Visuo-spatial complexity potentiates the body-part effect in intransitive imitation of meaningless gestures

Recent studies on the imitation of intransitive gestures suggest that the body part effect relies mainly upon the direct route of the dual-route model through a visuo-transformation mechanism. Here, we test the visuo-constructive hypothesis which posits that the visual complexity may directly potentiate the body part effect for meaningless gestures. We predicted that the difference between imitation of hand and finger gestures would increase with the visuo-spatial complexity of gestures. Second, we aimed to identify some of the visuo-spatial predictors of meaningless finger imitation skills. Thirty-eight participants underwent an imitation task containing three distinct set of gestures, that is, meaningful gestures, meaningless gestures with low visual complexity, and meaningless gestures with higher visual complexity than the first set of meaningless gestures. Our results were in general agreement with the visuo-constructive hypothesis, showing an increase in the difference between hand and finger gestures, but only for meaningless gestures with higher visuo-spatial complexity. Regression analyses confirm that imitation accuracy decreases with resource-demanding visuo-spatial factors. Taken together, our results suggest that the body part effect is highly dependent on the visuo-spatial characteristics of the gestures.