Touchless hand gesture control potentially leads to a safer, more comfortable and more intuitive Human Vehicle Interaction (HVI)if relevant ergonomic requirements are met. To achieve intuitive interaction and thus to favor user acceptance, the gesture interface should be conform to user expectation and enable the users to apply their prior knowledge. This particularly concerns the gestures used for input. The conducted experiment investigateswhich gestures subjects tend to use for various

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... ons of a truck and how these gestures are affected by the subjects' prior knowledge. In total, 17 potential functions were considered for this purpose. Within the experiment, 74 subjects performed gestures for each of these functions while being recorded on video. The video data showsa variety of gestures differing in hand pose, execution space, and palm orientation. Nevertheless, several interindividual similarities in gesturing can be observed, which made it possible to analyzethe gestures in terms of the prior knowledgeapplied. The results show thatgestures differ according to the sources of prior knowledge like culture and instincts. Depending on the function, the gestures observed within the experiment are based on gestures ofquasi-direct manipulation, emblematic gestures, instinctive gestures, standardized gestures and gestures expressing the users' mental model. However, the applicability of these gestures is limited by capabilities of gesture recognition and is depending on how the user interface will be designed.