Seeing the Way: the Role of Vision in Conversation Turn Exchange Perception

We presented clips containing single utterances spoken by single individuals engaged in a natural conversation with another. These utterances were from either right before a turn exchange (i.e., when the current talker would finish and the other would begin) or were utterances where the same talker would continue speaking. In Experiment  1, participants were presented audiovisual, auditory-only and visual-only versions of our stimuli and identified whether a turn exchange would occur or not. We demonstrated that although participants could identify turn exchanges with unimodal information alone, they performed best in the audiovis ual modality. In Experiment 2, we presented participants audiovisual turn exchanges where the talker, the listener or both were visible. We showed that participants suffered a cost at identifying turns exchanges when visual cues from the listener were not available. Overall, we demonstrate that alt hough auditory information is sufficient for successful conversation, visual information plays an important role in the overall efficiency of communication.

Source: Multisensory research - June 27, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Nida Latif, Agn ès Alsius and K. G. Munhall Source Type: research