Universität Bielefeld - Graduiertenkolleg Aufgabenorientierte Kommunikation

Non-verbal behaviors in human face-to-face interaction:
some requirements for virtual social agents

Sotaro Kita, Ph.D.

E-mail address: kita@mpi.nl
WWW: http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/profession/kita.html
Mail address: P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Street address: Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Monday, November 23rd, 1998, 16 Uhr c.t., Hörsaal 9

The goal of my talk is to illustrate three aspects of the human non-verbal behavior that should be taken into account in designing of virtual social agents. The human non-verbal behavior was investigated by various approaches to the study of human communication: cognitive psychology, experimental social psychology, and conversational analysis
  1. Humans pick up spatial information from gestures without conscious awareness of it. Thus, in human-machine interface situations, gestures with spatial content by a virtual social agent has to performed on the assumption that the human interactant cannot help but taking up the information.
  2. In human face-to-face interaction, body movements are synchronized among interactants. Thus, it is not sufficient for a virtual social agent to nonverbally encode certain kinds of information (spatial, affective, and etc.). The body movement has to be organized with respect to the movement of other interactants.
  3. It is well-known that body-movements with mainly social function (e.g. bowing, shaking hands, and etc.) are culturally variable. However, the cultural difference in non-verbal behavior goes further than previously assumed. Recent studies show that gestures with relatively little social functions (such as iconic gestures, which bears shape-similarity to its referent) vary cross-linguistically. Thus, in designing of social agents, cultural and language specificity should be taken into account even for the body movements that have relatively little social functions.
Anke Weinberger, 1998-10-27