Do Aligned Bodies Align Minds? The Partners’ Body Alignment as a Constraint on Spatial Perspective Use

Abstract

In a direction-giving task, we examine whether a high-level constraint-the task partners' relative body alignment-influences spatial language use and task accuracy. In 32 pairs, task partners interacted in two conditions: for one route description, direction givers (DGs) and direction followers (DFs) sat side-by-side (aligned condition), and for another they sat opposite one another (counter-aligned condition). After each description, DFs drew the route on a map. When pairs were counter-aligned (vs. aligned), DGs increased their use of expressions from a survey perspective, using more frequently terms such as east-west. When counter-aligned, DFs also used more words per conversational turn, which was taken to reflect the increased difficulty of coordinating in that condition. Still, in terms of task performance, the accuracy of DFs' drawings was unaffected by the partners' body alignment or spatial language use; it was only predicted by the DGs' spatial ability. We argue that, because direction-giving emphasizes accuracy, task partners invest in strategies that contribute to mutual understanding (e.g., recaps of the route by the DF at the end, evidenced by shifts in language use over time). Thus, body alignment in direction-giving impacts coordination difficulty and spatial language use, but it does not singularly influence task performance.

Do People Regard Robots as Human-Like Social Partners? Evidence From Perspective-Taking in Spatial Descriptions

“…Inconsistent with previous studies (Galati et al, 2019b), the current study did not find significant correlations between speakers' spatial perspective transformation abilities and perspective choices, which might be due to the current relatively simple task that do not require high spatial perspective transformation abilities. In the current study, participants only need to describe a target location among four candidate objects, whereas in Galati et al (2019b), participants have to describe and understand a complex route, which involved multiple spatial perspective transformation and tracking.…”

“…Therefore, in this study, speakers with higher anthropomorphism tendencies may also be inclined to regard their robot addressees of higher capabilities in understanding spatial instructions and then following the principle of least collaborative effort to describe more from self-perspective to reduce self-cognitive burden (Schober, 2009). Inconsistent with previous studies (Galati et al, 2019b), the current study did not find significant correlations between speakers' spatial perspective transformation abilities and perspective choices, which might be due to the current relatively simple task that do not require high spatial perspective transformation abilities. In the current study, participants only need to describe a target location among four candidate objects, whereas in Galati et al (2019b), participants have to describe and understand a complex route, which involved multiple spatial perspective transformation and tracking.…”

“…For example, German and United States participants were tested in earlier and recent studies, respectively; older adults were tested in Carlson et al (2014). Therefore, the speakers may vary in many traits critical to human-robot interaction (Schweinberger et al, 2020), such as anthropomorphism tendency (i.e., attributing human-like characteristics to non-human entities; e.g., the wind has intentions) and spatial abilities, which was suggested to be related to people's assumption about robots' capabilities (Waytz et al, 2010;Severson and Lemm, 2016) and speakers' perspective choice (Schober, 2009;Galati et al, 2019b). Lastly, the spatial description tasks are different among previous studies, which may induce different relative speaker-addressee cognitive burden (Pouliquen-Lardy et al, 2016) and shift speakers' perspective choice differently to human and robot addressees.…”

multiSyncPy: A Python package for assessing multivariate coordination dynamics

“…Past work on interpersonal coordination comprises a diverse body of work with investigations in general social interactions (Abney et al, 2015 ; Chanel et al, 2013 ; Louwerse et al, 2012 ), parent–child interactions (Abney et al, 2017 ; Crowell et al, 2017 ; Feldman, 2007 ; Nguyen et al, 2020 ), child–child interactions (Altmann, 2011 ), romantic partners (Butler & Barnard, 2019 ; Gottman, 2014 ; Randall et al, 2013 ; Timmons et al, 2015 ), families (Butner et al, 2018 ), strangers and friends (Bizzego et al, 2020 ; Galati et al, 2020 ), mental health-related interactions (Butner et al, 2017 ; Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2011 ; Soma et al, 2019 ; Wiltshire, Philipsen, et al, 2020), teamwork (Dias et al, 2019 ; Likens et al, 2014 ; Palumbo et al, 2017 ; Reinero et al, 2020 ; Wiltshire et al, 2019 ), performance groups (Keller et al, 2014 ; Setzler & Goldstone, 2020 ), and even inter-species interactions (Wanser et al, 2021 ). In addition, there is evidence of synchronization phenomena in many modalities including non-verbal behaviors and movements (Ramseyer, 2019 ; Schoenherr et al, 2019 ), acoustic properties of speech (Fischer et al, 2017 ; Imel et al, 2014 ; Wieder & Wiltshire, 2020 ), alignment and matching in language (Duran et al, 2019 ; Fusaroli & Tylén, 2016 ; Lord et al, 2015 ; Niederhoffer & Pennebaker, 2002 ) , physiological signals from the autonomic nervous system (Kleinbub, 2017 ; Kleinbub et al, 2020 ; Konvalinka et al, 2011 ), patterns of neural activation (Dikker et al, 2017 ; Hoehl et al, 2020 ; Koban et al, 2019 ), and between multiple modalities (Amon et al, 2019 ; Gorman et al, 2016 ).…”

multiSyncPy: A Python Package for Assessing Multivariate Coordination Dynamics

“…Past work on interpersonal coordination comprises a diverse body of work with investigations in general social interactions (Abney et al, 2015;Chanel et al, 2013;Louwerse et al, 2012), parent-child interactions (Abney et al, 2017;Crowell et al, 2017;Feldman, 2007;Nguyen et al, 2020), romantic partners (Butler & Barnard, 2019;Gottman, 2014;Randall et al, 2013;Timmons et al, 2015), families (Butner et al, 2018), strangers and friends (Bizzego et al, 2020;Galati et al, 2020), mental health-related interactions (Butner et al, 2017;Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2011;Soma et al, 2019;Wiltshire, Philipsen, et al, 2020), teamwork (Dias et al, 2019;Likens et al, 2014;Palumbo et al, 2017;Reinero et al, 2020;Wiltshire et al, 2019), performance groups (Keller et al, 2014;Setzler & Goldstone, 2020), and even inter-species interactions (Wanser et al, 2021). In addition, there is evidence of synchronization phenomena in many modalities including non-verbal behaviors and movements (Ramseyer, 2019;Schoenherr et al, 2019), acoustic properties of speech (Fischer et al, 2017;Imel et al, 2014;Wieder & Wiltshire, 2020), alignment in language (Duran et al, 2019;Fusaroli & Tylén, 2016), physiological signals from the autonomic nervous system (Kleinbub, 2017; PYTHON PACKAGE FOR MULTIVARIATE SYNCHRONIZATION 5 2020; Konvalinka et al, 2011), and patterns of ...…”