The Role of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication in a Two-Person, Cooperative Manipulation Task

Abstract

Motivated by the differences between human and robot teams, we investigated the role of verbal communication between human teammates as they work together to move a large object to a series of target locations. Only one member of the group was told the target sequence by the experimenters, while the second teammate had no target knowledge. The two experimental conditions we compared were haptic-verbal (teammates are allowed to talk) and haptic only (no talking allowed). The team’s trajectory was recorded and evaluated. In addition, participants completed a NASA TLX-style postexperimental survey which gauges workload along 6 different dimensions. In our initial experiment we found no significant difference in performance when verbal communication was added. In a follow-up experiment, using a different manipulation task, we did find that the addition of verbal communication significantly improved performance and reduced the perceived workload. In both experiments, for the haptic-only condition, we found that a remarkable number of groups independently improvised common haptic communication protocols (CHIPs). We speculate that such protocols can be substituted for verbal communication and that the performance difference between verbal and nonverbal communication may be related to how easy it is to distinguish the CHIPs from motions required for task completion.

Planning with Verbal Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration

“…Wang et al (2013) show that the efficiency of haptic communication was improved only after dyads were first given a learning period in which they could familiarize themselves with the task using verbal communication. Parikh et al (2014) find that for a more complicated task, verbal feedback coupled with haptic feedback has a significant positive effect on team performance, as opposed to haptic feedback alone. In general, verbalization is more flexible than haptic feedback, since it allows for the communication of more abstract and complex ideas (Eccles & Tenenbaum, 2004), while it can facilitate a shared understanding of the task (Bowers et al, 1998).…”

“…While the authors did not consider verbal communication, previous studies suggest that there is a significant benefit when teammates verbally communicate intentions and expectations (J. Wang et al, 2013;Parikh et al, 2014;Eccles & Tenenbaum, 2004;Bowers et al, 1998).…”

SLYKLatent, a Learning Framework for efficient Facial Features Estimation

“…However, in this framework, non-verbal cues from humans are frequently neglected and not given sufficient consideration. Understandably, since HRI is a replication of human-to-human interaction, it is reasonable to want to emulate a large part of the human communication process for a HRI framework [6]. Human-to-human interactions rely not only on verbal cues, but also on posture, gesture cues, and facial cues, all of which may carry information pertaining to the executed task or action (i.e.…”

“…Human-to-human interactions rely not only on verbal cues, but also on posture, gesture cues, and facial cues, all of which may carry information pertaining to the executed task or action (i.e. intention) [6], [7]. Humans can achieve this by understanding and interpreting observable patterns in the available information from the aforementioned cues.…”

Developing Students Verbal Communication Skills and Speech Etiquette in English Language Teaching

“…There is no limit to a language's vocabulary, as new words are introducing daily. Words are not the only things we need to communicate, although they are closely related to verbal and nonverbal (Parikh et al, 2014) symbols in terms of how we make the meaning of language. Every symbol represents some meaning related to a certain activity (Zhirenov et al, 2016).…”