Presentation
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Face-to-face spatial orientation fine-tunes the brain for neurocognitive processing in conversation
Poster C15 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Linda Drijvers1, Judith Holler1,2; 1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour
Orienting spatially towards one another for communication is rare in non-human animals but the default mode for communication in our species. We here put forward the radical hypothesis that this socio-spatial orientation in itself induces a special ‘social mode’ for neurocognitive processing during conversation, even in the absence of visibility. Participants conversed face-to-face, face-to-face but visually occluded, and back-to-back to tease apart effects caused by seeing visual communicative signals and effects caused by spatial orientation alone. Using dual-EEG, we found that 1) listeners’ brains engaged more strongly while conversing in a face-to-face than in a back-to-back spatial orientation, irrespective of the visibility of communicative signals, 2) listeners attended to speech more strongly in back-to-back compared to face-to-face spatial orientation without visibility; visual signals further reduced the attention needed; 3) the brains of interlocutors were more in sync in a face-to-face compared to a back-to-back spatial orientation, even when they could not see each other; visual signals further enhanced this pattern. Communicating in face-to-face spatial orientation is thus sufficient to induce a special ‘social mode’ which fine-tunes the brain for neurocognitive processing in conversation.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Perception: Speech Perception and Audiovisual Integration