Cross-cultural Nonverbal Cue Immersive Training

When US soldiers are deployed to Iraq, their interactions with the local population are impacted by their understanding of complex cultural differences. Nonverbal cues play a major role in cross-cultural communication, as they vary among cultures by many culture-specific rules that govern certain aspects of behavior (Taylor, 2006). This study was intended to be an initial attempt to discover the distinction between the types of nonverbal cues and their likelihood of being correctly perceived. Based on our preliminary results, it appears that the type of cue is indeed important.Affect displays and emblems seemed to be most reliably interpreted, while most regulators and adaptors were misinterpreted. These results suggest that nonverbal cue training requires context to understand their respective meaning and relationships. Immersive technologies incorporating mixed reality training may be used to promote social cooperative learning.