The paper argues that everyday exchange of business emails produces a development in the work-group relationship, which, in turn, makes new communication styles possible and acceptable by the users' habit to computer-mediated forms, even in unbalanced professional exchanges. The focus is on the (spoken) discourse features of email messages in a self-compiled corpus of selected computer-mediated...

Comparative work on human spatial cognition contrasts systems of calculating position and trajectory that involve body-relative reckoning frequently where the body in question is that of an egocentric observer with systems which rely on global coordinates such as compass directions not relative to the positions and orientations of moveable entities. I consider here a case from a Tzotzil speaker...

Psychology, robotic and virtual agents communities commonly claim that to enable natural interaction to take place within dyad of agents, the dyad must be the siege of dynamical coupling: to give to their partners a feeling of natural interaction, interactants be human, robotic or virtual, must be able to make the dynamic of their behaviour emerge both from their own internal states and from th...

Multiple organisms can sometimes affect a common phenotype. For example, the portion of a leaf eaten by an insect is a joint phenotype of the plant and insect and the amount of food obtained by an offspring can be a joint trait with its mother. Here, I describe the evolution of joint phenotypes in quantitative genetic terms. A joint phenotype for multiple species evolves as the sum of additive ...

Reputation formation is a key component in the social interactions of many animal species. An evaluation of reputation is drawn from two principal sources: direct experience of an individual and indirect experience from observing that individual interacting with a third party. In the current study we investigated whether dogs use direct and/or indirect experience to choose between two human int...

Humans can communicate even with few existing conventions in common (e.g., when they lack a shared language). We explored what makes this phenomenon possible with a nonlinguistic experimental task requiring participants to coordinate toward a common goal. We observed participants creating new communicative conventions using the most minimal possible signals. These conventions, furthermore, chan...

This paper presents results from a project on phonetic convergence in German spontaneous speech. We used linear mixed models to examine 22 unimodal and 24 multimodal dialogs for articulation rate. We show that speakers’ local articulation rates are influenced by the preceding rates of their interlocutors, and that the direction of this influence (i.e., divergence or convergence) depends on soci...

Modern virtual agents require knowledge about their environment, the interaction itself, and their interlocutors’ behavior in order to be able to show appropriate nonverbal behavior as well as to adapt dialog policies accordingly. Recent achievements in the area of automatic behavior recognition and understanding can provide information about the interactants’ multimodal nonverbal behavior and ...

We report on an experiment that examined the inuence of anthropomorphism and perceived agency on presence, copresence, and social presence in a virtual environment. The experiment varied the level of anthropomorphism of the image of interactants: high anthropomorphism, low anthropomorphism, or no image. Perceived agency was manipulated by telling the participants that the image was either an a...

Behavioral mimicry--the automatic imitation of gestures, postures, mannerisms, and other motor movements--is pervasive in human interactions. The current review focuses on two recent themes in the mimicry literature. First, an analysis of the moderators of mimicry uncovers the various motivational, social, emotional, and personality factors that lead to more or less mimicry of an interaction pa...