Showing papers by "Kevin G. Munhall published in 2014"

Movement Coordination during Conversation

Abstract: Behavioral coordination and synchrony contribute to a common biological mechanism that maintains communication, cooperation and bonding within many social species, such as primates and birds. Similarly, human language and social systems may also be attuned to coordination to facilitate communication and the formation of relationships. Gross similarities in movement patterns and convergence in the acoustic properties of speech have already been demonstrated between interacting individuals. In the present studies, we investigated how coordinated movements contribute to observers’ perception of affiliation (friends vs. strangers) between two conversing individuals. We used novel computational methods to quantify motor coordination and demonstrated that individuals familiar with each other coordinated their movements more frequently. Observers used coordination to judge affiliation between conversing pairs but only when the perceptual stimuli were restricted to head and face regions. These results suggest that observed movement coordination in humans might contribute to perceptual decisions based on availability of information to perceivers.

Temporal control and compensation for perturbed voicing feedback.

Abstract: Previous research employing a real-time auditory perturbation paradigm has shown that talkers monitor their own speech attributes such as fundamental frequency, vowel intensity, vowel formants, and fricative noise as part of speech motor control. In the case of vowel formants or fricative noise, what was manipulated is spectral information about the filter function of the vocal tract. However, segments can be contrasted by parameters other than spectral configuration. It is possible that the feedback system monitors phonation timing in the way it does spectral information. This study examined whether talkers exhibit a compensatory behavior when manipulating information about voicing. When talkers received feedback of the cognate of the intended voicing category (saying “tipper” while hearing “dipper” or vice versa), they changed the voice onset time and in some cases the following vowel.

The art of gaze guidance.

Abstract: An ongoing challenge in scene perception is identifying the factors that influence how we explore our visual world. By using multiple versions of paintings as a tool to control for high-level influences, we show that variation in the visual details of a painting causes differences in observers' gaze despite constant task and content. Further, we show that by switching locations of highly salient regions through textural manipulation, a corresponding switch in eye movement patterns is observed. Our results present the finding that salient regions and gaze behavior are not simply correlated; variation in saliency through textural differences causes an observer to direct their viewing accordingly. This work demonstrates the direct contribution of low-level factors in visual exploration by showing that examination of a scene, even for aesthetic purposes, can be easily manipulated by altering the low-level properties and hence, the saliency of the scene.