0000000000424808
AUTHOR
Hans
The body talks: Sensorimotor communication and its brain and kinematic signatures
Human communication is a traditional topic of research in many disciplines such as psychology, linguistics and philosophy, all of which mainly focused on language, gestures and deictics. However, these do not constitute the sole channels of communication, especially during online social interaction, where instead an additional critical role may be played by sensorimotor communication (SMC). SMC refers here to (often subtle) communicative signals embedded within pragmatic actions - for example, a soccer player carving his body movements in ways that inform a partner about his intention, or to feint an adversary; or the many ways we offer a glass of wine, rudely or politely. SMC is a natural …
Sensorimotor Communication for Humans and Robots: Improving Interactive Skills by Sending Coordination Signals
During joint actions, humans continuously exchange coordination signals and use nonverbal, sensorimotor forms of communication. Here we discuss a specific example of sensorimotor communication-"signaling"-which consists in the intentional modification of one's own action plan (e.g., a plan for reaching a glass of wine) to make it more predictable or discriminable from alternative action plans that are contextually plausible (e.g., a plan for reaching another glass on the same table). We first review the existing evidence on signaling in human-human interactions, discussing under which conditions humans use signaling. Successively, we distill these insights into a computational theory of sig…