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Take a look at this video. Your job: decide which person speaks first:
Click to view Video 1 (QuickTime required)
Let's make this a poll:
Now, try another one. Once again, decide which person speaks first:
Click to view Video 2 (QuickTime required)
Make your response here:
David Rose and Tanya Clark showed videos like this to 17 student volunteers, and asked the same question: who spoke first in each video? The videos are point-light displays, which show movements of particular points on an actor's body, but not the nuances of facial movements and expressions.
The videos were used in an earlier experiment about identifying emotion (which we've discussed on Cognitive Daily). That study showed that people are accurate in identifying emotions in point-light displays. Now they wanted to find out if people can determine who's talking in the same videos. Here are the results:
As you can see, accuracy depends on the emotion being portrayed. The videos depicted actors reading scripts while expressing one of several possible emotions. While in the previous study viewers were able to accurately identify the emotions, this experiment shows that people can't always accurately figure out who's speaking. While angry and joyful conversations were easy to parse, for conversations expressing fear and disgust, respondents didn't do better than chance.
If we duplicated these results in our example, accuracy should be much better for Video 1 (anger) than Video 2 (fear).
Rose, D., & Clarke, T. (2009). Look who's talking: Visual detection of speech from whole-body biological motion cues during emotive interpersonal conversation Perception, 38 (1), 153-156 DOI: 10.1068/p6279
Brain & Behavior
Comments
I had a very hard time telling because the video jumps straight into someone speaking. If there was a second or two of no speech it would be easier to tell I think.
Posted by: Chris | May 28, 2009 8:08 PM
It seems like the difference is between larger and smaller movements. What about the quietly angry people, or people who gesture a lot when they talk, regardless of emotional state?
Posted by: Heather | May 28, 2009 8:38 PM
Video 2 is supposed to be fear? Perhaps it was that I was somehow thinking of it as a follow-up to 1, but I saw it as resignation. It seemed both participants had a bleak sense that nothing else they said would matter.
Posted by: Carlie | May 28, 2009 10:11 PM
It's good to see mime research is still getting published.
Posted by: bez | May 29, 2009 1:36 AM
What if what really made a difference was the performance itself, not the emotion they were trying to portray?
Posted by: Fernando | May 29, 2009 8:20 AM
They are both ambiguous to me.
I chose the one who dominates the conversation.
Posted by: ifan | May 29, 2009 2:00 PM
I'm actually kind of surprised that anyone put "left" on the first one. To me it seemed very obvious that it was the guy on the right.
Posted by: MTGAP | May 30, 2009 11:44 PM
They are both ambiguous to me.I chose the one who dominates the conversation.
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Posted by: Nagesh | October 9, 2009 4:24 AM