Researchers involved: Mailin Antomo and Yuqiu Chen (Lying, Deceiving, Misleading, University of Göttingen), Oliver Herbort and Lisa-Marie Krause (Representation of Pointing Uncertainty for the Integration of Pointing Gestures and Speech, University of Würzburg)
The collaboration brings together two related projects. The first project addresses whether gestures can be perceived as deceptions or lies. The second project examines peoples understanding of the ambiguity associated with pointing gestures. We plan to join forces to examine how ambiguity affects as how misleading or deceptive pointing gestures and gesturers may be perceived, as well as whether ambiguity and under-informativity affect commitment attribution. These research questions extend beyond the scope of both projects and offer a new and promising avenue for future research.
Experiment 1 – Ambiguous gestures and speech:
We plan to conduct two initial (online) experiments. Experiment 1 addresses how people perceive under-informative pointing gestures and we compare the results directly to verbal expressions. We expect that gestures and verbal communication have a similar status with this respect. In the experiment, participants have the task to gather rewards (coins) that are hidden in randomly chosen boxes. They will receive information from different virtual persons who are expected to know the coin’s whereabouts. Then, they will choose one box and receive the coin or not. After that, their perception of the virtual person will be assessed with respect to his/her trustworthiness (reputational costs), furthermore the degree of perceived commitment will be measured by collecting data on deniability and accountability. We will manipulate the modality of the referential expression (speech vs. pointing) and the ambiguity of the information on the semantic and pragmatic level. The figure shows the different conditions.
Experiment 2 – Effect of ascribed intentions:
Experiment 2 addresses the role of the speaker’s intentions. The experiment will be altered as follows. Each box yields a specific type of reward (e.g. candy vs. chocolate). The participant has the task of collecting only one type of reward (e.g., candy). In a competition condition, the virtual persons compete with the participant for rewards. They can thus be expected to be deceptive. In a neutral condition, the virtual person does not collect candy and has no specific intentions. In a collaboration condition, the pointer is supposed to help the participant. We expect that referential expression and prior assumptions about a person’s intent both determine how the person is perceived.