How and Why People Synchronize: An Integrated Perspective.

Academic AbstractInterpersonal synchrony, the alignment of behavior and/or physiology during interactions, is a pervasive phenomenon observed in diverse social contexts. Here we synthesize across contexts and behaviors to classify the different forms and functions of synchrony. We provide a concise framework for classifying the manifold forms of synchrony along six dimensions: periodicity, discreteness, spatial similarity, directionality, leader-follower dynamics, and observability. We also distill the various proposed functions of interpersonal synchrony into four interconnected functions: reducing complexity and improving understanding, accomplishing joint tasks, strengthening social connection, and influencing partners' behavior. These functions derive from first principles, emerge from each other, and are accomplished by some forms of synchrony more than others. Effective synchrony flexibly adapts to social goals and more synchrony is not always better. Our synthesis offers a shared framework and language for the field, allowing for better cross-context and cross-behavior comparisons, generating new hypotheses, and highlighting future research directions.

Remembering visual and linguistic common ground in shared history.

Successful communication requires speakers and listeners to refer to information in their common ground. Shared history is one of the bases for common ground, as information from a communicative episode in the past can be referred to in future communication. However, to draw upon shared history, communicative partners need to have an accurate memory record that they can refer to. The memory mechanism for shared history is poorly understood. The current study investigated the ways in which memory for shared history is prioritised. Two experiments presented a referential communication task followed by a surprise recognition memory task, with the former task serving as an episode of shared history. Experiment 1 revealed superior memory for information that was both seen in the communicators' common ground and referred to, followed by information that was seen but not referred to, and finally by information privileged to the participants. Experiment 2 provided a replication of Experiment 1 and further demonstrated that these co-presence effects are not dependent on the presence of a speaker with a different perspective to the participant.

We know that we don't know: Children's understanding of common ignorance in a coordination game.

Common ground is the knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions shared between partners in an interaction. Previous research has focused extensively on what partners know they know together, that is, "common knowledge." However, another important aspect of common ground is what partners know they do not know together, that is, "common ignorance." A new coordination game was designed to investigate children's use of common ignorance. Without communicating or seeing each other's decisions, 4- to 8-year-olds needed to make the same decision as their partner about whether to try to retrieve a reward. To retrieve it, at least one of them needed to know a secret code. The knowledge/ignorance of both partners was ostensively manipulated by showing one partner, both partners, or neither partner the secret code in four conditions: common knowledge (both knew the code), common ignorance (neither partner knew the code), common privileged self knowledge (only children knew the code), and common privileged other knowledge (only their partner knew the code). Children's decisions, latency, and uncertainty were coded. Results showed that the common ignorance states were generally more difficult than the common knowledge states. Unexpectedly, children at all ages had difficulty with coordinating when their partner knew the code but they themselves did not (common privileged other knowledge). This study shows that, along with common knowledge, common ignorance and common privileged self knowledge and other knowledge also play important roles in coordinating with others but may develop differently.

Tripolar configuration and pulse shape in cochlear implants reduce channel interactions in the temporal domain.

The present study investigates effects of current focusing and pulse shape on threshold, dynamic range, spread of excitation and channel interaction in the time domain using cochlear implant stimulation. The study was performed on 20 adult guinea pigs using a 6-channel animal cochlear implant, recording was performed in the auditory midbrain using a multielectrode array. After determining the best frequencies for individual recording contacts with acoustic stimulation, the ear was deafened and a cochlear implant was inserted into the cochlea. The position of the implant was controlled by x-ray. Stimulation with biphasic, pseudomonophasic and monophasic stimuli was performed with monopolar, monopolar with common ground, bipolar and tripolar configuration in two sets of experiments, allowing comparison of the effects of the different stimulation strategies on threshold, dynamic range, spread of excitation and channel interaction. Channel interaction was studied in the temporal domain, where two electrodes were activated with pulse trains and phase locking to these pulse trains in the midbrain was quantified. The results documented multifactorial influences on the response properties, with significant interaction between factors. Thresholds increased with increasing current focusing, but decreased with pseudomonophasic and monophasic pulse shapes. The results documented that current focusing, particularly tripolar configuration, effectively reduces channel interaction, but that also pseudomonophasic and monophasic stimulation and phase duration intensity coding reduce channel interactions.

Direct and indirect linguistic measures of common ground in dialogue studies involving a matching task: A systematic review.

During dialogue, speakers attempt to adapt messages to their addressee appropriately by taking into consideration their common ground (i.e., all the information mutually known by the conversational partners) to ensure successful communication. Knowing and remembering what information is part of the common ground shared with a given partner and using it during dialogue are crucial skills for social interaction. It is therefore important to better understand how we can measure the use of common ground and to identify the potential associated psychological processes. In this context, a systematic review of the literature was performed to list the linguistic measures of common ground found in dialogue studies involving a matching task and to explore any evidence of cognitive and social mechanisms underlying common ground use in this specific experimental setting, particularly in normal aging and in neuropsychological studies. Out of the 23 articles included in this review, we found seven different linguistic measures of common ground that were classified as either a direct measure of common ground (i.e., measures directly performed on the referential content) or an indirect measure of common ground (i.e., measures assessing the general form of the discourse). This review supports the idea that both types of measures should systematically be used while assessing common ground because they may reflect different concepts underpinned by distinct psychological processes. Given the lack of evidence for the implication of other cognitive and social functions in common ground use in studies involving matching tasks, future research is warranted, particularly in the clinical field.

Keeping track of who knows what in multiparty conversation despite severe memory impairment.

Language use has long been understood to be tailored to the intended addressee, a process termed audience design. Audience design is reflected in multiple aspects of language use, including adjustments based on the addressee's knowledge about the topic at hand. In group settings, audience design depends on representations of multiple individuals, each of whom may have different knowledge about the conversational topic. A central question, then, concerns how these representations are encoded and retrieved in multiparty conversation where successful conversation requires keeping track of who knows what. In the present research, we probe the biological memory systems that are involved in this process of multiparty audience design. We present the results of two experiments that compare language use in persons with bilateral hippocampal damage and severe declarative memory impairment (amnesia), and demographically matched neurotypical comparison participants. Participants played a game in which they discussed abstract images with one partner in conversation, and then discussed the images again with the same partner or with a new partner in a three-party conversation. Neurotypical participants' language use reflected newly formed representations of which partner was familiar with which images. Participants with amnesia showed evidence of partner-specific audience design in multiparty conversation but it was attenuated, especially when success required rapid alternations between representations of common ground. The findings suggest partial independence of the formation and use of partner-specific representations from the hippocampal-dependent declarative memory system and highlight the unique contributions of the declarative memory system to flexible and dynamic language use.

Common ground in AAC: how children who use AAC and teaching staff shape interaction in the multimodal classroom.

Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6-9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them - vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal - to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints.

Language-Specific Constraints on Conversation: Evidence from Danish and Norwegian.

Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so, people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Here, we explore whether the use of conversational devices might be influenced by cross-linguistic differences in the speakers' native language, comparing two matched languages-Danish and Norwegian-differing primarily in their sound structure, with Danish being more opaque, that is, less acoustically distinguished. Across systematically manipulated conversational contexts, we find that processes supporting mutual understanding in conversations vary with external constraints: across different contexts and, crucially, across languages. In accord with our predictions, linguistic entrainment was overall higher in Danish than in Norwegian, while backchannels and repairs presented a more nuanced pattern. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that native speakers of Danish may compensate for its opaque sound structure by adopting a top-down strategy of building more conversational redundancy through entrainment, which also might reduce the need for repairs. These results suggest that linguistic differences might be met by systematic changes in language processing and use. This paves the way for further cross-linguistic investigations and critical assessment of the interplay between cultural and linguistic factors on the one hand and conversational dynamics on the other.

Agreements and differences between psychoanalysts with regard to changes observed during a treatment. A quantitative exploration using the Three-Level Model (3-LM).

The aim of this paper is to report the partial results of an exploratory investigation into how twelve psychoanalysts of different theoretical-clinical orientations perceive and use hypotheses about the phenomena of change in connection with selected material from a psychoanalytic treatment. The Three-Level Model (3-LM) was used for the observation of patient transformations and for the collection of data. This was followed by the statistical analysis of the behaviour and relationship of a set of variables relating to the type and degree of change perceived in the patient's mental functioning during the course of her treatment. The results reported here show that there was significant agreement among the participants, irrespective of their theoretical-clinical orientation, as regards the following: 1) the positive impact of the application of psychoanalytic treatment in diverse areas of the patient's mental functioning; 2) the explanatory hypotheses of the changes observed in the patient under consideration; 3) the usefulness of the experience of group exchange using the 3-LM in observing and understanding the changes in the patient.

Joint attention and its linguistic representation in dialogue: embodiment revisited.

Lakoff and Johnson, among many others, have discussed the role of the human body in structuring meaning in communication, aiming to reveal the interrelation between the human body, language, and cognition. This study revisits the concept of embodiment and investigates its interactive nature functioning in speakers constructing repeated structures in conversation, based on the hypothesis made in this work that the joint attention of interlocutors essentially indicates the interaction of their embodied experience of the language used in the situated context, where speakers not only share their propositional commitments but also make individual contributions to establishing common ground in dialogue. Viewed in this way, at the linguistic level, the implicitly and/or explicitly repeated language resources displayed between utterances are in fact the encoding of speakers' co-construction of joint attention and demonstrate the interplay of speakers' syntactic and pragmatic knowledge in producing utterances in the talk turns. This research hopefully sheds some light on studies concerning the relationship between language and cognition as well as how language is constructed in dialogue from the interactive view of the syntax-pragmatics interface.

The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication.

Inspired by early proposals in philosophy, dominant accounts of language posit a central role for mutual knowledge, either encoded directly in common ground, or approximated through other cognitive mechanisms. Using existing empirical evidence from language and memory, we challenge this tradition, arguing that mutual knowledge captures only a subset of the mental states needed to support communication. In a novel theoretical proposal, we argue for a cognitive architecture that includes separate, distinct representations of the self and other, and a cognitive process that compares these representations continuously during conversation, outputting both similarities and differences in perspective. Our theory accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel predictions about the role of perspective in language use. We term this new account the Multiple Perspectives Theory of mental states in communication.

Meeting the Challenge of Transmission Delay: Communication Protocols for Space Operations.

OBJECTIVE: Several studies were conducted to assess media-specific communication protocols as a countermeasure to challenges of asynchronous space-ground communication. BACKGROUND: Previous research demonstrated that transmission delay can negatively impact space-ground communication, collaboration, and task performance. We created media-specific protocols designed to mitigate identified problems associated with asynchronous communication and examined their effects on team communication and task performance. METHODS: The lab study included 24 teams of three who collaborated remotely via voice or text on computer-based tasks simulating failures in a spacecraft's life support system. Training and availability of communication protocols was the between-groups variable. Perceived usability, criticality, and effectiveness of the communication protocols were also assessed in space-analog simulations. RESULTS: Lab study data revealed that communication protocols facilitated some aspects of team communication; specifically, they reduced threats to common ground and information splitting but not instances of miscommunication. Analog data indicated that protocol compliance was high, participants evaluated most elements as highly important, and protocols maintained perceived communication effectiveness between space crews and mission control during time delay comparably to no-time-delay conditions. CONCLUSION: Converging data attest to the feasibility, usability, and effectiveness of empirically derived communication protocols as a countermeasure to the negative impacts of transmission delay and also point to technological solutions. APPLICATION: The communication protocols have been adopted for training in NASA analog simulations involving time-delayed communication. They could also support communication among remote team members in medical operations, command-and-control teams, or disaster response under asynchronous conditions or when time is limited and precise communication is critical.

A New Look at Young Children's Referential Informativeness.

In this article, I review experimental evidence for the dependence of 2- to 5-year-olds' linguistic referential informativeness on cues to common ground (CG) and propose a process model. Cues to CG provide evidence for CG, that is, for the shared knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes of interlocutors. The presence of cues to CG (e.g., unimpeded listener line of regard or prior mention) is shown to be associated with less informative reference (e.g., pronouns). In contrast, the absence of cues to CG (e.g., impeded listener line of regard or new mention) is shown to be associated with more informative reference (e.g., nouns). Informativeness is sensitive to linguistic before nonlinguistic cues to CG (i.e., 2.0 vs. 2.5 years old, respectively). Reference is cast as a process of active inference, a formulation of Bayesian belief-guided control in biological systems. Child speakers are hierarchical generative models that, characteristically, expect sensory evidence for the evolved, prior Bayesian belief that interlocutor mental states are aligned (i.e., that CG exists). Referential control emerges as an embodied tool to gather evidence for this prior belief. Bottom-up cues to CG elicited by action drive updates to beliefs about CG. In turn, beliefs about CG guide efficient referential control.

Spontaneous, controlled acts of reference between friends and strangers.

Speakers enjoy considerable flexibility in how they refer to a given referent--referring expressions can vary in their form (e.g., "she" vs. "the cat"), their length (e.g., "the (big) (orange) cat"), and more. What factors drive a speaker's decisions about how to refer, and how do these decisions shape a comprehender's ability to resolve the intended referent? Answering either question presents a methodological challenge; researchers must strike a balance between experimental control and ecological validity. In this paper, we introduce the SCARFS (Spontaneous, Controlled Acts of Reference between Friends and Strangers) Database: a corpus of approximately 20,000 English nominal referring expressions (NREs), produced in the context of a communication game. For each NRE, the corpus lists the concept the speaker was trying to convey (from a set of 471 possible target concepts), formal properties of the NRE (e.g., its length), the relationship between the interlocutors (i.e., friend vs. stranger), and the communicative outcome (i.e., whether the expression was successfully resolved). Researchers from diverse disciplines may use this resource to answer questions about how speakers refer and how comprehenders resolve their intended referent--as well as other fundamental questions about dialogic speech, such as whether and how speakers tailor their utterances to the identity of their interlocutor, how second-degree associations are generated, and the predictors of communicative success. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10579-022-09619-y.

What Is the Common Ground for Modern Psychotherapy? A Discussion Paper Based on EACLIPT's 1st Webinar.

Psychotherapy as it is implemented today, can be seen as the composition of unconnected groups of practitioners and scientists pursuing different theories. The idea of finding a common "umbrella" for all evidence-based treatments in the field of psychotherapy is gaining more interest. Based on this background, experts in clinical psychology from various backgrounds led a fundamental discussion about modern psychotherapy and its basic mechanisms. Process-Based Therapy (PBT) was presented by Stefan Hofmann as a possible novel approach to clinical research and practice. In this article we present the different perspectives of the four panelists on PBT and in how far the model builds a common ground for different treatment approaches. Learning mechanisms and the therapeutic alliance were almost unanimously considered as indispensable factors in a global model of psychotherapy. In conclusion, the panelists emphasized a much-needed focus on characteristics and competencies of therapists themselves e.g., in communication, listening and empathy. These core competencies should be trained and promoted independently of the therapeutic approach.

Are ape gestures like words? Outstanding issues in detecting similarities and differences between human language and ape gesture.

Opinion piece: ape gestures are made intentionally, inviting parallels with human language; but how similar are their gestures to words? Here we ask this in three ways, considering: flexibility and ambiguity, first- and second-order intentionality, and usage in interactive exchanges. Many gestures are used to achieve several, often very distinct, goals. Such apparent ambiguity in meaning is potentially disruptive for communication, but-as with human language-situational and interpersonal context may largely resolve the intended meaning. Our evidence for first-order intentional use of gesture is abundant, but how might we establish a case for the second-order intentional use critical to language? Finally, words are rarely used in tidy signal-response sequences but are exchanged in back-and-forth interaction. Do gestures share this property? In this paper, we examine these questions and set out ways in which they can be resolved, incorporating data from wild chimpanzees. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cognition, communication and social bonds in primates'.

Evidence of Audience Design in Amnesia: Adaptation in Gesture but Not Speech.

Speakers design communication for their audience, providing more information in both speech and gesture when their listener is naïve to the topic. We test whether the hippocampal declarative memory system contributes to multimodal audience design. The hippocampus, while traditionally linked to episodic and relational memory, has also been linked to the ability to imagine the mental states of others and use language flexibly. We examined the speech and gesture use of four patients with hippocampal amnesia when describing how to complete everyday tasks (e.g., how to tie a shoe) to an imagined child listener and an adult listener. Although patients with amnesia did not increase their total number of words and instructional steps for the child listener, they did produce representational gestures at significantly higher rates for the imagined child compared to the adult listener. They also gestured at similar frequencies to neurotypical peers, suggesting that hand gesture can be a meaningful communicative resource, even in the case of severe declarative memory impairment. We discuss the contributions of multiple memory systems to multimodal audience design and the potential of gesture to act as a window into the social cognitive processes of individuals with neurologic disorders.

Individual differences in working memory and semantic fluency predict younger and older adults' multimodal recipient design in an interactive spatial task.

Aging appears to impair the ability to adapt speech and gestures based on knowledge shared with an addressee (common ground-based recipient design) in narrative settings. Here, we test whether this extends to spatial settings and is modulated by cognitive abilities. Younger and older adults gave instructions on how to assemble 3D-models from building blocks on six consecutive trials. We induced mutually shared knowledge by either showing speaker and addressee the model beforehand, or not. Additionally, shared knowledge accumulated across the trials. Younger and crucially also older adults provided recipient-designed utterances, indicated by a significant reduction in the number of words and of gestures when common ground was present. Additionally, we observed a reduction in semantic content and a shift in cross-modal distribution of information across trials. Rather than age, individual differences in verbal and visual working memory and semantic fluency predicted the extent of addressee-based adaptations. Thus, in spatial tasks, individual cognitive abilities modulate the interactive language use of both younger and older adults.

Understanding Is a Process.

How do we gauge understanding? Tests of understanding, such as Turing's imitation game, are numerous; yet, attempts to achieve a state of understanding are not satisfactory assessments. Intelligent agents designed to pass one test of understanding often fall short of others. Rather than approaching understanding as a system state, in this paper, we argue that understanding is a process that changes over time and experience. The only window into the process is through the lens of natural language. Usefully, failures of understanding reveal breakdowns in the process. We propose a set of natural language-based probes that can be used to map the degree of understanding a human or intelligent system has achieved through combinations of successes and failures.