The Situated Multimodal Facets of Human Communication - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 181

dependable from the body a creature possesses (Gallese, 2008) or as
grounded in multiple ways, including context, culture consequence,
and “ on occasion bodily states (Barsalou, 2008)”. On this ground, it
can be suggested that the physical, organizational and social context
functions as a signaling modality in human communication. Studies
on human information processing must assess how humans integrate
and synchronize visual, tactile and audio somatic sensory inputs in
a unique percept (especially appreciated in noisy environments with
corrupted and degraded signals) and combine them into a reasoned
understanding.
It could be argued that the experiments reported in this section
relate to how auditory information is interpreted alone, or in
combination with visual congruent and incongruent stimuli and that
a change in the context, and therefore a context effect on the decoding
and interpretation of a given stimulus is better observed when the
same signal is differently interpreted in different circumstances. In this
line, the current literature refers to “cognitive bias” (Mathews et al.,
1997 for human) and “judgment bias” (Mendl et al., 2009 for human
and non-human animals). These experiments tested how ambiguous
stimuli (with a valence value that may result ambiguous according to
the past experience of the human or non-human animal involved in the
judgment) are differently interpreted according to the experimented
emotional state (Wheeler, 2009, 2010 for predator calls given by
capuchins in feeding/non-feeding contexts). However, according to
the task assigned, our subjects were asked to concentrate and assign
a valence value or a label to the melody. No mention was made on
the visual cues. In this sense, the visual cues have been considered
the surrounding task environment and therefore the context, and it
cannot be considered a multimodal signal integration. The reported
data cannot be linked to cognitive and judgment bias experiments due
to the lack of a pre-existing (i.e. an anxiety disorder) or an induced
(induced depression) bias.
3. The Significance of Pausing Strategies
Speech is characterized by the presence of silent intervals (empty
pauses) and vocalizations (filled pauses) that do not have a lexical
meaning. Such pauses play a role in controlling the speech flow and
are a multi-determined phenomenon attributable to physical, socio-
psychological, communicative, linguistic and cognitive causes.
Physical pauses are normally attributed to breathing or the
momentary stoppage of the breath stream caused by a complete closure