Neurocognitive and behavioral constituents of nonverbal speaker-listener attunement during science communication

How does nonverbal communication affect public speaking in the context of science communication? Public speaking is a skill that varies between speakers and which drastically impacts how much audiences learn during a talk. What is not often appreciated is that nonverbal communication plays a key role in how well a speaker is received. Nonverbal communication refers to all the ways people communicate without words, including body language, gestures, eye contact, and tone of voice. Skilled speakers use nonverbal communication to capture and hold the audience's attention, create positive impressions, and build rapport. But audiences also communicate with speakers nonverbally. For example, a speaker who starts a speech nervously may notice that the audience avoids eye contact. This can trigger stress in the speaker, which can lead to derailed thoughts. This project will use virtual reality (VR) to study how this speaker-audience attunement influences the reception of public talks about science topics. VR will allow us to create simulations of public speaking situations, and to measure the responses of both speakers and audiences. This research will advance our understanding of nonverbal factors as enablers for learning, and it could lead to new ways for improving public speaking. This is important because public speaking is one of the top 21st-century job skills and also because VR technology is becoming increasingly popular for communication. This project will use VR to experimentally manipulate and test how speaker-audience attunement influences the reception of public talks in the context of science communication. The investigators propose a new approach that integrates bio-behavioral measurement with VR-assisted manipulation to disentangle how speakers and audiences influence each other via nonverbal social signals. Specifically, this project will quantify the nonverbal components of the speaker’s behavior that affect neurophysiological audience responses, subjective perceptions, and objective outcomes. The project will also study how the behavior of audiences, which are manipulated via VR technology, affects the speakers’ neurophysiological processes, coping behavior, and overall measures of successful communication. In addition to testing the hypotheses about speaker-audience attunement on physiological subjective, and behavioral outcomes, this research will yield a database of speeches that are annotated with all measures and allows studying how speakers respond to audiences and which factors predict engagement and learning. Together with outreach and education efforts, this research will open the door to new developments at the intersection of communication, bio-behavioral, and technological learning systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.