title: The Perception of Cooperativeness Without Any Visual or Auditory Communication.
abstract: Perceiving social information such as the cooperativeness of another person is an important part of human interaction. But can people perceive the cooperativeness of others even without any visual or auditory information? In a novel experimental setup, we connected two people with a rope and made them accomplish a point-collecting task together while they could not see or hear each other. We observed a consistently emerging turn-taking behavior in the interactions and installed a confederate in a subsequent experiment who either minimized or maximized this behavior. Participants experienced this only through the haptic force-feedback of the rope and made evaluations about the confederate after each interaction. We found that perception of cooperativeness was significantly affected only by the manipulation of this turn-taking behavior. Gender- and size-related judgments also significantly differed. Our results suggest that people can perceive social information such as the cooperativeness of other people even in situations where possibilities for communication are minimal.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany; Graduate School of Neural & Behavioural Sciences, International Max Planck Research School, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Dong-Seon
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Franziska
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Burger
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany; Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea.
authors.forename: Heinrich H
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Bülthoff
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: de la Rosa
keywords: Action; cooperation; coordination; perception; reciprocity; social interaction