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Nonverbal Communication – Signals, Conventions and Incommensurable Explanations

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Cognitive Behavioural Systems

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 7403))

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Abstract

Considering nonverbal communication and its complexity, four problems are addressed which focus on the dynamics of nonverbal communication. (1) How much of the complexity of nonverbal communication is due to the amount of expressions following cultural rules (e. g. conventions) and the expressions of the agents´ states through their signaling systems? (2) Nonverbal behaviour can be regarded as time-varying multi-scaled multimodal configurations of magnitudes. It is natural to ask for scaling laws. (3) Furthermore, the dynamics of the configurations just mentioned is of interest. (4) Why are verbal expressions more conventional than nonverbal ones? The discussion of the four problems suggests that signal-based explanations of nonverbal behaviour and communication are incommensurable with convention-based explanations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Educational Research, Institute 1, Technische Universität Dresden, D-1062, Dresden, Germany

    Lutz-Michael Alisch

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  1. Lutz-Michael Alisch
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, and IIASS, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Italy

    Anna Esposito

  2. Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, sezione di Napoli Osservatorio Vesuviano, Napoli, Italy

    Antonietta M. Esposito

  3. School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Alessandro Vinciarelli

  4. Laboratory of Acoustics and Speech Communication, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Rüdiger Hoffmann

  5. Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, Anatolia College/ACT, P.O. Box 21021, 55510, Pylaia, Greece

    Vincent C. Müller

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Alisch, LM. (2012). Nonverbal Communication – Signals, Conventions and Incommensurable Explanations. In: Esposito, A., Esposito, A.M., Vinciarelli, A., Hoffmann, R., Müller, V.C. (eds) Cognitive Behavioural Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7403. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34584-5_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34584-5_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-34583-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-34584-5

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