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Schedule

10:00–10:45 — Marta Sibierska: What exactly is aligned when we speak of alignment in whole-body communication? A case study of convergence on mode and form in pantomimic enactments.

10:45–11:30 — Sławomir Wacewicz: Towards the standardisation of key terms across cognitive and behavioral sciences

Please contact Šárka Kadavá for the Teams link.

Abstracts

Marta Sibierska: What exactly is aligned when we speak of alignment in whole-body communication? A case study of convergence on mode and form in pantomimic enactments
Alignment is a fundamental mechanism in interaction, where we repeat each other’s behaviours, so as to communicate successfully (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Alignment can concern different dimensions of interaction: for instance, it can be cognitive, cross-linguistic, lexical, or syntactic (Pickering & Garrod, 2006). In spite of a lot of research on alignment in linguistic communication, there is still a lot to be said about alignment in non-linguistic communication. One example of a research gap is generalising findings about alignment in manual gesture onto whole-body expression. Especially as far as alignment in “form” is concerned, it can be dissected into, for instance, alignment in terms of mode of representation (cf. e.g., Müller, 2014) and the form of representation—including handedness, handshape, orientation, or position (Bergmann & Kopp, 2012; Chui, 2014). According to the available studies on alignment in manual gesture, interactants tend to align both on the level of mode and form (e.g., Oben & Brône, 2016). We believe this does not necessarily apply to whole-body communication (cf. “pantomime” sensu Żywiczyński et al., 2018). To verify this assumption, we are analysing a set of video recordings of two charades-like games, where the participants were arranged into dyads and asked to take turns miming “targets” and guessing them (Sibierska et al., 2023; Żywiczyński et al., in preparation). We can easily show that although alignment in mode is frequent in whole-body communication, forms of movement remain highly idiosyncratic. Based on this observation, we argue that achieving alignment—and, by extension, communicative success (cf. Pickering & Garrod, 2006)—might be more challenging in whole-body communication than in other interactions. We also use this opportunity to stress that the treatment of “mode” and “form” in studies on alignment in non-verbal communication is tailored to manual gesture and to ask what could be annotated to best capture the “form” of a representation in whole-body communication.

Sławomir Wacewicz: Towards the standardisation of key terms across cognitive and behavioral sciences
In my talk I introduce a draft research project aimed at developing a feasible method of standardisation of key terms across cognitive and behavioral sciences. This is important, since high-gain research increasingly transcends individual disciplines, leading to challenges in efficient communication between these disciplines, with particular problems coming from what I call 'pivot terms', such as alignment, cooperation, gesture, iconicity, imitation, intentionality. These are typically single everyday-language words that are applied very flexibly across a wide range of academic contexts and whose meaning varies greatly, not only between disciplines but often also within them: between research traditions or even individual labs.
Providing clear definitions of one's pivot terms terms is a solution that is as obvious as problematic: in practice definitions are not always present, and even when they are, they can be unsystematic, not mutually compatible, or simply difficult to locate within the body of the article. Further, researchers tend to work with preconceptions that have long been shown as inaccurate, in particular that definitions need to be analytic, and that for each term, there is a single ‘correct’ definition of that term. A way forward that I suggest here involves describing pivot terms as family-resemblance categories composed of bundles of features that could be checked, or left unchecked, for a given term as used in a particular article. For example, cooperation could have features like "cooperator invests recourses", "cooperator profits later", and "cooperators act jointly". Features would need to be binary, determinable, ergonomic (determining them should be easy) and approved by the community.
In the long run, a solution like the one described in my talk could help save resources by limiting conceptual discussions, reducing problems with the replication of studies, increase the generalisability of results and transfer to new domains and contexts, aid troubleshooting (if results do not apply, it’s not always clear why), laying grounds for metaanalyses resembling these in medical sciences.
Mindful that similar challenges have been encountered and dealt with in semantics, analytic philosophy, philosophy of science or field linguistics, I will be eager to get feedback on the general feasibility of this idea as well as specific advice.

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