Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Everyday conversation is composed of a rapid exchange of turns between talkers as they communicate. The speedof these exchanges implies simultaneous perception and production of conversational cues relevant to turn-taking behavior.Natural face-to-face conversation involves a rich set of these social cues including visual information whose contribution toperception of turns has yet to be examined. Our studies investigated the influence of visual information in perceiving a turnexchange. We examined the time-course of the use of these visual cues during turn judgments. Results show that visualinformation is sufficient but not necessary for perceiving turn exchanges. Further, the temporal precision with which auditorycues influence turn perception is greater than that of visual information. We suggest that although auditory cues dominatethe perception of turn exchanges, reliance on the various sources of information is flexible and may follow highly sensitivetimelines.