Cascade Effect in Perceiving Onset Timings of Others’ Responses and Feeling about Communication

The cognitive mechanism of human communication seems to be a complex system that shows multiple interactions among feeling about communication, responsive action, and timing perception of responses by an interactant. Although such a mechanism has been modeled by the spiral-response cascade hypothesis, its components have not been completely verified. According to the previous findings that the onset timing of the contingent event of one’s own voluntary action is perceived as earlier than actual (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002) and that responses at earlier timing are regarded as communicative (Yoshikawa, Shinozawa, & Ishiguro, 2007), we hypothesize that human might estimate the onset timing of responses by a communication partner as earlier than actual, which is what we call the intrapersonal being-responded-to cascade effect. Extending the paradigm of Haggard et al. , we report that responses by a communicative computer agent in verbal interactions are perceived as happening earlier than those by a less-communicative agent.