Face - to - Face Communication Is a Highly Interactive Process Where Participants Mutually Exchange and Interpret Verbal and Nonverbal Messages

Face-to-face communication is a highly interactive process where participants mutually exchange and interpret verbal and nonverbal messages. Communication dynamics represent the temporal relationship between these communicative messages. Even when only one person speaks at a time, other participants exchange information continuously among themselves and with the speaker through gesture, gaze, posture, and facial expressions. The transactional view of human communication shows an important dynamic between communicative behaviors where each person serves simultaneously as speaker and listener [9]. At the same time you send a message, you also receive messages from your own communications (individual dynamics) as well as from the reactions of the other person(s) (interpersonal dynamics) [2]. Individual and interpersonal dynamics play a key role when a teacher automatically adjusts his/her explanations based on the student nonverbal behaviors, when a doctor diagnoses a social disorder such as autism, or when a negotiator detects deception in the opposite team. An important challenge for artificial intelligence researchers in the 21st century is in creating socially intelligent robots and computers that are able to recognize, predict, and analyze verbal and nonverbal dynamics during face-to-face communication. This will not only open up new avenues for human-computer interactions but create new computational tools for social and behavior researchers—software able to automatically analyze human social and nonverbal behaviors and extract important interaction patterns. CHALLENGES WITH INDIVIDUAL AND INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS Human face-to-face communication is a little like a dance in that participants continuously adjust their behaviors based on verbal and nonverbal displays and signals. Even when observing participants individually, the interpretation of their behaviors is a multimodal problem in that both verbal and nonverbal messages are necessary to a complete understanding of human behaviors. Individual dynamics represents this influence and relationship between the different channels of information such as speech and gestures.