Chinmaya Mishra presents at LingCologne 2025

A significant portion of human communication is visual and the importance of signals such as gestures and eye gaze is relatively well-known. This study focused on a much neglected visual signal, namely eye blinking. Prior studies have found evidence that long blinks are perceived as a signal of understanding. This study explored whether the effect generalize to human-robot interactions. This study also aims to tease apart the effect of various visual signals of understanding such as blinking-only, nodding-only and nods with long blinks. The results show that overall a robot's visual feedbacks did not have a significant effect on the length of answer duration by the participants when compared with a no-feedback control condition. However, analyzing the data with a focus on only the three feedback gestures shows that blinking-only is less effective in signaling understanding when compared to nodding or nods with long blinks. These findings advance our understanding of multimodal communication, and of visual addressee feedback in human-robot interactions.

LingCologne 2025 is an annual conference hosted at the University of Cologne, bringing together researchers in linguistics, cognitive science, and related fields. The event fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and showcases cutting-edge research on language and communication across diverse modalities.