Do Aligned Bodies Align Minds? The Partners’ Body Alignment as a Constraint on Spatial Perspective Use

ABSTRACT

In a direction-giving task, we examine whether a high-level constraint—the task partners’ relative body alignment—influences spatial language use and task accuracy. In 32 pairs, task partners interacted in two conditions: for one route description, direction givers (DGs) and direction followers (DFs) sat side-by-side (aligned condition), and for another they sat opposite one another (counter-aligned condition). After each description, DFs drew the route on a map. When pairs were counter-aligned (vs. aligned), DGs increased their use of expressions from a survey perspective, using more frequently terms such as east-west. When counter-aligned, DFs also used more words per conversational turn, which was taken to reflect the increased difficulty of coordinating in that condition. Still, in terms of task performance, the accuracy of DFs’ drawings was unaffected by the partners’ body alignment or spatial language use; it was only predicted by the DGs’ spatial ability. We argue that, because direction giving emphasizes accuracy, task partners invest in strategies that contribute to mutual understanding (e.g., recaps of the route by the DF at the end, evidenced by shifts in language use over time). Thus, body alignment in direction giving impacts coordination difficulty and spatial language use, but it does not singularly influence task performance.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Maria Photiou, Maria Papagianni, Miria Plastira, Andreas Andreou, and Panagiotis Loizou for assistance with transcription; Katerina Charalampous for assistance with coding spatial expressions for establishing reliability of the coding scheme; and Imani Brown for assistance with coding the duration of the study phase. They also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Gestures from a survey perspective typically involve tracing, tapping, and pointing on a two-dimensional surface such as a table, as if creating a map, whereas those taken to reflect a route perspective typically involve hand movement in three-dimensional space, often with a sideways oriented palm to mark directional turns (Galati, Weisberg, et al., 2018).

2. We should note that, although the survey perspective is fixed and is based on cardinal directions, external visualizations of survey representations have a perspective whose orientation can vary relative to the user’s body orientation (e.g., maps can be rotated). We therefore reasoned that the alignment of the task partners’ bodies with the canonical orientation of the survey representation (e.g., where North = up on a vertical plane or away from the users’ body on a sagittal plane) could matter.

3. More about the distribution of these linguistic varieties in our sample can be found in our online supplement: https://osf.io/g2ceh/.

4. We chose materials that recruited both a route and a survey perspective in complementary formats (i.e., linguistic descriptions from a route perspective and a map from a survey perspective) for two reasons. First, as we wished to maximize generalizability to real-life settings, our material parallels the typical format of directions provided through GPS systems (e.g., Google Maps). Second, as we wished to bolster the accuracy of the DGs’ representation of the route and environment, our choice was motivated by findings suggesting that integrating the two perspectives through different modalities promotes task performance, presumably by contributing to a more flexible representation of the environment (e.g., Brunyé et al., 2008).

5. We also examined statistical models that included the interaction term for the DG and DF’s use of a specific type of expression (route or survey) as a predictor of task performance. We reasoned that this interaction term could capture the linguistic alignment of the two partners in terms of spatial perspective. Nevertheless, this interaction term was not a significant predictor of task performance. The code for these supplementary analyses can be found in our public repository for the project.

6. We have chosen not to exclude these six pairs from the analyses as they constitute a considerable subset of our pairs (18.75%). We have also chosen not to recode their body alignment as being that of the opposite condition. As evident in Figure 3, the partners’ configuration in these cases does not afford an unambiguous, binary classification for whether the pair is aligned or counter-aligned. The pairs’ body orientation can be seen as being on a gradient from counter-aligned to aligned, which in more cases varies over the course of the dialogue. We did, however, conduct exploratory analyses to examine whether these pairs differed from those who stayed in the assigned orientation. In statistical models that included “switching” body orientation as a factor, along with its interactions with all other factors (Alignment, Block, Route), “switching” was not a significant predictor of language use or task accuracy. The only pattern was that those who switched (especially from Counter-aligned to Aligned) used route and survey spatial expressions more frequently than those who didn’t switch. This was evidenced by significant interactions between “switching” with assigned body Alignment and/or Block. The increase in spatial language use may suggest that pairs that “switched” invested more in relaying and grounding spatial information than “non-switchers.” However, these results should be interpreted with caution, given our sample size. The code for these exploratory analyses is included in our OSF repository.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 705037.