Now scientists have revealed why we often end up raising the voices of our colleagues: as video quality deteriorates, we speak louder and change our gestures in an effort to compensate. “The gestures we make as we speak, as well as other visual cues, such as facial expressions, are really important and comprehensive aspects of how we communicate,” said Dr. James Trujillo, lead author of the research at Radboud Nijmegen University. Netherlands. “If your connection to Zoom gives you bad video, remember to articulate both your speech and your gestures.” He said previous research had shown that when we can not hear someone well due to noise, we speak louder, while recent team work has shown that when a video call is very noisy, people make their gestures more noticeable. “There seems to be a general tendency to put more effort into our speech and gestures when our communication is interrupted by something like noise or poor video connection,” he said. Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Trujillo and his colleagues reported how they analyzed video calls between 20 pairs of participants. For each couple, participants sat in separate rooms and chatted with each other in a casual, non-scripted conversation via a 40-minute Zoom-like video call. During the call, the video quality changed in 10 steps, between excellent and completely blurry, with half of the couples experiencing improved video quality during the call and half getting worse. The video quality during the call at each step was the same for both participants. The researchers monitored participants’ gestures and aspects of their speech during the calls. He revealed that as the video quality deteriorated, participants initially reduced their hand and body movements as they chatted, but as the quality deteriorated further, they moved more. However, the pace, speed and size with which they gestured increased as the quality of the video initially declined but then decreased as it deteriorated further. The team added that when gestures are not used, speech is not affected by reduced visibility. But when gestures were used, the volume increased by up to 5 decibels as the video quality initially dropped and then remained at this higher level as the video quality deteriorated further – in other words, when the gestures ceased to be useful at all. Trujillo said the results showed that communication was not just about speech, but that, in the case of spoken language, it was a complete system of visual and auditory signals that work together to convey meaning. “To compensate [for poorer video quality]”People ‘exaggerate’ the form of their gestures to help their partner recognize the meaning of the gesture, even when they can not see it as normally,” he said. “While speaking louder probably does not help, the fact that people do shows how built-in these systems are, especially because people only speak louder when there are gestures,” Trujillo added. “They know that the gestures produced are vital to their communication, but their partner will find it more difficult to see them. That way they increase the power of the other signal – speech. “
