Audiovisual prosody and feeling of knowing

This paper describes two experiments on the role of audiovisual prosody for signalling and detecting meta-cognitive information in question answering. The first study consists of an experiment, in which participants are asked factual questions in a conversational setting, while they are being filmed. Statistical analyses bring to light that the speakers' Feeling of Knowing (FOK) is cued by a number of visual and verbal properties. It appears that answers tend to have a higher number of marked auditory and visual cues, including divergences from the neutral facial expression, when the FOK score is low, while the reverse is true for non-answers. The second study is a perception experiment, in which a selection of the utterances from the first study is presented to participants in one of three conditions: vision only, sound only, or vision+ sound. Results reveal that human observers can reliably distinguish high FOK responses from low FOK responses in all three conditions, but that answers are easier than non-answers, and that a bimodal presentation of the stimuli is easier than the unimodal counterparts. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.