How social opinion influences syntactic processing—An investigation using virtual reality

Abstract

The extent to which you adapt your grammatical choices to match that of your interlocutor’s (structural priming) can be influenced by the social opinion you have of your interlocutor. However, the direction and reliability of this effect is unclear as different studies have reported seemingly contradictory results. We have operationalized social perception as the ratings of strangeness for different avatars in a virtual reality study. The use of avatars ensured maximal control over the interlocutor’s behaviour and a clear dimension along which to manipulate social perceptions toward this interlocutor. Our results suggest an inverted U-shaped curve in structural priming magnitude for passives as a function of strangeness: the participants showed the largest priming effects for the intermediately strange, with a decrease when interacting with the least- or most-strange avatars. The relationship between social perception and priming magnitude may thus be non-linear. There seems to be a 'happy medium' in strangeness, evoking the largest priming effect. We did not find a significant interaction of priming magnitude with any social perception.

Changes in alpha activity reveal that social opinion modulates attention allocation during face processing

“…Here the avatars were animated such that each avatar had different facial expressions in terms of their smile habit, eyebrow movements, and blink rate (see Table 1). Participants were therefore able to form opinions about the three avatars based on these facial characteristics, an effect seen robustly in previous studies using the same avatars and same facial expressions (Heyselaar et al, 2017). After each interaction, participants were asked to evaluate the avatars.…”

“…Interacted-with avatars differed as a function of the opinion the participant had of the secondary individual. All the avatars were exactly the same, except for the facial expressions, which we have shown in two previous studies to be enough to vary the opinion of these avatars (Heyselaar et al, 2017;Heyselaar et al, 2015). However, as they were identical in appearance, we cannot rule out the possibility that they were perceived not as individuals but as the same avatar with varying moods.…”

“…The previous study that used these avatars to observe an effect of opinion on behaviour (Heyselaar et al, 2017) showed an effect with 36 participants. However, as EEG effects are usually seen with a smaller sample size compared to behavioural studies, we decided to use 30 participants.…”

“…The three facial expressions used have been tested elsewhere and have been convincingly demonstrated to induce a wide spread of ratings with regard to perceived humanness, perceived strangeness, and quality of facial expression (Heyselaar et al, 2017). These three facial expressions involved combinations of subtle changes in blink rate, smiling, and eyebrow habits (Table 1).…”

“…In addition to the mere presence of a secondary individual, the opinion the participant has of this individual also influences the participants' subsequent behaviour (Heyselaar, Hagoort, & Segaert, 2017;Lott & Lott, 1961;Weatherholtz, Campbell-Kibler, & Jaeger, 2014). One possible explanation for the phenomena discussed thus far involves the capture of attention by the secondary individual .…”