Emily Huang
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Julie Boland
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program:
Authors: Emily Huang, Julie Boland
Session: Session 3: 11:00 am – 11: 50 am
Poster: 33
Abstract
In day-to-day conversations, it has been proposed that neural oscillators keep track of the rhythm of speech. However, this proposal has been difficult to evaluate, given the rhythmic variability of natural, spontaneous speech. As conversations shift towards online platforms such as zoom, electronic transmission delays can disrupt the rhythmic flow even more and would likely overwhelm the proposed oscillators. This disruption would lead to other cognitive functions taking over, which results in slower transitions between speakers and possibly zoom fatigue. To simulate the effects of zoom under controlled laboratory conditions, participants were placed into separate rooms and asked to complete a collaborative task using partially overlapping maps. Transmission of their voices either had a variable delay of 100 ms, 300 ms, or no delay at all. Variability was confined to a standard deviation of 15 ms. When compared to the control (no delay) group, both the 100 ms and 300 ms variable latency seem to impact transition times to a similar degree. This suggests that variability in electronic transmission delay is the primary problem, not the length of the delay.
