ABSTRACT
Embodied communication is the term meant to refer to such, often spontaneous, behavioral phenomena. Communication models that emphasize symbolic information transfer neglect the decisive role of non-symbolic qualities which are especially present in face-to-face communication. The cognitive modeling challenge is to devise theoretically grounded and empirically guided operational models that specify how mental processes and embodiment work together in communication. Natural communication and human language developed in intimate connection with body. When a person speaks, not only symbols are transmitted, but the whole body is in continuous motion. A growing body of work in artificial intelligence and agent research – in areas like facial expression robots or embodied conversational agents – takes up questions that can be related to embodied communication in a technical way.
