Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human communication is a complex multimodal behavior that is deeply embedded within our environment. Fromnarrative monologues (Dale, 2014) to dyadic task performance (Paxton, Abney, Kello, & Dale, 2014), recent efforts havesought to identify multimodal signatures of different types of communication. We extend these efforts in the current project byinvestigating the multimodal signatures of learning about a pressing but publicly controversial issue: global warming. Here,we explore how personal political stances and previous scientific understanding affect patterns of multimodal behavior (i.e.,language use and gaze patterns) when participants are asked to learn about and then describe the mechanisms behind globalwarming (Ranney et al., 2013). Quantifying understanding – and exploring how personal traits affect that understanding – isnot only vital to better describing communication dynamics overall but may also shed light on emerging efforts to educate thepublic on important scientific concerns.