If you find yourself shouting and gesticulating wildly if others can't hear you during a Zoom call, you're not alone. The more the video quality of an online meeting degrades, the louder we start talking, a new study by researchers at Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics finds. People also tend to change up their gestures to compensate. Their findings were published today in the Royal Society Open Science journal.
When conversing over Zoom or Skype, we use some of the same tactics to make ourselves heard as we use in the real world, says James Trujillo, first author of the paper and a cognitive scientist at Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. 'If you're talking to someone in a busy area with a lot of background noise, you typically use gestures to support your speech, and you start talking louder. When we talk in a video call, any issues that make it harder for people to understand each other usually come from technical difficulties. However, we still tend to use similar methods to compensate for those issues.'
Analyzing video calls
For the study, Trujillo and colleagues set up video calls between twenty pairs of participants. The participants sat in separate rooms, and were told to have a casual conversation for 40 minutes. Over the course of the call, the quality of the video deteriorated in ten steps, from very clear to extremely blurry. The researchers tracked how participants altered their speech and gestured over the course of the call.
At first, when the video quality deteriorated, participants reduced their arm and body movements somewhat, researchers found. However, when the quality decreased further, movement started increasing. The rate, speed and size of the gestures increased quickly at first, and then reached a certain plateau. Those participants who used gestures during the video call would also increase by up to 5 decibels when the video quality started dropping. Even when the image quality decreased so much that participants could barely see each other, they continued to use gestures and talk at a louder volume.
