A model for production, perception, and acquisition of actions in face-to-face communication

The concept of action as basic motor control unit for goal-directed movement behavior has been used primarily for private or non-communicative actions like walking, reaching, or grasping. In this paper literature is reviewed indicating that this concept can also be used in all domains of face-to-face communication like speech, co-verbal facial expression, and co-verbal gesturing. Three domain-specific types of actions, i.e. speech actions, facial actions and hand-arm actions are defined in this paper and a model is proposed that elucidates the underlying biological mechanisms of action production, action perception, and action acqui¬sition in all domains of face-to-face communication. This model can be used as basic concept for embodied conversational agents and thus for specific human-computer interaction technologies.