purple motes

Most person-to-person communication occurs between persons who know each other well (family and close friends). A recent study of a large number of mobile phone voice calls found that in an 18-week period, about two-thirds of mobile phone users engaged in mutual calling with only two other persons. The mean number of partners for mutual calling in that period was three.[1] Mutual calling partners with more mutual calling partners in common spent on average more time in calls with each other.[2] Mutual calling appears to have increasing returns in personal familiarity.

Recent neuroscience research points to neural functioning that supports this macro-behavioral pattern. The suppression of a certain brain wave pattern (mu activity) is associated with sub-conscious processing of the present activity of another person. Premotor neurons that perform such sub-conscious processing have been called mirror neurons. Mu activity, and by implication mirror neuron activity, depends on familiarity with the other person:

mu activity was suppressed most when subjects watched videos of themselves, indicating the greatest mirror neuron activity. For both groups [autistic and non-autistic children], the measurements showed a slightly lower level of suppression when subjects watched familiar people in the video and the least when watching strangers.[3]

Recognition of another is typically considered to be a high-level neural function. Familiarity with another, however, appears to associated with (downloaded) resources for sub-conscious processing of another's actions.

Persons highly value in communication making sense of presence. The relation of mu activity to personal familiarity is consistent with personal familiarity being a resource for making sense of presence. Presence as a value, and familiarity as a resource, provide a structure for increasing returns in mutual calling.

[1] See Analysis of a large-scale weighted network of one-to-one human communication, Jukka-Pekka Onnela et al 2007 New J. Phys. 9 179 doi:10.1088/1367-2630/9/6/179, Fig. 4 and Table 1.

[2] See Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks, J.-P. Onnela, J. Saramäki, J. Hyvönen, G. Szabó, D. Lazer, K. Kaski, J. Kertész, and A.-L. Barabási, PNAS 104, 7332-7336 (2007), preprint, pp. 4-5. Overview of this paper here.

[3] From "Mirror, Mirror In The Brain: Decoding Patterns Reflecting Understanding Of Self, Others May Further Autism Therapies," Society for Neuroscience News Release, 11/04/07, summarizing L. M. Oberman, V. S. Ramachandran, J. A. Pineda, "Mirror Neuron Activity Modulated by Actor Familiarity in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: an EEG Study," 2007 Neuroscience Meeting Planner. San Diego, CA: Society for Neuroscience, 2007, abstract on EBDblog. The sentence following the above quoted excerpt states, "This indicates that normal mirror neuron activity was evoked when children with autism watched family members, but not strangers." The abstract states, "Both neurotypical participants and those with ASD [autism spectrum disorder] showed greater suppression to familiar individuals compared to the stranger." These and the above descriptions appear to be inconsistent, but that is not relevant to the point here.

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Brain effects are communicative goods. A recent study found common effects among reading and seeing actions:

Participants observed actions and read phrases relating to foot, hand, or mouth actions. In the premotor cortex of the left hemisphere, a clear congruence was found between effector-specific activations of visually presented actions and of actions described by literal phrases.

For example, reading the phrase "biting the peach" and seeing a video of a person bite a peach activate a common set of premotor neurons called "mirror neurons." These neurons also trigger muscular actions such as actually biting a peach.

Consider the economics of activating these neurons. Making sense of text is relatively expensive. Actually executing actions involve the caloric cost of moving bodily mass. Observing actions is probably the cheapest means to activate the common neurons associated with these different sensory circumstances. Perhaps this helps to explains why so many persons spend so much time on couches, watching sports on television.

Past physical experience affects the extent of neural activation. A scholar who has studied this relation noted:

"When we watch a sport, our brain performs an internal simulation of the actions, as if it were sending the same movement instructions to our own body. But for those sports commentators who are ex-athletes, the mirror system is likely to be even more active because their brains may re-enact the moves they once made. This might explain why they get so excited while watching the game!" [supporting scholarly paper (pdf)]

Sense of presence involves attunement to another like oneself. Common experience of physical action heightens sense of presence. Current demand for televised sports probably depends strongly on explicit marketing investment. An interesting challenge might be to try to calculate the implicit marketing value of sports participation.

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The PicturePhone was a spectacular failure in the U.S. in the early 1970s. Many factors contributed to the PicturePhone’s flop. It required significant up-front equipment expenditure coordinated across users. It was expensive to use. It was bulky. It highly constrained the bodily position of users: compared to the PicturePhone, the fixed line phone of that time was a “mobile” phone. Because of these and other weaknesses, the PicturePhone became the communications industry’s Edsel.

The massive, money-losing investment in PicturePhone shouldn’t be understood to indicate that voice is all that most persons want in most personal communication. The PicturePhone had the technical capability to combine voice and images. That is not sufficient to create economic value in communication. Economic value in communication depends on broader sensory circumstances and more specific behavioral goals of users.

Good sensory design of communication services requires understanding behavioral goals. Consider, for example, voice quality. High voice quality might mean transmitting the full audible range of a person’s voice, and nothing else (no “noise”). Research indicates, however, that persons are able to identify locations based on their acoustic qualities. If the goal of a voice conversation is to transmit specific information in speech, then ambient sound is “noise”. But if the goal of a voice conversation is to make sense of the other’s circumstances, then ambient sound might enhance communication, particularly for a mobile device.

Identifying specific persons, while often taken for granted, is an important goal in communication. Factors relevant to identifying persons by sight are not just pixel resolution and color depth. For example, the orientation of a face affects the amount of time to detect whether the face is smiling or frowning (please do future frowning upside-down). Moreover, the sound of a person’s voice creates a sense of what the person looks like speaking. The value of a communication service depends on the sensory affordances it provides in relation to the multimodal human perceptual routines for identifying persons.

Another goal in communication, one that is probably overvalued in theory, is understanding what a specific person is saying. Seeing lips annunciating sounds affects what sounds are heard. Moreover, the orientation of a face affects the integration of the sight of lip movements and the sounds that are heard (check out this amazing demonstration). Recognizing a face, seeing lip movements, and hearing sounds are all sensory dimensions that contribute to understanding, or misunderstanding, what a specific person is saying.

Google has integrated visual identity in Google Talk and Gmail. Visual identity doesn’t generate any additional constraints on the use of the service. The cost to users is image acquisition and set-up costs. All in all, it’s a minor innovation. But, unlike the PicturePhone, it enlarges sensory circumstances to serve a specific behavioral goal in communication. That’s a major way to create value.

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Recent research indicates that human visual processing capabilities have shaped text. Letters in 96 non-logographic writing systems, Chinese characters, and natural scenes all have similar distributions of topological configurations. The human visual system evolved to process natural scenes. Writing systems from around the world and throughout the history of written language appear to be well-matched to the evolved visual capabilities of human beings.

This same research indicates that motor complexity of writing is less important than visual processing for reading in shaping the distribution of topological configurations. The frequency ranks of topological configurations in widely used writing systems are not significantly correlated with a measure of the motor effort required to produce the letter or character. Moreover, shorthand, which is designed to be written quickly, has a significantly different topological distribution of letters than does more widely used writing systems. Young children’s scribbles, which reflect relatively weak motor capabilities, also have a significantly different topological distribution than widely used writing systems. Within the space of relatively simple topological possibilities, motor complexity seems not to have strongly affected the design of writing systems.

This research suggests that the design of text favors reading over writing. That’s a plausible design orientation. The invention of text was probably oriented toward the market for memorializing events and storing knowledge. Those are communicative functions that involve writing that is read many times. Text messaging among family and friends is not that type of communication.

Text has other disadvantages as technology for personal communication. Compared to audible language, text has a relatively high bodily cost. Babies easily learn audible language. In contrast, the capability to read and write requires from humans a large, specialized investment in time and attention (schooling). Moreover, broad patterns of media use indicate that persons prefer spending time with audiovisual media than with text. This suggests that the marginal bodily processing cost of reading is higher than for audiovisual communication.

The design of text and the design of the human body disadvantage text messaging for presence-oriented, personal communication. Experts in the field assure me that their teen-aged daughters find great value in text messaging among their friends, value that voice communication does not provide. I respect this expertise. The research discussed above, however, at least indicates the importance of considering carefully how text messaging creates value relative to voice communication.

Addendum: The research on topological configurations in written languages is brilliant, pioneering research. Extensive discussion of the analysis and duplication of the findings would help to ensure that they are correct. I noticed that the analysis did not weigh topological configurations by frequency of use in representative text. Perhaps this wasn’t done because generating such weights might require considerable additional effort. I would like to see future research at least consider the significance of use weights.

The full citation for the research on topological configurations is:
Mark A. Changizi, Qiong Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo (2006), "The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes," American Naturalist, v. 167, pp. E117-E139.

Update: Included in Tangled Bank #54, hosted by Science and Politics. Check out that carnival for other interesting science posts.

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