Effects of Delay on Nonverbal Behavior and Interpersonal Coordination in Video Conferencing

In this paper, we investigated the effects of transmission delay on individual nonverbal behavior and interpersonal coordination during dyadic video conferencing conversations. For that, we assessed individual-level nonverbal behaviors, including body motion and gaze patterns, and examined participants' interpersonal coordination of body movement. Our results indicate that transmission delay significantly reduces individual body motion. No significant differences in gaze behaviors were found between different delay conditions, however, a trend of participants spending more time looking at their conversational partner in the high-delay condition than in the no-delay condition was observed. Also, we found that transmission delay significantly influences interpersonal body-movement coordination, enhancing structural organization and coordination stability while showing a threshold effect on movement similarity.