From correspondents in Washington, United States, 11:30 AM IST

Women convey a range of meanings and emotions by shaking their heads while chatting among themselves, more so than men do with other men.

When women and men converse together, the men shake their heads a little and the women use a little less. Both men and women might be adapting because of their gender-based expectations or because of the movements they perceive from each other.

What would happen if you could change the apparent gender of a conversant while keeping all of the dynamics of head movement and facial expression?

Relying on new video-conferencing technology, a team of psychologists and computer scientists, led by Steven Boker, psychology professor at Virginia University, were able to switch the apparent gender of participants and found that head motion was more important than gender in determining how people coordinate with one another in such interactions.

The researchers used synthesised faces - known as avatars - in video-conferences with naive participants, who believed they were conversing with an actual person rather than its synthetic version, according to a Virginia University release.

In some conversations, the researchers changed the gender of the avatars and the vocal pitch of the avatar's voice - while still maintaining their actual head movements and facial expressions - convincing naive participants that they were speaking with, for example, a male when they were in fact speaking with a female, or vice versa.

'We found that people simply adapt to each other's head movements and facial expressions, regardless of the apparent sex of the person they are talking to,' Boker said.

'This is important because it indicates that how you appear is less important than how you move when it comes to what other people feel when they speak with you,' he said.

These findings were presented on Sunday at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco.

They are also slated for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

(Staff Writer, © IANS)