Why do some speakers capture a room almost instantly while others fail to connect? The real-time architecture of audience engagement remains largely a black box. Here, we used motion-captured animations to present the pure nonverbal performance of public speakers to audiences - either in silence (nonverbal-only) or paired with the verbal content (nonverbal-plus-verbal). Using continuous response measurement (CRM), we find that audience judgments solidify with remarkable speed: Moment-to-moment engagement ratings become highly predictive of subsequent evaluations within the initial 10 seconds of the performance. Most notably, this predictive relationship emerged faster and slightly stronger in the nonverbal-only condition, with predictive information being present already after less than 5 seconds. These findings elucidate the social impact a speaker's nonverbal performance has on audience impressions, even when dissociated from the verbal content of the speech. Our approach provides a high-resolution temporal map of social impression formation, pointing to an early "moment of capture" that appears to set the stage for the reception of the following message. On a broader scale, this research validates a powerful new method to isolate different communicative channels, to scientifically deconstruct rhetorical skill, and to study the pervasive impact of nonverbal behavior more broadly. It also enables us to translate the ancient art of rhetoric into a modern science of social impression formation, yielding an empirical basis that can inform human-centered feedback, develop AI-based augmentation tools, and guide the design of engaging, socially present avatars in an increasingly AI-mediated and virtual world.

翻译：为何有些演讲者几乎能瞬间吸引全场，而另一些却难以建立共鸣？观众参与度的实时形成机制在很大程度上仍是一个黑箱。本研究通过动作捕捉动画，向观众呈现公共演讲者的纯粹非言语表现——包括无声条件（仅非言语）及与言语内容结合的条件（非言语加言语）。利用连续反应测量技术，我们发现观众评判以惊人速度固化：表演开始10秒内，逐时刻的参与度评分已能高度预测后续整体评价。尤为显著的是，在仅非言语条件下，这种预测关系出现得更快且略强——预测信息在不足5秒时即已显现。这些发现阐明了演讲者非言语表现对观众印象的社会影响力，即使在与演讲言语内容分离的情况下依然存在。我们的方法提供了社会印象形成的高分辨率时间图谱，指向一个早期的"捕捉瞬间"，该时刻似乎为后续信息的接收设定了基调。在更广泛层面上，本研究验证了一种强大的新方法，可用于分离不同沟通渠道、科学解构修辞技巧，并更广泛地研究非言语行为的普遍影响。这使我们得以将古老的修辞艺术转化为现代的社会印象形成科学，建立能够指导人本化反馈设计、开发基于AI的增强工具，并在日益由AI介导的虚拟世界中构建具有吸引力的社会性虚拟形象的经验基础。