Joint Diagrammatical Reasoning in Language
By discussing a problem and drawing a sketch we create external resource that enable us to think together and to develop new insights and solutions. Joint Diagrammatical Reasoning in Language is an international research project aimed at understanding how this happens, employing conceptual, experimental and ethnographic means. The project's website.
Digging for the Roots of Understanding
Digging for the Roots of Understanding is a European collaborative project investigating interpersonal and intercultural understanding from deeply interdisciplinary perspectives: How do we build successful interactions? How do we misunderstand each other and what is the role of these misunderstandings? While much research focuses on how pre-existing common ground is needed for successful interactions, we investigate the online coordination of common ground and the potential constructive role of differences and misunderstanding.
The local node of Drust involves Kristian Tylén and Riccardo Fusaroli. Drust is funded by the EuroCore program of the European Science Foundation. The project's website.
The local node of Drust involves Kristian Tylén and Riccardo Fusaroli. Drust is funded by the EuroCore program of the European Science Foundation. The project's website.
Clinical Voices
Several mental illnesses have been associated with unusual speech patterns (mostly monotone, emotionless voices), with consequent negative impact on social interactions. This project employs non-linear methods of voice analyses and machine learning techniques to investigate monological and dialogical speech production in clinical patients and matched controls. The study provides a quantitative ground to qualitative psychiatric assessments of patients’ speech patterns. Crucially, it is a preliminary step in better understanding some of the social impairments in the clinical populations and the dynamics of social interaction, with potential therapeutical impact. Hear more about the project (in Danish) on P1 Videnskabensverden: http://videnskab.dk/krop-sundhed/psykiske-lidelser-kan-hores-i-din-stemme
Clinical Voices is funded by a Interacting Minds Centre seed grant. The project's website.
Clinical Voices is funded by a Interacting Minds Centre seed grant. The project's website.
The Sound of Sarcasm
How do we understand if an utterance is sarcastic or not? While we generally seem pretty good at spotting a sarcastic comment, this ability is lacking in many mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, autism, depression, etc.). What are the grounds for this impairment: Is this due to high level deficits in theory of mind, or at lower level perceptual and attentional processes not picking up on cues for sarcasm? Understanding the way we cue for and understand sarcasm might thus be very important in granting us a handle on social impairments in mental disorders.
In this project we analyze the relative importance of verbal and visual cues in recognizing sarcastic utterances in English and Danish corpora, with a particular focus on acoustic/prosodic properties. Machine learning techniques are employed on staged sarcasm and the resulting models are applied to spontaneously produced sarcastic utterance, with the aim of understanding which cues are crucial to individuate sarcasm, and could therefore be impaired in mental disorders.
Project website
In this project we analyze the relative importance of verbal and visual cues in recognizing sarcastic utterances in English and Danish corpora, with a particular focus on acoustic/prosodic properties. Machine learning techniques are employed on staged sarcasm and the resulting models are applied to spontaneously produced sarcastic utterance, with the aim of understanding which cues are crucial to individuate sarcasm, and could therefore be impaired in mental disorders.
Project website
Conventionalization, movement and feedback in gesture
Processes of ritualization and conventionalization lie at the core of social coordination. However, the mechanisms and efficacy of such processes are not well understood. Spontaneous gesture/pantomime is an interesting window to these processes because, on the one hand, they come natural to us but, on the other hand, they are not already heavily constrained by cultural/communicative convention. This allows us to observe how conventionalization processes occur in real time in a controlled experimental setting.Relying on the data produced in "The motivations for conceptual structure in interactive non-verbal event representation" we will look at how the individual “lexical” components evolve through the experimental paradigm due to repeated exposure, use and interactive feedback. Measures from the motion capturing actigraphs will be analyzed and dynamical indices will be correlated with dyads’ accuracy, alignment and amount of spontaneous feedback. We hypothesize that groups with a lot of initial feedback will experience more long-term convergence, gesture reduction and overall higher accuracy.
Project website
Project website
