The annual summer conference for the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences is shaping up to be an outstanding experience. Below is the abstract and biography for one of our keynote speakers, Dr. Steven M. Booker. Save the dates of August 4-6. You will not want to miss the excellent program that is shaping up for the summer of 2006. See our website for more information about the society and the summer conference:
http://www.societyforchaostheory.org Sincerely,
David Pincus, Ph.D., SecretarySociety for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life SciencesRegister online: www.societyforchaostheory.org/form.htmlcontact fellow members: sctpls@listproc.umbc.eduMail: SCTPLS, PO Box 484, Pewaukee, WI 53072, USAFax: 1+714-997-6780
Information Flow and Symmetry Breaking in Interpersonal Coordination
Steven M. Boker University of Notre Dame
The semantic content of conversation is accompanied by coordinated prosody, head movement, eye movements, eyebrow movement, smiles, and other facial changes. Coordination between conversants' movements and/or facial expressions can be observed when an action generated by one individual is predictive of a symmetric movement by another. Both spatial and spatiotemporal symmetry is commonly observed in conversation and may be linked to mirror neuron systems that organize embodied coordination into a perception--action loop. Overt expressions of symmetry thus are likely to be indicative of mutually shared inner states. But the greater the symmetry between two individuals, the greater the redundancy in their embodied states. The greater the redundancy, the less information is transferred in a nonverbal communications channel. Therefore, symmetry breaking must also be a component of coordination in conversation. High degrees of nonstationarity in dyadic coordination have been observed in a recent set of motion tracking experiments. Current methods for estimation of nonstationarity in the association between variables are discussed and the results of application of these methods to motion tracked dyadic conversations are presented. These results suggest that the ongoing mutual estimation of affect that occurs during human interaction may be framed as a dynamical systems model, and that this step may help us better understand emotion regulation.
Steven M. Boker is associate professor of Quantitative Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include the application of dynamical systems analytic techniques to psychological and physiological data. His contributions include methods for examining change in multivariate mixed cross-sectional and longitudinal data include Statistical Vector Fields, Windowed Cross- Correlation with Peak Picking, Differential Structural Equation Modeling, and the Latent Differential Equations method for fitting differential equations models to multivariate multiple occasion data. Dr. Boker's lab uses motion capture technology for experiments in interpersonal coordination and perception-action coupling during conversation, dance, and imitation learning.