Paper Blogs 06

Reference Paper

Mimicking Expressiveness Of Movements By Autistic Children In Game Play

Daniel Tetteroo, Azadeh Shirzad, Mariana Serras Pereira, Matthijs Zwinderman, Duy Le, Emilia Barakova

(Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/SocialCom-PASSAT.2012.100)

Overview of the Paper

Mimicry is a very important social phenomenon which leads to emotional convergence in human interaction. Usually mimicry is viewed as the tendency of imitate the facial, vocal, postural and movement expressions of the people with whom he or she is interacting.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are thought to face difficulties when interacting with others. They have great difficulties in performing tasks that require imitate other in group settings. An experiment is designed in this paper to find out how the children with ASD behave in more natural conditions, like playing game.

In this paper, the authors designed a game setting where the children with ASD played a game against a confederate. The confederate showed different level of expressiveness in her movements. In the same setting, children who do not have ASD also played the game with the same confederate.

During the game, the motion was captured using Microsoft Kinect. After that, the expressiveness of movement for both children with ASD, and children without ASD, was measured by human observers and their modeled automated movement analysis system. Then they compare the result of these two methods.

 

Evaluation and Validity of the Paper

From the movement data, first the expressiveness of the participant player was measured by two human observers. For each five second slots, the observers rated the expressiveness. Then, from the video, their system rated the expressiveness. They use Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) for analyzing the movement. They only use the amplitude and acceleration of movements to analyze the expressiveness. For their game settings, they defined the expressiveness of movements as an area of movement per time period.

From the result obtained from human observers, there was no significant difference in expressiveness for both participant groups. But, they found some difference in result analyzed by their system.

 

Improvement Scopes

In their discussion, the authors mentioned about that there were some difference in the game settings for both groups of children. There may be a little chance for different result. Another, improvement scope might be, to consider other part of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to measure expressiveness by their system.

 

Further Reading

One of the interesting articles, which are cited by this paper, is “The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction”, by Tanya L. Chartrand and John A. Bargh [2] (Digital Object Identifier: 10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.893). Chameleon effect is non-conscious mimicry.  In the cited article, the authors presented three studies to find out chameleon effect during conversations.

References

[1] D. Tetteroo, A. Shirzad, M. Serras Pereira, M. Zwinderman, D. Le, E. Barakova, “Mimicking Expressiveness Of Movements By Autistic Children In Game Play.” In: Proceedings 4th International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom 2012), Workshop on Wide Spectrum Social Signal Processing, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 3-5 September, 2012

[2] T. Chartrand and J. Bargh, “The chameleon effect: The perception–behavior link and social interaction.” Journal of personality and social psychology, vol. 76, no. 6, p. 893, 1999.