About
A key trait of well-ordered social interactions is turn-taking – the regular cycling of activity between partners. Good turn-taking in dialogue is observable in the well-known minimal-gap, minimal-overlap effect, i.e. turn transitions occur with small durations of silence or overlap on a time scale of half a second; on a larger time scale of seconds and minutes, turn-taking is detectable in the modulation of interaction rhythm measured by the statistical contingencies between partners. Turn-taking is not a mere property of polite dialogue but seems to be tied to core processes that support social coordination. Even preverbal infants engage in proto-conversations in face-face interactions that share properties with adult-adult turn-taking. Little is known, however, about the fine-grained dynamics of motor activity in parent-child interactions, their changes across the child’s developmental level, and of critical importance, the relation between motor activity, and establishing a well-ordered rhythm for the interaction.
This project was concerned with a developmental pathways approach to turn-taking – the properties of children’s increasingly more sophisticated social rhythms. The project included novel developmental studies of turn-taking dynamics – when a child is engaged in a joint task with a parent – in relation to the real-time dynamics of both partner’s body movements. The methodological approach was multimodal recording of the interaction (vocalizations and body motion), in particular motion-capture of parent and child’s body, with special attention to head and hands), and while participants were engaged in a joint task.
The workplan was comprised of 3 main objectives: (1) development of a multimodal recording system adequate for adult-child social interactions engaged in joint tasks on a tabletop – this system followed our previous work and did motion-capture of the participant’s bodies, allowing the automatic data acquisition and coding of object manipulations; (2) developmental studies of turn-taking in joint tasks – this included a set of studies where parents and their children were asked to complete object-oriented construction games or collaborative tasks that elicit dialogue; (3) development of a data visualization framework for a social interaction multimodal corpus; following our previous projects in data visualization we developed a new framework for the datasets generated by this project.
