Author Archives: Muhammad Umair

Transcript-based computer animation of movement: Evaluating a new tool for nonverbal behavior research

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Transcript-based computer animation of movement: Evaluating a new tool for nonverbal behavior research

A new approach for the use of computer animation in experimental nonverbal research is intro- duced. The method was evaluated in a pilot study comparing video recordings of movement in dyadic interactions with computer animations based on transcripts of the behavior, to determine whether sim- ilar impression effects could be obtained. At the core of our development is a software tool allowing for the conversion of so-called position time-series protocols of movement into animation scripts for a professional computer animation platform. Our software combines computer-assisted movement transcription and editing with state-of-the-art 3-D animation technology. We present empirical evidence indicating remarkable overall correspondence between video recordings and computer animations. Due to the lack of facial activity in the computer animations, a decline in visual attention for the face area could be observed, which did not, however, affect the impression ratings.

Using conversation analysis to improve hypothesis formation in the study of human interaction

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Adopting an eyetracking paradigm, we investigated the role of H*L, L*HL, L*H, H*LH, and deaccentuation at the intonational phrase-final position in online processing of information status in British English in natural speech. The role of H*L, L*H and deaccentuation was also examined in diphone- synthetic speech. It was found that H*L and L*HL create a strong bias to- wards newness, whereas L*H, like deaccentuation, creates a strong bias to- wards givenness. In synthetic speech, the same effect was found for H*L, L*H and deaccentuation, but it was delayed. The delay may not be caused entirely by the difference in the segmental quality between synthetic and natural speech. The pitch accent H*LH, however, appears to bias participants’ interpretation to the target word, independent of its information status. This finding was ex- plained in the light of the effect of durational information at the segmental level on word recognition.

Albert, S. & De Ruiter, J.P. (2018). Improving Human Interaction Research through Ecological Grounding. Collabra:Psychology 4(1): 1-14.

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Improving Human Interaction Research through Ecological Grounding

In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of falsificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (how we come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’ (how we test them). However, when studying human interaction, separating these contexts can lead to theories with low ecological validity that do not generalize well to life outside the lab. We propose borrowing research procedures from well-established inductive methodologies in interaction research during the process of discovering new regularities and analyzing natural data without being led by theory. We introduce research procedures including the use of naturalistic study settings, analytic transcription, collections of cases, and data analysis sessions, and illustrate these with examples from a successful cross-disciplinary study. We argue that if these procedures are used systematically and transparently throughout a research cycle, they will lead to more robust and ecologically valid theories about interaction within psychology and, with some adaptation, can enhance the reproducibility of research across many other areas of psychological science.

BUILDING A CORPUS OF MULTIMODAL INTERACTION IN YOUR FIELD SITE13 N. J. Enfield, S. C. Levinson, J. P. de Ruiter & T. Stivers

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Multimodal Interaction
Collect high quality video recordings of spontaneous, naturally- occurring interaction for transcription
To acquire a corpus of video data, for investigating the underlying structure(s) of interaction cross-linguistically and cross-culturally.

De Ruiter, Jan Peter. 2004. Response systems and signals of recipiency. In Asifa Majid (ed.), Field Manual Volume 9, 53-55. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

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The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behavior during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalization. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.

Slides used in the Workshop “How Bayesian Statistics Tell Us What We Want to Know”, by J.P. de Ruiter at the 2019 Conference of the Society for Text & Discourse, in New York City.

To say that our dominant statistical paradigm, “Null Hypothesis 
Significance Testing” (NHST), is confusing is an understatement. It has 
been shown that it often befuddles even experts. In this workshop, I 
will explain the underlying logic of NHST, and why it is so confusing. I 
will then introduce an alternative approach, the Bayesian framework, 
which is more consistent, easier to interpret, and above all, answers 
the questions that empirical scientists (even those who use NHST) really 
*want* to ask.

Find slides here

Redefine or Justify? Comments on the Alpha debate

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Reference: Redefine or Justify? Comments on the Alpha debate.

Abstract:

Benjamin et al. (Nature Human Behaviour 2, 6-10, 2017) proposed improving the reproducibility of findings in psychological research by lowering the alpha level of our conventional null hypothesis significance tests from .05 to .005, because findings with p-values close to .05 represent insufficient empirical evidence. They argued that findings with a p-value between 0.005 and 0.05 should still be published, but not called Bsignificant^ anymore. This proposal was criticized and rejected in a response by Lakens et al. (Nature Human Behavior 2, 168-171, 2018), who argued that instead of lowering the traditional alpha threshold to .005, we should stop using the term Bstatistically significant,^ and require researchers to determine and justify their alpha levels before they collect data. In this contribution, I argue that the arguments presented by Lakens et al. against the proposal by Benjamin et al. are not convincing. Thus, given that it is highly unlikely that our field will abandon the NHST paradigm any time soon, lowering our alpha level to .005 is at this moment the best way to combat the replication crisis in psychology.

Acknowledgments:

The author wishes to thank Alexander Etz, Jason Noble, and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.