Michael Richardson - US grants

When two people converse both are almost always in motion. As a speaker's posture shifts, the listener's does too, and the two together become coordinated with the speaker's speech rhythms. We don't always notice but this kind of social coordination happens all the time. People coordinate the movements of their bodies, even in the awkward social situation of a laboratory experiment. Movements are subtly and unintentionally synchronized as in an unconscious dance. This dance is important and is associated with mental health. It breaks down with psychological dysfunctions such as schizophrenia, autism and even marital dissatisfaction. Thus a fundamental science of social synchronization would broadly impact our understanding of social concerns and further advance the possibilities for therapy.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Richard Schmidt and Dr. Carol Fowler will advance our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive processes that support social interactions, the processes that allow synchronization of movements in natural interactions. Past research by these scientists and others suggests general dynamical principles that underlie interpersonal coordination. These previous studies established that talking with another person or seeing the other person's movements provide the coupling mediums, the bases for coordination. The funded research will investigate how the mind and body interact to organize this coordination. The new experiments put people together to solve problems and then track how the shared problem solving-the degree of psychological coordination-contributes to movement coordination. Subtle movements to maintain posture as well as overt rhythmic movements are recorded for analysis using modern mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics. Different experiments contrast movements of limbs, torso, and other parts of the body, competitive vs. cooperative tasks, natural vs. rhythmic speaking, and how much can be seen of another's person's movements.

People are social animals, in part, because they can accomplish things together that they cannot do alone. The possibilities for acting in the environment are very different when others are present. These possibilities for action, the so-called affordances of a situation, are quantitatively and qualitatively changed when we are with another person. Not only can we perform tasks that are more demanding but, as a cooperative social unit, we may see new ways that such tasks can be completed.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Kerry Marsh and her colleagues will advance our understanding of how pairs of individuals shift from solo to shared action in physical tasks. Past research suggests that fundamental mathematical principles determine the actions of a solo actor in reaching or lifting for example. Dr. Marsh and colleagues extend those principles to understand interpersonal action. The funded research will investigate how physical limitations and environmental constraints on individuals combine with interpersonal constraints such as past relationship and shared goals to affect cooperative actions among individuals. The current approach makes specific predictions regarding how and when cooperation will emerge. Broader impacts of interpersonal cooperation are of fundamental societal import, and the rigorous method of the funded study is unique and original.

Communication is an act of coordination. Conversants must coordinate their mental activities to achieve the common ground required for effective communication. But how is this coordination achieved? This project tests the hypothesis that coordination of body movements and eye movements helps minds work together. The objective is to evaluate whether coordinated movement that occurs during conversation embodies the coordinated mental activities that make communication possible. The research employs a highly innovative approach to understanding these processes of mental and bodily coordination. The approach capitalizes on methods derived from nonlinear dynamical systems theory, a sub-domain of complexity science. The investigators will record patterns of body movements, such as gestures and postures, and patterns of eye movements. They will then apply time series analyses designed to capture the complexity of nonlinear dynamical systems to quantify the coordination of body and eye movements between people who are conversing.

Research on interpersonal coordination during conversation is a theoretically important and far-reaching issue because it serves as a hub topic for interdisciplinary studies of cognition, perception-action, language and communication, social psychology, and neuroscience. The proposed research offers innovative methods for studying joint action and strategies for understanding the relation between coordinated movement and coordinated cognition during joint action. These new measures of coordination provide quantitative tools for studying the complex and covert processes of conversational interaction. As part of this project, the investigators will establish a freely available, online, Joint Action Research Database (JARD). This will enhance the research infrastructure in this interdisciplinary field by serving as a repository for eye and body movement time series and speech data collected in this project and from other interested labs. In parallel with JARD the researchers will make available the software analysis tools appropriate for studying the complex dynamics of interpersonal coordination.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of this project is to support a scientific meeting, Progress in Motor Control VIII (PMC VIII) to be held in July, 2011 in Cincinnati, OH. Motor control is a wide- ranging and fundamentally important topic of scientific investigation. Disorders of gait, balance, and movement are unfortunately common. They occur in children (e.g., developmental coordination disorder) and adults (e.g., Parkinson's disease), and can result from neurological insults such as stroke or traumatic brain injury. Poor motor control (e.g., balance problems) is also associated with other public health issues, such as injuries from falls or declines in physical fitness that in turn lead to a cascade of additional health problems. Furthering our understanding of motor control thus presents opportunities for improving public health. The goal of PMC VIII is to advance scientific understanding of motor control. The specific aim of this proposal is to make PMC VIII more affordable and accessible to a diverse group of scientists. Using grant funds to pay some conference fees directly will lower costs for all participants and thus is expected to increase participation, especially by students, post-docs, and junior faculty. We will also offer grants to help offset conference costs for qualified students, with additional support for post-docs and junior faculty who belong to groups underrepresented in the field of motor control. Achieving this aim will help increase participation and ensure a high-quality scientific meeting that is relevant to the NIH mission and public health. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This proposal will support Progress in Motor Control 2011, a scientific conference on the topic of motor control. The conference will present opportunities for improving public health by furthering our understanding of movement control and how movement control is compromised for people who have movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease or other problems with movement such as poor balance.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit numerous impairments in social interaction that typically persist throughout adolescence and adulthood. These deficits severely impede mental and physical development, learning, and behavioral functioning at home and in the community and also make successful treatment difficult. Past research has found that the lack of social competence of children with ASD is comprised of deficits in a number of componential areas including social cognitive and social perceptual processes. Although interacting competently with others relies on cognitive abilities such as making inferences about another's mental state, a less obvious component of social competence lies within social motor processes, the interpersonal coordination of movements during a social interaction. Indeed social psychological research has found that social motor coordination both in the form of imitation and in the lesser known phenomenon of interactional synchrony, is important for maintaining critical aspects of successful human social interaction, including interpersonal responsiveness, social rapport and other-directedness, positive self-other relations, and verbal communication and comprehension. Given the importance of social competence in ASD, the proposed research will evaluate whether social motor coordination can be a marker for social competence in autism across the spectrum of deficits and explore the relationship between motorically-based and cognitively-based conceptions of social competence. Given that social interactions are inherently complex and unfold over time, we propose to evaluate not only traditional cognitive measures of social competence but also the dynamical structure of social coordination across the ASD spectrum by using unique, process-oriented measures of social coordination and analyzing the time series records of the time-dependent unfolding of social coordination during social interaction tasks. We investigate a broad range of questions concerning the social deficits in ASD by using a multi-method design and examining the relationships among measures that capture varied and complex aspects of social interactions. Additionally, we will confront the heterogeneity within the population of children with ASD by including children with a range of language and cognitive abilities in order to get a better sense of how deficits in motor coordination may be influenced by these variables that vary widely within the ASD population. If successful, the research proposed here has important implications for understanding more about the etiology of the social deficits in ASD and will provide a fertile ground for exploring potential new avenues for intervention. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The numerous impairments in social interaction that affect Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can severely impede mental and physical development, learning, and behavioral functioning at home and in the community and also make successful treatment difficult. Accordingly, having a better understanding of the etiology of the social deficits in ASD represents a pressing public health need. We are exploring the role of an overlooked dimension of social interaction, social motor coordination, in ASD. We propose that social motor coordination is a marker for social competence in autism across the spectrum of deficits, will likely provide a fertile new ground for exploring potential avenues for intervention and may provide a pathway for improving social skills in children with ASD.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A fundamental feature of social behavior is the face-to-face or co-present interactions that characterize everyday social activity. The success of such interactions, whether measured in terms of social connection, goal achievement, or the ability of an individual or group of individuals to understand and predict the meaningful intentions and behaviors of others, is not only dependent on the processes of social cognition and perception, but also on the between-person motor coordination that makes such face-to-face and co-present interactions possible. Understanding and modeling the dynamics of social motor coordination, including how it emerges and is maintained over time, as well as how its stable states are activated, dissolved, transformed, and exchanged over time, is therefore an extremely important endeavor. The overall aim of the proposed project is to develop a dynamical modeling strategy for capturing the self-organized behavioral dynamics of goal-directed physical activity among socially coordinated human agents and how the dynamics of such tasks are influenced by physical, information, and task-goal properties. More specifically, the proposed project will build differential equation models of the temporal and spatial patterns that dynamically emerge during a number of different movement based multi-agent action tasks: social rhythmic or repetitive movement and targeting tasks, social object-moving tasks, structured conversation tasks, and a competitive sport task. Employing a systems identification approach to formulate candidate behavioral dynamics models, we will not only capture the steady-state dynamics of the joint and social behaviors investigated, but will also formulate models that capture how parameter tuning and symmetry breaking events fundamentally modify the dynamics of social interaction, including movement sub-roles (e.g., leader-follower) and action sequencing. By recording the limb or whole body movements of participants during the real-world performance of social action tasks, we will evaluate and refine the proposed models using a range of parameter estimation techniques. For some of the social action tasks, we will also test and refine the developed models by implementing them into real-time human-computer interfaces and investigate whether the behavior of real participants is modulated in a qualitatively similarly manner when interacting with model-controlled versus other-participant-controlled task stimuli. By developing a detailed strategy for modeling the dynamics of social action tasks, the proposed project will have a transformative impact on the fields which study social coordination such as cognitive science, social and clinical psychology and robotics by providing researchers with empirical modeling strategies for better apprehending the self-organizing dynamics of goal-directed social activity.

1550222
Knappe

Because of their persistence, bioaccumulation potential, and (eco)toxicity, long-chain perfluoroalkyl substances such as perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctane sulfonate are being replaced with short-chain fluorinated alternatives. Almost no information exists about the occurrence of fluorinated alternatives and their behavior during water treatment. The overall goal of the proposed research is to begin to fill this knowledge gap by studying one class of fluorinated alternatives, perfluoro(poly) ethers.

Specific research objectives include to: (1) develop a quantitative liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for the analysis of 13 perfluoro(poly) ethers in water, (2) apply the liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method to (a) determine perfluoro(poly) ether fate in a surface water, (b) quantify perfluoro(poly) ether concentrations and mass flows at the intake of a water treatment plant, (3) in collaboration with the water utility, trace parcels of water through the plant to quantify perfluoro(poly) ether removal/transformation in full-scale water treatment processes, and (4) trace parcels of water through the water distribution system to determine perfluoro(poly) ethers fate during drinking water distribution. This data would be used to estimate human exposure to perfluoro(poly) ethers via consumption of drinking water. Given the data scarcity surrounding fluorinated alternatives, it is anticipated that the results of this research will receive wide interest.

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising interdisciplinary scholar in the area of human computer interaction. The success of many everyday activities depends on the effective behavioral coordination of cooperating individuals. These activities include moving materials through an assembly line, loading a dishwasher with a family member, shaking hands with a co-worker, and maneuvering a remotely operated vehicle to repair a satellite. Recent research within the fields of human movement science, psychology and complex dynamical systems has revealed new methods for modelling these interactions. The objective of this project is to examine whether these human inspired models can be implemented in robotic and artificial agents in order to develop highly robust and flexible human-machine systems. Accordingly, the project will result in important new advances in interactive human-robotic and human-artificial-agent based systems by grounding the behavior of these systems in the dynamics of natural human-human interaction. More generally, the proposed project has significant implications for the design and development of workplace machinery, autonomous vehicles, and medical technologies where high levels of precise human-machine cooperation are necessary. Understanding how to implement human inspired behavioral dynamic models in robotic and artificial agents will also help with the development of assistive technologies, including prosthetics, robotic aids, and therapeutic technologies, that are better tailored to the needs of the specific end user.

Cooperating individuals behave as a single, synergistic unit, with their actions and behaviors often coordinated in a self-organized manner, requiring little or no explicit direction or a priori planning. The objective of this project is to develop and test dynamical (differential equation) models that capture the synergistic self-organization of human multi-agent coordination and deploy these models in artificial agents (virtual and robotic agents) to create highly robust and mutually responsive coupled human-machine systems. The project is designed to advance a new framework for the development of coordinated human-machine systems, one that is derived from empirical evidence of the physical, informational and biomechanical processes that shape and constrain the dynamics of successful and adaptive joint-action behavior in humans. Using a set of object moving and passing tasks, the specific aims of the project are to demonstrate (1) how dynamical models of the synergistic coordination that occurs between pairs of human agents performing a physical joint-action task can serve as the basis for artificial agent performance and (2) can be implemented in systems of interacting human and artificial agents to produce stable and adaptive patterns of robust behavioral coordination equivalent to that observed during human-human interaction. The proposed research integrates contemporary methods from behavioral, cognitive and social psychology, human movement science, computer-science, complexity science, engineering, and philosophy and will advance our fundamental understanding of the behavioral dynamics of human joint action. Moreover, the proposed project will have broad and transformative implications for the development and design of interactive robotic and artificial agent based assistive, diagnostic, and therapeutic sensorimotor technologies.