Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Basics of Intersubjectivity Dynamics:
Model of Synchrony Emergence When Dialogue
Partners Understand Each Other
Ken Prepin and Catherine Pelachaud
LTCI/TSI, Telecom-ParisTech/CNRS, 37-39 rue Dareau, 75014, Paris, France
{
ken.prepin,catherine.pelachaud
}
@telecom-paristech.fr
Abstract.
Since Condon's annotations of videotaped interactions in 1966, an in-
creasing amount of studies points the crucial role of non-verbal behaviours in
communication. Among others, synchrony between interactants is claimed to be
an evidence of the interaction quality: to give to humans a feeling of natural dia-
logue, agents must be able to react on appropriate time. Recent dynamical models
propose that synchrony emerges from the coupling between interactants. We pro-
pose here, and test in simulation, a model of verbal communication which links
the mutual understanding of dialogue partners to the emergence of synchrony
between their non-verbal behaviours: if interactants understand each other, syn-
chrony emerges; if they do not understand, synchrony is disrupted. In addition
to propose and test a model explaining the link between synchrony and inter-
action quality (synchrony accounts for mutual understanding and good interac-
tion, di-synchrony accounts for misunderstanding) our tests point the fact that
synchronisation and di-synchronisation emerging from mutual understanding are
fast phenomenons: agents have a quick answer to whether they understand each
other or not.
1
Introduction
When we design agents capable of being involved in verbal exchange, with humans or
with other agents, it is clear that the interaction cannot be reduced to speech. When an
interaction takes place between two partners, it comes with many non-verbal behaviours
that are often described by their type such as smiles, gaze at the other, speech pauses,
head nod, head shake, raise eyebrows, mimicry of posture and so on [12,27]. But an-
other aspect of these non-verbal behaviours is their timing according to the partner's
behaviours.
In 1966, Condon and Ogston's annotations of interactions have suggested that there
are temporal correlations between the behaviours of two person engaged in a discussion
[4]: micro analysis of discussion videotaped conduces Condon to define in 1976 the no-
tions of auto-synchrony (synchrony between the different modalities of an individual)
and hetero-synchrony (synchrony between partners).
Since Condon et al.'s findings, synchronisation between interactants has been in-
vestigated in both behavioural studies and cerebral activity studies. These studies tend
to show that when people interact together, their synchronisation is tightly linked to
