moving along with characterizing the dance

["cognizor@cognizor.com" <cognizor@cognizor.com>]

Related to a psychology conference on dynamic modelling this weekend, with forthcoming proceedings, apparently,

This webpage describes quantitative modelling of dance movement sequences grabbed,

www.nd.edu/~sboker

Steven Boker at Notre Dame U in Indiana

 Steven M. Boker; Room 118-C; Department of Psychology; 
 University of Notre Dame; Notre Dame, IN 46556 
 Office: 574-631-4941, FAX: 574-631-8883, Cell: 574-339-0735
 e-mail: sboker@nd.edu 

Quite parallel to Rob's?  James'?  Cognition and Context...

(site also has some interesting photos of Japan)

Techniques generally statistical, generating [spaces with axes, presumably and] vector fields to represent evolving values, as follows:

------------- excerpts

Local Time Structure of the Coordination of Posture and Gesture during Dyadic Conversation When people converse, they use head motions, postural adjustments and gestures that convey information. It has been hypothesized that individuals coordinate their movements while they converse in a sort of "conversational dance". Using motion tracking equipment, data are being gathered in Dr. Boker's lab that measures the movements of individuals as they engage in conversations. One project is currently analyzing data that can estimate gender differences in the conversational coordination. A second project involves a manipulation of dominance in conversation and selects participants based on a dominance personality scale and on gender. Another project is analyzing data from conversational dyads that were composed of individuals at the extremes in a personality variable: self-monitoring. 


Linear and Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Data Analytic Techniques and their Application to Physiological and Developmental Data proposes a practical methodology for the analysis of longitudinal data that has been postulated to have an underlying dynamical process. A novel analysis is proposed which builds models based on a mutual information matrix in place of a covariance matrix. Several nonlinear analyses are applied to data from an experiment studying the development of visually guided postural control in infants. A pdf version of this Ph.D. Thesis can be downloaded by clicking on the following filename: BokerPhD960409.pdf. 

Dynamical Analyses of Postural Development is a talk which was presented to the June 1995 annual meeting of The North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity in Monterey California. 

Statistical Vector Fields are a way of displaying and summarizing mixed longitudinal and cross-sectional data into a graphic display. The method is locally parametric and thus is robust with respect to outliers and mixed distributions. (See Experimental Aging Research, 2:1 (1995)). The Statistical Vector Fields software for DOS and source code that can be compiled under Unix can be downloaded by clicking on the following filename: svfdos.zip (124,322 bytes). 

The Perception of Rhythm and Time

 
Interlimb Synchronization in Unstructured Dance A project is currently underway in Dr. Boker's lab using multiple motion tracking sensors to measure human movement during improvisational dance. Participants are asked to dance to stimuli from the preceding two rhythm perception experiments. The hypothesis is that individuals will segment their limb movements in time with the rhythm such that times of high limb acceleration will correspond to beats that were highly likely to be chosen as segmentation points in the two experiments above. A brief introduction to the issues of symmetry formation and symmetry breaking during dyadic dance is presented in this chapter from the forthcoming book Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language, M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (eds). 

The Perception of Simple Auditory Rhythmic Sequences finds that local information content can be calculated using Laplacian estimators, and that this information content is a better predictor of the segmentation of rhythmic patterns than previous methods. A pdf version of this Master's Thesis can be downloaded by clicking on the following filename: BokerMA941209.pdf. 

Predicting the Grouping of Rhythmic Sequences using Local Estimators of Information Content explores methods for predicting the perception of simple auditory rhythms. (Presented to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Workshop on Computational Auditory Scene Analysis, August 19--20, 1995) 

The Perception of Color

 
The Representation of Color: Metrics and Mappings in Perceptual Color Space. This is a paper from the fall of 1994 detailing some of the history of color vision research and the search for a uniform color metric. A postscript version of this article can be downloaded by clicking on the following filename: ColorVision2Reprint.ps.gz (3390293 bytes). 

A measurement of the adaptation of color vision to the spectral environment. Color vision may be represented as a process of extracting factors from the covariance matrix of spectral distributions in the environment. (1997. Psychological Science 8:2 pp 130-134) A pdf version of this article can be downloaded by clicking on the following filename: ColorFactor9606-PsychScience.pdf. 

Data Archiving and Collection using the Internet

 
A Psychotelemetry Experiment in Fluid Intelligence describes the results of an experiment in cognitive abilities that was distributed on the internet. Individual volunteers were tested by interacting with a computer program that was sent to participants via an email enclosure. Results were automatically returned via email and compiled. 

Using the Internet and the World Wide Web for Archiving Psychological Data was presented at the Symposium on Data Archiving in Psychology as part of the American Psychological Association Annual Convention in Chicago on August 16, 1997. This report describes a proposed process of archiving data from psychological experiments and large scale surveys and making these data available over the world wide web for secondary analyses by other behavioral scientists.