Abstract
The complexity and non-linear dynamics of socio-motor phenomena underlying social interactions are often missed by observation methods that attempt to capture, describe, and rate the exchange in real time. Unknowingly to the rater, socio-motor behaviors of a dyad exert mutual influence over each other through subliminal mirroring and shared cohesiveness that escape the naked eye. Implicit in these ratings nonetheless is the assumption that the other participant of the social dyad has an identical nervous system as that of the interlocutor, and that sensory-motor information is processed similarly by both agents’ brains. What happens when this is not the case? We here use the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) to formally study social dyadic interactions, at the macro- and micro-level of behaviors, by combining observation with digital data from wearables. We find that integrating subjective and objective data reveals fundamentally new ways to improve standard clinical tools, even to differentiate females from males using the digital version of the test. More generally, this work offers a way to turn a traditional, gold-standard clinical instrument into an objective outcome measure of human social behaviors and treatment effectiveness.
Highlights
The wearable sensors revolution has brought behavioral science to a new era of precision.Across many research areas in basic and translational sciences, it is possible to monitor natural motions continuously, as they unfold between two people in a social dyad, or even as part of a social group
To that end, using the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) metric [34], we examine the pairwise differences in frequency histograms derived from the movement spikes (MMS) of the linear acceleration and build a 6×6 matrix whereby entries provide information about variability in the micro-fluctuations of linear acceleration amplitude for dyadic- and for self-interactions (Figure 1D)
The combination of macro- and micro-level of inquiries can be appreciated in Figure 3A where we plot the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) sub-scores as a function of the Dyad Strength for each child in the cohort
Summary
The wearable sensors revolution has brought behavioral science to a new era of precision.Across many research areas in basic and translational sciences, it is possible to monitor natural motions continuously, as they unfold between two people in a social dyad, or even as part of a social group. It is possible to track multi-layered activities generated by our nervous systems while our brain controls our bodies in motion. Such tracking affords various levels of discourse, including a macro- and a micro-level of description. At a macro-level (Figure 1A), we can describe the overt motions of our body to some degree, i.e., the motions that we can unambiguously perceive and explicitly describe. It is at the micro-level of analysis where information that transpires largely beneath awareness can help us understand the patterns of socio-motor behaviors underlying social interactions (Figure 1B)
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