Making Meaningful Movements: A computational model of nonverbal communication interpretation

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2010-08-30
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en
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The Tacit Communication Game (TCG) is a task used by cognitive neuroscientists to study the basic principles of human communication (de Ruiter et al., 2007, 2010). In this task, a Sender player must communicate goals nonverbally to a Receiver player by moving a token on a 3-by-3 grid. Both players are assigned a token in each trial, which can vary in shape and can differ between the players. The Sender player must design and perform a sequence of movements that signals the goal location and orientation of the Receiver's token, allowing the Receiver to place it correctly. An architecture for a computational model of the task was recently developed by van Rooij et al. (2009) at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior. A key hypothesis of the architecture is that players assign meaning to movements through analogy and re-representation. This thesis describes the first implementation of a core part of said architecture in the form of a Receiver model. Building on established concepts from analogy research such as structure-mapping theory (Gentner, 1983), the implemented Receiver model is capable of correctly interpreting movement sequences resulting from common strategies used by human Sender players. The capabilities of the model show that analogy and re-representation can be sufficient for the successful interpretation of signals used by human players. Both the strengths and shortcomings of the implementation are analyzed in context of how they can inform future work on a TCG-playing model. A number of possible improvements are discussed, as are several key problems that future research will have to solve in order to develop a fully sufficient TCG-playing model.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen