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Analyzing Social Interactions: The Promises and Challenges of Using Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis

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Translational Recurrences

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics ((PROMS,volume 103))

Abstract

The scientific investigation of social interactions presents substantial challenges: interacting agents engage each other at many different levels and timescales (motor and physiological coordination, joint attention, linguistic exchanges, etc.), often making their behaviors interdependent in non-linear ways. In this paper we review the current use of Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA) in the analysis of social interactions, and assess its potential and challenges. We argue that the method can sensitively grasp the dynamics of human interactions, and that it has started producing valuable knowledge about them. However, much work is still necessary: more systematic analyses and interpretation of the recurrence indexes and more consistent reporting of the results,more emphasis on theory-driven studies, exploring interactions involving more than 2 agents and multiple aspects of coordination,and assessing and quantifying complementary coordinative mechanisms. These challenges are discussed and operationalized in recommendations to further develop the field.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The review was accomplished by searching for “cross recurrence” and “crqa” on PubMed, Google Scholar and Web of Science (on October 1\(^{\text {st}}\) 2013) and then manually selecting the articles analyzing social interactions. We followed up on the bibliography of these articles to individuate further relevant ones. The resulting list counts 41 articles, 34 of which reporting empirical studies and the rest being reviews or method papers. To these we added 6 submitted, but not yet published papers.

  2. 2.

    The characters (including spaces) are converted to numbers, the embedding dimensions are set to 3, and the threshold to 0, to respect the categorical nature of the data.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research—Humanities & Technology and Production Sciences, the Interacting Minds Center (Aarhus University), the ERC Marie Curie Training Network Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity (TESIS) and the EUROCORES project: Digging the Roots For Understanding (DRUST).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Riccardo Fusaroli & Sebastian Wallot

  2. Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Riccardo Fusaroli

  3. Cognitive Systems, DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ivana Konvalinka

Authors
  1. Riccardo Fusaroli
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  2. Ivana Konvalinka
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  3. Sebastian Wallot
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Correspondence to Riccardo Fusaroli .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Res, Potsdam, Germany

    Norbert Marwan

  2. Dept. of Psychology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Michael Riley

  3. Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Rome, Italy

    Alessandro Giuliani

  4. Loyola University Chicago, Stritch School of Medicine, Health Sciences Division,Dept. of Cell and Molecular Physiology, Maywood, Illinois, USA

    Charles L. Webber, Jr.

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Fusaroli, R., Konvalinka, I., Wallot, S. (2014). Analyzing Social Interactions: The Promises and Challenges of Using Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis. In: Marwan, N., Riley, M., Giuliani, A., Webber, Jr., C. (eds) Translational Recurrences. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09531-8_9

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