Communicative Behavior and Physiology in Social Interactions

We introduce here a new experimental set-up that provides temporally aligned behavioral (including linguistic) together with physiological activity time-series recorded during social interactions. It brings the experimental approach closer to ecological social interactions while preserving important experimental features for transposing the set-up to other physiological and neurophysiological measures. The set-up is implemented as a full-size pilot study that contrasts two experimental factors: the nature of the agent the research participant interacts with (a human vs. a virtual agent) and the nature of the interaction (live vs. video). The analysis presented here focuses on investigating co-occurrences between electrodermal activity on the one hand and behaviors, speech and gaze in particular, on the other hand. We also investigated into the linguistic productions in order to evaluate the degree of communicative interaction as a function of the experimental conditions. We are reporting our first results on these different aspects, and argue that they pave the way for promising studies exploiting this set-up.