Background
We recorded 13 EEG hyperscanning experiments in which groups of three acquainted people held 12 conversational trials each, across free speech, consensus finding, and conflict conditions. The sessions were filmed, and the video is already photodiode-synchronised to the 96-channel EEG. Audio from three directional microphones and one omnidirectional microphone gives us diarized speaking intervals, so we know at every moment who was talking.
We would like to consider the sight. This matters more in a triad than in a dyad. With two people, gaze direction carries limited information: you are either looking at the other person or you are not. With three, gaze becomes a genuine addressing mechanism. A speaker selects the next speaker by looking at them. A listener signals alignment with one participant over another. Someone can be excluded from an exchange without a word being said. The classic findings on gaze in conversation, that speakers avert gaze while planning and return it near turn ends to hand over the floor, were largely established in dyads, and the triadic case is where they should become both more complex and more consequential.
Our seating geometry helps: participants sat 120 degrees apart at known, fixed positions, which turns gaze target identification from an open-ended regression problem into a well-posed three-way classification.
*This project is being done in collaboration with the Neurotech team.
Objective
Extract gaze and eye-related measures from the video recordings and relate them to the temporal dynamics of the conversation, to the neural metrics computed in our pipeline, and to the behavioural ratings.
Requirements
- Solid Python; computer vision experience is an advantage.
- Interest in human behaviour and social interaction, not only in the signal processing.
- Willingness to do manual annotation work. It is unglamorous and it is what makes the rest of the thesis defensible.
Resources
A recorded and synchronised multimodal dataset, an established EEG analysis pipeline, GPU compute.
Supervisors
Please send me an email (amirreza.asemanrafat@fau.de) with your resume and transcripts to apply for the topic. We will then get in contact with you if we are interested.
Please send me an email (amirreza.asemanrafat@fau.de) with your resume and transcripts to apply for the topic. We will then get in contact with you if we are interested.