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Poster B160 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Pink noise in speakers' semantic synchrony dynamics predicts conversation quality
Kathryn O'Nell1, Emily Finn1; 1Dartmouth College
Dyadic social interaction is a complex coordination task involving many interconnected variables. Previous research has shown that metastability -- persistence for an extended, but impermanent, period of time in a non-stable state of a system -- can be a useful lens for understanding what makes an interaction successful. Metastability occurs at certain noise signatures; namely, pink noise, in which the power of a signal is inverse to its frequency. However, this framework has thus far only been applied to para-conversational signals like heart rate and prosody -- not to the semantic content of a conversation. Here, we present pink noise analysis of semantic trajectories as a metric for conversational success and apply this technique to a large open conversation dataset. Our results demonstrate that adaptive movement in and out of semantic synchrony in a conversation predicts a host of variables representing conversation quality.
Keywords: dynamical systems social cognition conversation natural language