Quantifying Joint Activities using Cross-Recurrence Block Representation

Humans, as social beings, are capable of employing variousbehavioral cues, such as gaze, speech, manual action, and bodyposture, in everyday communication. However, to extract fine-grained interaction patterns in social contexts has beenpresented with methodological challenges. Cross-RecurrencePlot Quantification Analysis (CRQA) is an analysis methodinvented in theoretical physics and recently applied tocognitive science to study interpersonal coordination. In thispaper, we extend this approach to analyzing joint activities inchild-parent interaction. We define a new representation asCross Recurrence Block based on CRQA. With thisrepresentation, we are able to capture interpersonal dynamicsfrom more than two behavioral streams in one CrossRecurrence Plot and derive a suite of measures to quantifydetailed characteristics of coordination. Using a datasetcollected from a child-parent interaction study, we show thatthese quantitative measures of joint activities revealdevelopmental changes in coordinative behavioral patternsbetween children and parents