Speech Science Forum -- Pablo Arias Sarah
06 June 2024, 4:00 pm–5:00 pm

Manipulating social signals during interactions to uncover their causal effect on social behavior
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Rana Abu-Zhaya
Location
-
Chandler House G152Wakefield StreetLondonWC1N 1PF
Social interaction research is lacking an experimental paradigm enabling researchers to understand how specific social signals (e.g. emotional expressions or physical attributes) causally influence social behavior. To go beyond these limitations, we built the experimental platform DuckSoup. DuckSoup is a video-conference experimental platform that enables researchers to transform the voices and faces of participants with transformation filters in real time during interactions. During this talk, I will show how we use DuckSoup to align (or misalign) the smiles of interacting participants with smile transformation algorithms, to investigate how smile alignment causally influences liking. I will conclude by presenting my vision for the future of social interaction research. Particularly, one where we are able to (1) scale social cognition experiments by collecting dozens of interacting participants in parallel and in different cultures, (2) reveal how specific social signals bias our social behavior and (3) reveal the multimodal mechanisms recruited by such biases.
This event will be hosted online as well: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/97718702895?pwd=UzhOcHlwMTd4NWZFWGVTNGZwTndCQT09
About the Speaker
Pablo Arias Sarah
Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Glasgow
Pablo Arias Sarah is a postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow working at the University of Glasgow in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience. He studies human social cognition mechanisms using digital signal processing techniques. He is particularly interested in understanding how specific social signals can causally trigger the emergence of social behaviours and feedback loops during social interactions. He holds a a PhD in cognitive science from Sorbonne University, a Master of Engineering in digital technologies and multimedia from Polytech' Nantes, and a Master of Science in acoustics, signal processing and computer science applied to sound, from IRCAM. You can find more information here : Website, Google Scholar, Twitter
More about Pablo Arias Sarah