SCAD

Social interaction is the hallmark of the human species. Past social and developmental psychological research has demonstrated that people interacting do not only communicate with language, their bodily movements are also tacitly coordinated. Social psychologists have been investigating naturalistic behavioral 'entrainment' processes in social interactions since the 1960's and found that this motor coordination embodies functionally important dyadic psychological characteristics such as rapport. We take little notice of this coordination in our everyday social interactions. However, everyone notices a breakdown in the fluidity of an interaction with a patient with a social disorder. In pathologies such as schizophrenia and social phobia, this breakdown is not limited to verbal interactions but extends to nonverbal motor behaviors. Dysfunctional motor coordination could be a patent cue of social disorder. Similarly, the absence of coordination by artificial agents could limit the social competence of their interactions. Social phobia patients are reluctant to take part in an interaction and to maintain eye contact with another person. Their behavior is characterized by behavioral inhibition as well as awkward hand gestures and body posture. The association of social and motor disorders raises the question of dysfunctional motor coordination. In order to determine whether these patients are less synchronized because of impairment specific to social cognition or because of the pathology's indirect influence on motor behavior, we will compare their coordination with schizophrenic patients whose attentional deficit is most salient. If results support that dysfunction of motor coordination results from a specific impairment of social cognition in social phobics patients, we will assess the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavior therapy using a humanoid robot to strengthen patients' coordination and improve the social competence of their interactions. Artificial agents such as humanoid robots also still lack the ability to coordinate with another agent. This absence could participate to the feeling of repulsion that has been attributed to realistic albeit imperfect anthropomorphic agents. While this 'uncanny valley of eeriness" experience was originally attributed to the appearance and motion of androids, recent developments point to the importance of integrated behaviors. In this context, the lack of motor coordination is a very promising candidate to explain the eeriness feeling when interacting with android robots. Although different fields have investigated social interaction, little work has been performed to integrate their approaches in an interdisciplinary study. We propose to remedy this situation by using an interdisciplinary paradigm to examine the multilevel processes that characterize motor coordination and its consequences on social interactions. A consortium of four research teams (psychologists from CHC, motor control researchers from EDM, neuroscientists from INCM and psychiatrists from SUPA) proposes to examine motor coordination in healthy individuals and its impairments in patients with social disorders to understand Social Coordination of Agents with Deficits (SCAD). The originality of this project is to go beyond individual members' investigation of social interactions to apprehend the integration between neural, behavioral and social levels of normal and dysfunctional cognition. In order to investigate the social motor coordination and its deficits, we propose three Tasks. Task 1 is a preliminary inquiry that uses multiple paradigms to explore the motor coordination of agents with deficits in sociality as well as develop a procedure that identifies the neural markers of motor coordination using human neuroimaging techniques fMRI and MEG. Task 2 is to investigate social, behavioral and neural processes that may be impaired in patients with social disorders. Finally, Task 3 applies the results of the previous experiments to propose guidelines to help patients with social disorders and robots enhance their motor coordination, and hence, improve the social competence of their interactions. 212 Persons Month will be devoted to the SCAD project with a total cost of HT 1 270 076 ', and a total requested ANR budget of only HT 351 555 '. It is the first step in an interdisciplinary European project (FP7, STREP/cooperation or ERC/IDEA), based on a Montpellier-Marseille consortium that should lead to developments in fundamental research in social interactions of normal individuals and psychiatric patients that leads to mental health and industrial robotic applications.