Hi all,

Just a quick reminder that Kathrin Rothermich (SCSD) will give her talk "Introducing RISC: A new open-source video database for testing social perception in healthy and neuropsychological populations" today at 3:30pm.

Esther

From: Esther Schott Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2015 5:36 PM To: Coggroup@psych.mcgill.ca Subject: Cognitive Area Seminar this week (+Pizza!)

***Apologies for multiple postings***

This week, we're excited to have Kathrin Rothermich, PostDoc with Marc Pell at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (McGill) give a talk:

Introducing RISC: A new open-source video database for testing social perception in healthy and neuropsychological populations Kathrin Rothermich McGill University

Nonliteral language, such as jocularity, sarcasm, or white lies, occurs frequently in daily communication. During natural social interactions, linguistic and paralinguistic information about nonliteral speech unfolds simultaneously in several communication channels. However, there are four common limitations in studies investigating social communication and speaker intentions: (1) using only uni-modal stimulation, i.e. visual; (2) designing static experiments depicting stimuli that are far away from everyday communication; (3) neglecting important factors such as discourse context and relationship type; and (4) insufficient stimulus control and number of trials to perform neuroimaging experiments. Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) is a newly developed database, which entails short video vignettes depicting social interactions, including sincere, sarcastic, jocular, and white lie exchanges. For the first time we also manipulated the type of social relationship between communication partners (e.g. friends vs. couple) and carefully controlled the availability of contextual cues (e.g. preceding conversations) while keeping lexical-semantic content constant. First validation data reveals an overall accuracy for identifying speaker intentions above 80 %, indicating that our material is suitable for testing healthy and neuropsychological populations. Results further show that both relationship type and context are influencing the categorization of literal and nonliteral interactions. Additionally, we gathered data on social appropriateness, perceived politeness and affective impact, which turned out to differ between literal and non-literal intentions. The results demonstrate that it is important to consider social as well as discourse context when studying speaker intentions. In terms of potential applications, we note increasing interest in past years in how speaker intentions are understood by individuals with psychiatric disorders (autism, schizophrenia), neurodegenerative disease (Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, fronto-temporal dementia), and traumatic brain injury. By including crucial aspects that have often been neglected in previous research, RISC represents a contemporary set of naturalistic video stimuli that creates a useful resource for future neuroscientific research.

Friday, October 9th, 15h30-17h00 Stewart Biology Building, S3/4 There will be pizza at the talk.

Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Thanks,

Esther

------ Esther Schott Graduate Student, MIDC Department of Psychology McGill University http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/midccdem/

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