Tavano Alessandro, Pesarin Anna, Murino Vittorio, Cristani Marco
Institute of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany ; Scientific Institute "E.Medea", San Vito al Tagliamento (Pordenone), Italy.
Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Verona, Italy.
PLoS One. 2014 Jan 29;9(1):e85819. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0085819. eCollection 2014.
Individuals with Asperger syndrome/High Functioning Autism fail to spontaneously attribute mental states to the self and others, a life-long phenotypic characteristic known as mindblindness. We hypothesized that mindblindness would affect the dynamics of conversational interaction. Using generative models, in particular Gaussian mixture models and observed influence models, conversations were coded as interacting Markov processes, operating on novel speech/silence patterns, termed Steady Conversational Periods (SCPs). SCPs assume that whenever an agent's process changes state (e.g., from silence to speech), it causes a general transition of the entire conversational process, forcing inter-actant synchronization. SCPs fed into observed influence models, which captured the conversational dynamics of children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome/High Functioning Autism, and age-matched typically developing participants. Analyzing the parameters of the models by means of discriminative classifiers, the dialogs of patients were successfully distinguished from those of control participants. We conclude that meaning-free speech/silence sequences, reflecting inter-actant synchronization, at least partially encode typical and atypical conversational dynamics. This suggests a direct influence of theory of mind abilities onto basic speech initiative behavior.
患有阿斯伯格综合征/高功能自闭症的个体无法自发地将心理状态归因于自己和他人，这是一种被称为心盲的终生表型特征。我们假设心盲会影响对话互动的动态过程。使用生成模型，特别是高斯混合模型和观察影响模型，对话被编码为相互作用的马尔可夫过程，作用于新颖的言语/沉默模式，称为稳定对话期（SCPs）。SCPs假设，每当一个参与者的过程改变状态（例如，从沉默变为言语）时，它会导致整个对话过程的一般转变，迫使互动者同步。将SCPs输入观察影响模型，该模型捕捉了患有阿斯伯格综合征/高功能自闭症的儿童和青少年以及年龄匹配的发育正常参与者的对话动态。通过判别分类器分析模型参数，成功区分了患者与对照参与者的对话。我们得出结论，反映互动者同步的无意义言语/沉默序列至少部分编码了典型和非典型的对话动态。这表明心理理论能力对基本言语发起行为有直接影响。
