My colleagues at Aarhus University have put together a fascinating proposal for a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on “Analyzing Behavioral Dynamics: non-linear approaches to social and cognitive sciences”. I’ve worked with Riccardo and Kristian since my masters and I can promise you the course will be excellent. They’ve spent the past 5 years exhaustively pursuing methodology in non-linear dynamics, graph theoretical, and semantic/semiotic analyses and I think will have a lot of interesting practical insights to offer. Best of all the course is free to all, as long as it gets enough votes on the MPF website. I’ve been a bit on the fence regarding my feelings about MOOCs, but in this case I think it’s really a great opportunity to give novel methodologies more exposure. Check it out- if you like it, give them a vote and consider joining the course!
Course Description
In the last decades, the social sciences have come to confront the temporal nature of human behavior and cognition: How do changes of heartbeat underlie emotions? How do we regulate our voices in a conversation? How do groups develop coordinative strategies to solve complex problems together?
This course enables you to tackle this sort of questions: addresses methods of analysis from nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory, which are designed to find and characterize patterns in this kind of complicated data. Traditionally developed in fields like physics and biology, non-linear methods are often neglected in social and cognitive sciences.
The course consists of two parts:
The dynamics of behavior and cognition
In this part of the course you are introduced some examples of human behavior that challenge the assumptions of linear statistics: reading time, voice dynamics in clinical populations, etc. You are then shown step-by-step how to characterize and quantify patterns and temporal dynamics in these behaviors using non-linear methods, such as recurrence quantification analysis.
The dynamics of interpersonal coordination
In this second part of the course we focus on interpersonal coordination: how do people manage to coordinate action, emotion and cognition? We consider several real-world cases: heart beat synchronization during firewalking rituals, voice adaptation during conversations, joint problem solving in creative tasks – such as building Lego models together. You are then shown ways to analyze how two or more behaviors are coordinated and how to characterize their coupling – or lack-thereof.
This course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to non-linear techniques for social and cognitive sciences. It presents concrete case studies from actual research projects on human behavior and cognition. It encourages you to put all this to practice via practical exercises and quizzes. By the end of this course you will be fully equipped to go out and do your own research projects applying non-linear methods on human behavior and coordination.
Learning objectives
Given a timeseries (e.g. a speech recording, or a sequence of reaction times), characterize its patterns: does it contain repetitions? How stable? How complex?
Given a timeseries (e.g. a speech recording, or a sequence of reaction times), characterize how it changes over time.
Given two timeseries (e.g. the movements of two dancers) characterize their coupling: how do they coordinate? Do they become more similar over time? Can you identify who is leading and who is following?
MOOC relevance
Social and cognitive research is increasingly investigating phenomena that are temporally unfolding and non-linear. However, most educational institutions only offer courses in linear statistics for social scientists. Hence, there is a need for an easy to understand introduction to non-linear analytical tools in a way that is specifically aimed at social and cognitive sciences. The combination of actual cases and concrete tools to analyze them will give the course a wide appeal.
Additionally, methods oriented courses on MOOC platforms such as Coursera have generally proved very attractive for students.
Please spread the word about this interesting course!