Hedda Lausberg, Uta Sassenberg:
The Neuropsychological Gesture Coding System (NGCS)
Uta und Hedda are presenting a system to annotate gestures that was developed for psychiatry. Hedda was referring to coding the beginning and the ending of the movement and how this leads to a certain interrater agreement. It reminds me of the time I also needed to code movement phases. In my 2007 paper (here) I gave an overview of the reliability between raters with regards to movement phases. I found that raters can sometimes disagree to about 200 ms about the beginning of the preparations and of the stroke, for example. But most of the time the difference is within about 80 ms, or two frames.
An important paper in this area, which I also used, is:
Kita, S., Gijn, I. v., & Hulst, H. v. d. (1998). Movement Phases in Signs and Co-speech Gestures, and Their Transcription by Human Coders. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1371, 23.
A good thing about this NEUROGES, or NGCS is that it is implemented as a template of ELAN, so you can just use ELAN to code according to NGCS.
Questions:
– De Ruiter mentions that he developed a way to go about interrater reliability in the face of temporal intervals. I should perhaps also look at that.
– Miss ? asks about ‘self touch gestures’, which I call fidgeting. Hedda mentioned that self-touch gestures are indicative of mental stress, and that they function for self-regulation. In other words, they are important to watch out for when you are in psychiatry. Well, I know of this view of fidgeting but I don’t support it. There is probably a correlation somewhere, but I don’t think it can be used very productively. A colleague of mine tried to look for fidgeting movements, back in our lab, to learn something about product experience but I think it was all way too subtle too draw any conclusions.
Link: At Noldus, Hedda also talked about NGCS (here)