Mapping and manipulating facial expression.

Nonverbal visual cues accompany speech to supplement the meaning of spoken words, signify emotional state, indicate position in discourse, and provide back-channel feedback. This visual information includes head movements, facial expressions and body gestures. In this article we describe techniques for manipulating both verbal and nonverbal facial gestures in video sequences of people engaged in conversation. We are developing a system for use in psychological experiments, where the effects of manipulating individual components of nonverbal visual behavior during live face-to-face conversation can be studied. In particular, the techniques we describe operate in real-time at video frame-rate and the manipulation can be applied so both participants in a conversation are kept blind to the experimental conditions.

The principles of tomorrow's university.

In the 21st Century, research is increasingly data- and computation-driven. Researchers, funders, and the larger community today emphasize the traits of openness and reproducibility. In March 2017, 13 mostly early-career research leaders who are building their careers around these traits came together with ten university leaders (presidents, vice presidents, and vice provosts), representatives from four funding agencies, and eleven organizers and other stakeholders in an NIH- and NSF-funded one-day, invitation-only workshop titled "Imagining Tomorrow's University." Workshop attendees were charged with launching a new dialog around open research - the current status, opportunities for advancement, and challenges that limit sharing. The workshop examined how the internet-enabled research world has changed, and how universities need to change to adapt commensurately, aiming to understand how universities can and should make themselves competitive and attract the best students, staff, and faculty in this new world. During the workshop, the participants re-imagined scholarship, education, and institutions for an open, networked era, to uncover new opportunities for universities to create value and serve society. They expressed the results of these deliberations as a set of 22 principles of tomorrow's university across six areas: credit and attribution, communities, outreach and engagement, education, preservation and reproducibility, and technologies. Activities that follow on from workshop results take one of three forms. First, since the workshop, a number of workshop authors have further developed and published their white papers to make their reflections and recommendations more concrete. These authors are also conducting efforts to implement these ideas, and to make changes in the university system.  Second, we plan to organise a follow-up workshop that focuses on how these principles could be implemented. Third, we believe that the outcomes of this workshop support and are connected with recent theoretical work on the position and future of open knowledge institutions.

How open science helps researchers succeed.

Open access, open data, open source and other open scholarship practices are growing in popularity and necessity. However, widespread adoption of these practices has not yet been achieved. One reason is that researchers are uncertain about how sharing their work will affect their careers. We review literature demonstrating that open research is associated with increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities and funding opportunities. These findings are evidence that open research practices bring significant benefits to researchers relative to more traditional closed practices.

Response to Comment on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science".

Gilbert et al. conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration's Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted.

Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability.

An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and ignore negative results. Prior reports demonstrate how these incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation. Previous suggestions to address this problem are unlikely to be effective. For example, a journal of negative results publishes otherwise unpublishable reports. This enshrines the low status of the journal and its content. The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive-getting it right-competitive with the more tangible and concrete incentive-getting it published. This article develops strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and biases.

Something in the way we move: Motion dynamics, not perceived sex, influence head movements in conversation.

During conversation, women tend to nod their heads more frequently and more vigorously than men. An individual speaking with a woman tends to nod his or her head more than when speaking with a man. Is this due to social expectation or due to coupled motion dynamics between the speakers? We present a novel methodology that allows us to randomly assign apparent identity during free conversation in a video-conference, thereby dissociating apparent sex from motion dynamics. The method uses motion-tracked synthesized avatars that are accepted by naive participants as being live video. We find that 1) motion dynamics affect head movements but that apparent sex does not; 2) judgments of sex are driven almost entirely by appearance; and 3) ratings of masculinity and femininity rely on a combination of both appearance and dynamics. Together, these findings are consistent with the hypothesis of separate perceptual streams for appearance and biological motion. In addition, our results are consistent with a view that head movements in conversation form a low level perception and action system that can operate independently from top-down social expectations.

Modeling accuracy and variability of motor timing in treated and untreated Parkinson's disease and healthy controls.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by difficulty with the timing of movements. Data collected using the synchronization-continuation paradigm, an established motor timing paradigm, have produced varying results but with most studies finding impairment. Some of this inconsistency comes from variation in the medication state tested, in the inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) selected, and in changeable focus on either the synchronization (tapping in time with a tone) or continuation (maintaining the rhythm in the absence of the tone) phase. We sought to re-visit the paradigm by testing across four groups of participants: healthy controls, medication naïve de novo PD patients, and treated PD patients both "on" and "off" dopaminergic medication. Four finger tapping intervals (ISI) were used: 250, 500, 1000, and 2000 ms. Categorical predictors (group, ISI, and phase) were used to predict accuracy and variability using a linear mixed model. Accuracy was defined as the relative error of a tap, and variability as the deviation of the participant's tap from group predicted relative error. Our primary finding is that the treated PD group (PD patients "on" and "off" dopaminergic therapy) showed a significantly different pattern of accuracy compared to the de novo group and the healthy controls at the 250-ms interval. At this interval, the treated PD patients performed "ahead" of the beat whilst the other groups performed "behind" the beat. We speculate that this "hastening" relates to the clinical phenomenon of motor festination. Across all groups, variability was smallest for both phases at the 500-ms interval, suggesting an innate preference for finger tapping within this range. Tapping variability for the two phases became increasingly divergent at the longer intervals, with worse performance in the continuation phase. The data suggest that patients with PD can be best discriminated from healthy controls on measures of motor timing accuracy, rather than variability.

Effects of damping head movement and facial expression in dyadic conversation using real-time facial expression tracking and synthesized avatars.

When people speak with one another, they tend to adapt their head movements and facial expressions in response to each others' head movements and facial expressions. We present an experiment in which confederates' head movements and facial expressions were motion tracked during videoconference conversations, an avatar face was reconstructed in real time, and naive participants spoke with the avatar face. No naive participant guessed that the computer generated face was not video. Confederates' facial expressions, vocal inflections and head movements were attenuated at 1 min intervals in a fully crossed experimental design. Attenuated head movements led to increased head nods and lateral head turns, and attenuated facial expressions led to increased head nodding in both naive participants and confederates. Together, these results are consistent with a hypothesis that the dynamics of head movements in dyadicconversation include a shared equilibrium. Although both conversational partners were blind to the manipulation, when apparent head movement of one conversant was attenuated, both partners responded by increasing the velocity of their head movements.