Visual Analysis of Proximal Temporal Relationships of Social and Communicative Behaviors

Developmental psychology researchers examine the temporal relationships of social and communicative behaviors, such as how a child responds to a name call, to understand early typical and atypical development and to discover early signs of autism and developmental delay. These related behaviors occur together or within close temporal proximity, forming unique patterns and relationships of interest. However, the task of finding these early signs, which are in the form of atypical behavioral patterns, becomes more challenging when behaviors of multiple children at different ages need to be compared with each other in search of generalizable patterns. The ability to visually explore the temporal relationships of behaviors, including flexible redefinition of closeness, over multiple social interaction sessions with children of different ages, can make such knowledge extraction easier. We have designed a visualization tool called TipoVis that helps psychology researchers visually explore the temporal patterns of social and communicative behaviors. We present two case studies to show how TipoVis helped two researchers derive new understandings of their data.