Hidden Real-Time Patterns in Intra- and Inter-Individual Behavior: Description and Detection

Abstract

It is widely believed that human interaction is much more regular than has yet been detected. What kinds of hidden regularities exist is, however, unsettled. In this paper a structural hypothesis is proposed where each continuous human interaction is seen as the performance of a set of a particular type of temporal patterns. Some of these repeated intra- and inter-individual real-time behavior patterns may be mutually exclusive in time while others may overlap in various ways. Perceptual limitations making such patterns hidden to the naked eye are illustrated. A computerized detection method and illustrative empirical findings from various types of face-to-face interactions in children and adults are presented. The specially developed pattern detection and analysis software, THEME, is also shortly described.

Temporal patterns of self-injurious behavior correlate with stress hormone levels in the developmentally disabled

“…As developed by Magnusson (1996Magnusson ( , 2000, THEME provides a statistical method of detecting temporal patterns (T-patterns) of related behavioral events that may not be obvious to a trained observer or identifiable by traditional sequential methods. The pattern detection algorithm first identifies significant (non-random) recurrences of any two events within a similar temporal configuration (critical interval) in a real-time behavioral record and then proceeds to identify hierarchical relations with any other antecedent or subsequent events, both sequential and nonsequential in distribution.…”

Application of T-Pattern Detection and Analysis in Sports Research

“…A complete explanation of the theoretical roots of the pattern-detection algorithms together with an overview of the wider use of the process has been presented elsewhere [4,5].…”

“…Given that observational records of human behaviour, including sport performance analysis, have both a temporal and sequential structure an analysis tool that can describe this structure will enhance understanding of the behaviour (s) being studied. A generic observational software package called Theme has been specifically developed to operationalise T-pattern detection as an analysis process [4][5][6].…”

T-pattern analysis for the study of temporal structure of animal and human behavior: A comprehensive review

“…In the early 90s, the T-pattern diagram has been created and implemented as an integral part of Theme. It shows, at-a-glance, all the point series and hierarchical connections between their points involved in a T-pattern (Magnusson, 1996(Magnusson, , 2000. Further developments in T-pattern analysis resulted in two papers on children's dyadic problem solving (Beaudichon et al, 1991;Magnusson and Beaudichon, 1997) and a series of doctoral theses (Bensalah, 1992;Tardif, 1996a;Sigurdsson, 1997;Sevre-Rousseau, 1999;Schwab, 2000) with related publications all implicating T-pattern analysis (Tardif, 1996b;Tardif and Plumet, 2000;Plumet and Tardif, 2005).…”