Nonverbal Leadership in Joint Full-Body Improvisation

In this work, we investigate nonverbal leadership and address two research questions: 1) is it possible to perceive leadership from nonverbal cues in an unstructured joint full-body activity with no designated leader? 2) what are its nonverbal indicators? To address these questions, we propose eight cues of nonverbal leadership and conduct a two-step validation study on a novel dataset (video, MoCap) of dance improvisation. To explore various leadership strategies, we introduce constraints on how dancers communicate by manipulating their shared sensory channels. In the first stage, 27 persons carried out continuous annotation of leadership in the recorded videos; in the second stage, 92 persons watched 25 short segments indicating who the leader was and reported perceived leadership cues. The results indicate 1) a high consensus among observers regarding nonverbal leadership, but only for certain video segments, and 2) that five leadership cues were frequently observed in our dataset. In the final part, we explore the feasibility of automatically detecting nonverbal leadership using hand-crafted cues and standard machine learning techniques.