From Actions to Kinesics: Extracting Human Psychological States through Bodily Movements

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lin, Cheyu, Flanigan, Katherine A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915534959804416
author Lin, Cheyu
Flanigan, Katherine A.
author_facet Lin, Cheyu
Flanigan, Katherine A.
contents Understanding the dynamic relationship between humans and the built environment is a key challenge in disciplines ranging from environmental psychology to reinforcement learning (RL). A central obstacle in modeling these interactions is the inability to capture human psychological states in a way that is both generalizable and privacy preserving. Traditional methods rely on theoretical models or questionnaires, which are limited in scope, static, and labor intensive. We present a kinesics recognition framework that infers the communicative functions of human activity -- known as kinesics -- directly from 3D skeleton joint data. Combining a spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) with a convolutional neural network (CNN), the framework leverages transfer learning to bypass the need for manually defined mappings between physical actions and psychological categories. The approach preserves user anonymity while uncovering latent structures in bodily movements that reflect cognitive and emotional states. Our results on the Dyadic User EngagemenT (DUET) dataset demonstrate that this method enables scalable, accurate, and human-centered modeling of behavior, offering a new pathway for enhancing RL-driven simulations of human-environment interaction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Actions to Kinesics: Extracting Human Psychological States through Bodily Movements
Lin, Cheyu
Flanigan, Katherine A.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Understanding the dynamic relationship between humans and the built environment is a key challenge in disciplines ranging from environmental psychology to reinforcement learning (RL). A central obstacle in modeling these interactions is the inability to capture human psychological states in a way that is both generalizable and privacy preserving. Traditional methods rely on theoretical models or questionnaires, which are limited in scope, static, and labor intensive. We present a kinesics recognition framework that infers the communicative functions of human activity -- known as kinesics -- directly from 3D skeleton joint data. Combining a spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) with a convolutional neural network (CNN), the framework leverages transfer learning to bypass the need for manually defined mappings between physical actions and psychological categories. The approach preserves user anonymity while uncovering latent structures in bodily movements that reflect cognitive and emotional states. Our results on the Dyadic User EngagemenT (DUET) dataset demonstrate that this method enables scalable, accurate, and human-centered modeling of behavior, offering a new pathway for enhancing RL-driven simulations of human-environment interaction.
title From Actions to Kinesics: Extracting Human Psychological States through Bodily Movements
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04844