Quantitative lunch -- Gustav Sjobeck. (Zoom).

Much of the work on interpersonal symmetry has emphasized bivariate relationships, between two people. However, research in group dynamics suggests that symmetry might also be present at the group level. The Threeway Approximate Spatiotemporal Symmetry (TASS) algorithm was developed to capture symmetry between three signals in segments which correspond to either the presence or absence of symmetry. The TASS algorithm is an extension of the Pairwise Approximate Spatiotemporal Symmetry (PASS) algorithm (Sjobeck, Boker, Scheidt, & Tschacher, under review), which provides similar symmetry segmentation information between two signals. Like the PASS algorithm, the TASS algorithm captures association between signals using short windows of the time series which are lagged to capture non-simultaneous relationships. Additionally, the TASS and PASS algorithms both emphasize how the association pattern changes across time so as to determine which time points are and are not indicative of symmetry. Unlike the PASS algorithm, however, which uses correlation as a measurement of association, the TASS algorithm uses total correlation, an association metric from the field of information theory. To capture the underlying pattern of association between three signals, the TASS algorithm considers lags in all three time series. In order to understand how it performs under known conditions, the TASS algorithm will be used to capture potential symmetry relationships in a number of simulated examples. The results of these simulations will be discussed here. The relative strength of the TASS algorithm will be discussed within the context of these simulations.