Behavioral Landscapes
According to a paper written by Ram, Coccia, Conroy, Lorek, Orland, Pincus, Sliwinski and Gerstorf entitled ‘Behavioral Landscapes and Change in Behavioral Landscapes: A Multiple Time-Scale Density Distribution Approach’ it states that the ‘notions of personality have progressed beyond the idea that people are well characterized by five or more scores obtained on a single occasion.’ It is believed instead that multiple observations are needed instead to obtain a ‘robust characterization of individuals’ behavioral tendencies across time and context.’
The paper goes on to present a method that uses knowledge from geography to map ‘notions of personality’ into behavioral landscapes. Taking examples of how mountains, hills and plains are measured in the physical world by geography, the measuring system is then translated into ways to map, built and simulate behavioral landscapes in humans. Take for example the simulated uni-variate and bi-variate density distributions in the image below:
“In this 3D distribution, individuals’ behavior “resides” within the hills. Visualized this way, we can immediately see similarities between the density distributions and the natural world: mountains, hills and plains, and may be reminder of the many theoretical perspectives that describe behavior and developmental landscapes. ”
The images in Rhino below further illustrates how methods use in geography can be used to describe behavioral landscapes and how they transform over time. Collected EMA data from a sample of individuals from the local community across multiple bursts along with information about the life events they experienced during an 18 month study period patterns of emotional behavior were captured through the intensive repeated measures within a burst. They were then visualized as behavioral landscapes. Algorithms from geography were then used to classify the landscapes into types and to describe if and how individuals’ landscapes changes over macro time as they did or did not transition through major life events.
Taking steps with materialization of this landscapes, these Rhino models were then CNC milled as individual objects using wood by Matt Kenney.