Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I’m Neil. |
And I’m Rob. |
Now, Rob, would you say that you are an introvert or an extrovert? |
What a good question! |
Well, extroverts are confident in their personality. |
They’re outgoing and comfortable in social situations. |
So, I would have to say that, if anything, I’m the opposite. |
I’m more of an introvert. |
I’m really quite shy. |
I feel uncomfortable in social situations. |
For example, if I go to a party, where I don’t know anyone I usually feel very embarrassed and I find it impossible to start conversations with strangers. |
But you do all of this on the radio and videos for BBC Learning English, don’t you? |
Some would say you have to be an extrovert to do what we do. |
Ah! Well, maybe I’m pretending to be an extrovert to hide the fact that I’m an introvert. |
It’s quite a common thing, you know. |
Well, it might not be so easy to hide in the future, |
because researchers have developed a computer program that can tell your personality from looking at where you look, by tracking your eye movements. |
Wow! That sounds pretty hi-tech, and scary. |
Well, we’ll learn more shortly, but first a question on the topic of clever computers. |
The letters ’AI’ stand for Artificial Intelligence but what are the letters ’AI’? |
Are they A) an abbreviation, B) an acronym, or C) an initialism? |
OK, I thought that was going to be easy, but I think it’s an abbreviation, isn’t it? |
Well, you’ll have to wait to the end of the programme to find out! |
Sabrina Hoppe is a researcher at the University of Stuttgart. |
She was interviewed on the BBC Radio programme All In The Mind. |
She spoke about an experiment in which they tracked the eye movements of people in real situations. |
This is what she said about the research. |
Was she confident the experiment would work in the real world? |
The main finding in our study is that it is possible at all to just look at eye movements and then predict something about their personality. |
And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real world setting. |
So, was she confident this would work? |
No, not really. She said that before the study it wasn’t clear if it would be possible in an unconstrained real-world setting. |
Unconstrained here means that there wasn’t strict control over the conditions of the experiment. |
It took place in the ‘real-world’ – so not in a laboratory. |
The result of the experiment - or the finding, as she called it - was that by following eye movements, a computer programme was able to work out the personality of the subjects. |
Let’s listen again. |
The main finding in our study is that it is possible at all to just look at eye movements and then predict something about their personality. |
And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real world setting. |
So how does the software work, for example, what are the differences in the eye movements of extroverts compared to introverts? |
We still don’t really know in detail what makes the difference. |
We can only tell that there are differences and that we know computer programs that can pick up those differences. |
Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because they want to look at people’s faces, |
whereas some super introvert person maybe just stares at their own shoes, if you want to take the extreme examples. |
So, probably it somehow changes gaze. |
But we only know that this information is there and somehow our program figured out how to extract it. |
So how does it work? |
Well, that’s the strange thing. She said that she didn’t really know, at least not in detail. |
She did say that our personality somehow changes gaze. |
Gaze is another word for looking at something. |
So maybe we gaze in different ways depending on our personality. |
Extroverts may look up more and introverts, like me, may look down more. |
Yes, it was interesting that she said that she didn’t know how it did it, but the program somehow managed to figure it out. |
The phrasal verb to figure something out means ’to understand or realise something’. |
Time to review today’s vocabulary, but first, let’s have the answer to the quiz question. |
I asked what are the letters AI? |
Are they A) an abbreviation, B) an acronym, C) an initialism? |
Rob, what did you say? |
I said A) an abbreviation. |
Well sorry, no, AI is C), so to speak. It’s an initialism. |
It’s the first letters of the words ’artificial intelligence’, but it’s not pronounced like a new word, just the initial letters. |
Right, time now to review today’s vocabulary. |
Yes. We had the word extrovert. |
This describes someone who has a very outgoing personality. |
An extrovert is confident and socially comfortable. |
By contrast, an introvert is someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations and doesn’t like being the centre of attention. |
Our report today talked about the findings of some new research. |
A finding is something that has been learnt, discovered or indeed, found out. |
It is the conclusion that is reached. |
Then we had unconstrained to describe the experiment which was not carried out in a controlled environment. |
So unconstrained means ‘not limited or restricted‘. |
Our next word was gaze. |
This is a word that means ’our way of looking at something’. |
Yes, the findings of the research suggest that our personality can affect our gaze. |
And this was something the computer was able to figure out. |
To figure out means ’to study something and reach an answer to a particular question or problem’. |
Right! Well, you know what I’ve just figured out? |
Do tell! |
It’s time to bring this edition of 6 Minute English to an end. |
Bye for now. |
Bye-bye! |