Neil: Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.
Rob: And I'm Rob.
Neil: Now, Rob, would you say that you are an introvert
or an extrovert?
Rob: 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.
Neil: But you do all of this on the radio and videos
for Learning English, don’t you?
Some would say
you have to be an extrovert to do what we do.
Rob: 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.
Neil: 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.
Rob: Wow! That sounds pretty hi-tech, and scary.
Neil: 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?
Rob: OK, I thought that was going to be easy, but
I think it’s an abbreviation, isn’t it?
Neil: 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?
Sabrina Hoppe: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.
Neil: So, was she confident this would work?
Rob: 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.
Neil: 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.
Sabrina Hoppe: 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.
Rob: So how does the software work, for example,
what are the differences in the eye movements
of extroverts compared to introverts?
Sabrina Hoppe: 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.
Neil: So how does it work?
Rob: 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.
Neil: 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?
Rob: I said A) an abbreviation.
Neil: 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.
Rob: Yes. We had the word 'extrovert'. This describes
someone who has a very outgoing personality.
An extrovert is confident and socially comfortable.
Neil: By contrast, an introvert is someone who is
shy and not comfortable in social situations
and doesn’t like being the centre of attention.
Rob: 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.
Neil: Then we had 'unconstrained' to describe the
experiment which was not carried out
in a controlled environment.
So 'unconstrained' means
'not limited or restricted'.
Rob: Our next word was 'gaze'. This is a word that
means 'our way of looking at something'.
Neil: Yes, the findings of the research suggest
that our personality can affect our gaze.
Rob: 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'.
Neil: Right! Well, you know what I’ve just figured out?
Rob: Do tell!
Neil: It’s time to bring this edition of 6 Minute English
to an end. We hope you can join us again,
but until then we are bbclearningenglish.com
and you can find us on social media, online
and on our app. Bye for now.
Rob: Bye-bye!