When the game gets difficult, then it is time for mimicry

The computing community shows significant interest for the detection of mimicry , one of the names designating the tendency of interacting people to converge towards common behavioural patterns. This work shows experiments where speaker verification techniques, originally designed to detect fraudulent attempts to imitate others, are used to automatically detect the phenomenon. Furthermore, the experiments show that mimicry tends to be more frequent when people deal with harder collaborative tasks, thus suggesting that one of the functions of the phenomenon is to make communication easier or more effective in case of difficulties