Scaling-up perception-action links: Evidence from synchronization with individual and joint action (original) (raw)
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Synchronicities that shape the perception of joint action
Scientific Reports, 2020
In joint performances spanning from jazz improvisation to soccer, expert performers synchronize their movements in ways that novices cannot. Particularly, experts can align the velocity profiles of their movements in order to achieve synchrony on a fine-grained time scale, compared to novices who can only synchronize the duration of their movement intervals. This study investigated how experts’ ability to engage in velocity-based synchrony affects observers’ perception of coordination and their aesthetic experience of joint performances. Participants observed two moving dots on a screen and were told that these reflect the hand movements of two performers engaging in joint improvisation. The dots were animated to reflect the velocity-based synchrony characteristic of expert performance (in terms of jitter of the velocity profile: Experiment 1, or through aligning sharpness of the velocity profile: Experiment 2) or contained only interval-based synchrony. Performances containing velo...
The role of shared visual information for joint action coordination
Previous research has identified a number of coordination processes that enable people to perform joint actions. But what determines which coordination processes joint action partners rely on in a given situ-ation? The present study tested whether varying the shared visual information available to co-actors can trigger a shift in coordination processes. Pairs of participants performed a movement task that required them to synchronously arrive at a target from separate starting locations. When participants in a pair received only auditory feedback about the time their partner reached the target they held their movement duration constant to facilitate coordination. When they received additional visual information about each other's movements they switched to a fundamentally different coordination process, exaggerating the curvature of their movements to communicate their arrival time. These findings indicate that the availability of shared perceptual information is a major factor in determining how individuals coordinate their actions to obtain joint outcomes.
Categorizing coordination from the perception of joint actions
Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2018
The ability to perceive others' actions and coordinate our own body movements accordingly is essential for humans to interact with the social world. However, it is still unclear how the visual system achieves the remarkable feat of identifying temporally coordinated joint actions between individuals. Specifically, do humans rely on certain visual features of coordinated movements to facilitate the detection of meaningful interactivity? To address this question, participants viewed short video sequences of two actors performing different joint actions, such as handshakes, high fives, etc. Temporal misalignments were introduced to shift one actor's movements forward or backward in time relative to the partner actor. Participants rated the degree of interactivity for the temporally shifted joint actions. The impact of temporal offsets on human interactivity ratings varied for different types of joint actions. Based on human rating distributions, we used a probabilistic cluster ...
Action observation: mirroring across our spontaneous movement tempo
Scientific Reports, 2015
Healthy subjects show a common spontaneous movement tempo (SMT) ranging around 2 Hz. First, we investigated the excitability of the left motor cortex (M1) during the observation of videos displaying a hand performing a finger motor sequence at a rate similar to, lower or higher than the individual spontaneous one. The highest M1 excitability was observed during the AO of movements performed at the rate similar to the spontaneous one.
Human interaction often requires simultaneous precision and flexibility in the coordination of rhythmic behaviour between individuals engaged in joint activity, for example, playing a musical duet or dancing with a partner. This review article addresses the psychological processes and brain mechanisms that enable such rhythmic interpersonal coordination. First, an overview is given of research on the cognitive-motor processes that enable individuals to represent joint action goals and to anticipate, attend and adapt to other's actions in real time. Second, the neurophysiological mechanisms that underpin rhythmic interpersonal coordination are sought in studies of sensorimotor and cognitive processes that play a role in the representation and integration of self-and other-related actions within and between individuals' brains. Finally, relationships between social–psychological factors and rhythmic interperso-nal coordination are considered from two perspectives, one concerning how social-cognitive tendencies (e.g. empathy) affect coordination, and the other concerning how coordination affects interpersonal affiliation, trust and proso-cial behaviour. Our review highlights musical ensemble performance as an ecologically valid yet readily controlled domain for investigating rhythm in joint action.
Expertise in dance modulates alpha/beta event‐related desynchronization during action observation
European Journal of …, 2008
We presented professional dancers and non-dancers with videos of two movement styles, dance movements and everyday movements. Participants were asked to indicate by a button press to which category a movement belonged. We computed eventrelated desynchronization (ERD) in alpha and beta frequency bands between 7.5 and 25 Hz relative to a visual baseline condition. Power in alpha and lower beta frequency bands was significantly reduced if dancers watched dance movements but not if nondancers watched dance movements, in particular between 1 and 2 s after movement onset. During observation of everyday movements no such group difference was evident. Thus, ERD in alpha and beta frequency bands was modulated by a participant's expertise with a certain movement style. The results are discussed in light of a human observation-execution matching system similar to the macaque mirror neuron system and strengthen the idea of a functional relationship between such a system and rhythmical activity in the alpha and beta frequency bands.
Action synchronization with biological motion [Colling, Thompson, & Sutton]
W. Christensen, E. Schier, and J. Sutton (eds), ASCS09: proceedings of the 9th conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, pp.49-56, 2010
The ability to predict the actions of other agents is vital for joint action tasks. Recent theory suggests that action prediction relies on an emulator system that permits observers to use information about their own motor dynamics to predict the actions of other agents. If this is the case, then predictions for self-generated actions should be more accurate than predictions for other-generated actions. We tested this hypothesis by employing a self/other synchronization paradigm where prediction accuracy for recording of self-generated movements was compared with prediction accuracy for other-generated movements. As expected, predictions were more accurate when the observer’s movement dynamics matched the movement dynamics of the recording. This is consistent with that idea that the observer’s movement dynamics influence the predictions they generate.
Dynamic similarity promotes interpersonal coordination in joint-action
arXiv.org/abs/1507.00368/euromov.eu/alterego, 2015
Human movement has been studied for decades and dynamic laws of motion that are common to all humans have been derived. Yet, every individual moves differently from everyone else (faster/slower, harder/smoother etc). We propose here a measure of such variability, namely an individual motor signature (IMS) able to capture the subtle differences in the way each of us moves. We show that the IMS of a person is time-invariant and that it significantly differs from those of other individuals. This allows us to quantify the dynamic similarity, a measure of rapport between dynamics of different individuals' movements, and demonstrate that it facilitates coordination during interaction. We use our measure to confirm a key prediction of the theory of similarity that the level of coordination between two individuals performing a joint task is higher if their motions share similar kinematic features. We evaluate the theory by applying it to the "mirror game", a recently proposed paradigm for studying the dynamics of two people improvising motion together. Moreover, we use a virtual avatar driven by an interactive cognitive architecture based on feedback control theory to 1 arXiv:1507.00368v1 [q-bio.NC] 1 Jul 2015
Our actions in my mind: Motor imagery of joint action
Neuropsychologia, 2014
How do people imagine performing actions together? The present study investigated motor imagery of joint actions that requires integrating one's own and another's part of an action. In two experiments, individual participants imagined jumping alone or jointly next to an imagined partner. The joint condition required coordinating one's own imagined actions with an imagined partner's actions to synchronize landing times. We investigated whether the timing of participants' own imagined jumps would reflect the difference in jump distance to their imagined partner's jumps. The results showed that participants' jump imagery was indeed modulated to achieve coordination with an imagined task partner, confirming prior findings from a performance task. Moreover, when manipulating both target distance and target size, the same violation of Fitts' law reported for individual jumping was present in imagery of joint jumping. These findings link research on motor imagery and joint action, demonstrating that individuals are able to integrate simulations of different parts of a joint action.