Effects of Visual and Verbal Interaction on Unintentional Interpersonal Coordination.

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that people's movements can become unintentionally coordinated during interpersonal interaction. The current study sought to uncover the degree to which visual and verbal (conversation) interaction constrains and organizes the rhythmic limb movements of coactors. Two experiments were conducted in which pairs of participants completed an interpersonal puzzle task while swinging handheld pendulums with instructions that minimized intentional coordination but facilitated either visual or verbal interaction. Cross-spectral analysis revealed a higher degree of coordination for conditions in which the pairs were visually coupled. In contrast, verbal interaction alone was not found to provide a sufficient medium for unintentional coordination to occur, nor did it enhance the unintentional coordination that emerged during visual interaction. The results raise questions concerning differences between visual and verbal informational linkages during interaction and how these differences may affect interpersonal movement production and its coordination.

Inter-group entrainment in Afro-Brazilian Congado ritual

“…The point at which they make visual contact does not correspond, as far as we can determine, to any other change which would have resulted in the two groups being in stronger auditory contact. Although not conclusive in itself, this observation is consistent with other studies which have identified the role of visual attention in unintended interpersonal entrainment (Schmidt & O'Brien, 1997;Richardson et al, 2005Richardson et al, , 2007. In the third extract, when the two groups managed to resist entrainment, one of the strategies at play appears to be to avoid visual contact with the other group.…”

“…In terms of how the coupling occurs, in a musical context auditory information is of course important. However, a number of studies have pointed to the role of visual information in unintentional interpersonal coupling (Richardson et al, 2005;Richardson et al, 2007;Schmidt & O'Brien, 1997) and we have therefore also considered the likelihood that visual contact may have contributed to the instances of entrainment identified below.…”

How Two Share a Task: Corepresenting Stimulus-Response Mappings.

“…Work on unintentional synchrony interpreted within a dynamical systems account suggests that the emergence of a coupled oscillator dynamic relies on visual information (Richardson et al, 2005;Schmidt & O'Brian, 1997). It remains to be seen whether interpersonal effects that result from the way task instructions are implemented can also be accounted for by dynamical systems principles.…”

Social coordination dynamics: Measuring human bonding

“…Most of the results reporting unintentional synchronization in humans are based on observation and categorization methods that rely primarily on the experimenter's appreciation of a given exemplar behavior rather than a quantitative measure of coupling and individual behavior (e.g. Barsalou et al, 2003;Condon & Sandler, 1974; but see Richardson, Marsh, & Schmidt, 2005).…”