Impairments of Social Motor Coordination in Schizophrenia

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that motor coordination of interacting people plays a crucial role in the success of social exchanges. Abnormal movements have been reported during interpersonal interactions of patients suffering from schizophrenia and a motor coordination breakdown could explain this social interaction deficit, which is one of the main and earliest features of the illness. Using the dynamical systems framework, the goal of the current study was (i) to investigate whether social motor coordination is impaired in schizophrenia and (ii) to determine the underlying perceptual or cognitive processes that may be affected. We examined intentional and unintentional social motor coordination in participants oscillating hand-held pendulums from the wrist. The control group consisted of twenty healthy participant pairs while the experimental group consisted of twenty participant pairs that included one participant suffering from schizophrenia. The results showed that unintentional social motor coordination was preserved while intentional social motor coordination was impaired. In intentional coordination, the schizophrenia group displayed coordination patterns that had lower stability and in which the patient never led the coordination. A coupled oscillator model suggests that the schizophrenia group coordination pattern was due to a decrease in the amount of available information together with a delay in information transmission. Our study thus identified relational motor signatures of schizophrenia and opens new perspectives for detecting the illness and improving social interactions of patients.

Unintentional entrainment effect in a context of Human Robot Interaction: An experimental study

“…The main difference is that intentional synchronization requires the will of the subject to coordinate whereas unintentional synchronization occurs without the subject noticing. In 2012, Varlet et al showed that schizophrenia impacts intentional synchronization whereas the capacity of unintentional synchronization remains intact [17]. This suggests that intentional and unintentional synchronization may not be a part of the same process.…”

Challenges for the understanding of the dynamics of social coordination

“…In the two latter approaches prediction and anticipation of actions and decisions of others may be put forward as clearly complementary to a dynamical system account of social coordination. A dynamical system approach rests upon the instantaneous formalization provided by differential calculus, even seldom delayed differential equations have been used (see for a specific application to dyadic coordination Varlet et al, 2012). Arguably the challenge of anticipation in dynamical systems of human coordination, individual or social, which may minimally be defined as the state of the system under study at time ( t ) being determined (at least partly) by the state at time ( t + tau), that is, the physicist abhorred causal influence of future onto present, remains to the best of our knowledge untouched.…”

“…Kelso et al (2009) judiciously reversed the coupling function within the artificial agent, to create a conflict between the human and the VPI and investigate novel phenomena. In the same vein, this insight about individual’s role within a pair can be examined by breaking the symmetry of movements, for instance by changing the moment of inertia of hand oscillated pendulum (Varlet et al, 2012), but more radical differences can be introduced. A change in one such parameter stands either for a quantitative change, and this has been investigated in within individual bimanual coordination and between individuals (Varlet et al, 2012), but also to a more important qualitative change, as presented in the course of this paper.…”

Using Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis to Understand Social Motor Coordination in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…This is despite the fact that there is now a well-established body of research demonstrating how intentionally or unintentionally coordinating one's movements with those of another individual can positively influence rapport, feelings of social connection, and feelings of social competence [2][3][4][5]. Previous research has also found that deficits in social motor coordination are associated with other social psychological disorders such as schizophrenia [6,7] and borderline personality disorders [8]. It is therefore important to understand the degree to which social motor coordination (or the lack thereof) is related to social competency in children diagnosed with ASD.…”