Movement constraints on interpersonal coordination and communication.

Abstract

The present study investigated how constraining movement affects interpersonal coordination and joint cognitive performance. Pairs of participants worked cooperatively to solve picture-puzzle tasks in which they conversed to identify differences between pictures in 3 degree-of-constraint conditions: both participants were free to move their hands (free-free; FF); both participants’ hands were restrained (restrained-restrained; RR); and the hands of 1 participant were free while the hands of the other participant were restrained (free-restrained; FR). Eye tracking data were collected, and movement was measured at the waist, hand, and head. Data were analyzed using Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQ). Postural sway coordination, gaze coordination, and task performance were predicted to be highest in FF, followed by RR, and then by FR. Results showed the asymmetric FR condition generally exhibited lesser degrees of coordination than the symmetric Conditions FF and RR, and that the patterning of coordination in the symmetric conditions varied across the measured body segments. These results demonstrate that movement restraints affect not only interpersonal postural coordination, but also joint attention. Additionally, significant positive relationships were found between task performance and total amount of anterior-posterior movement measured at the head, hand and waist; number of utterances; and number of differences pairs found in the puzzles. These findings indicate a relationship between movement and task performance consistent with the hypotheses that both interpersonal coordination and cognitive performance are sensitive to local action constraints.

Beyond Dyadic Coordination: Multimodal Behavioral Irregularity in Triads Predicts Facets of Collaborative Problem Solving

“…In addition, many research studies utilizing RQA apply it to data from highly controlled cognitive tasks (Shockley & Turvey, 2005;Stephen, Dixon, & Isenhower, 2009) or measures that have continuous activity (e.g., eye gaze, EEG, and postural sway; Madeo, Castellani, Santarcangelo, & Mocenni, 2013;Richardson & Dale, 2005;Tolston, Shockley, Riley, & Richardson, 2014). We applied RQA to an ecologically valid collaborative problem-solving task where recurrence reflected a decrease in overt activity, but not necessarily cognitive inactivity.…”

Body sway reflects leadership in joint music performance

“…Body sway has been used to index underlying mechanisms of joint action as it becomes interpersonally coupled when individuals engage in a coordinated task (37,38) and during conversation (14,15). Body sway dynamics are thought to reflect real-time interpersonal information sharing (14,16).…”

Comparison of Cross-Correlation and Joint-Recurrence Quantification Analysis Based Methods for Estimating Coupling Strength in Non-linear Systems

“…To test the ability of these methods to detect coupling in noisy, non-stationary data, we re-evaluated data collected by Tolston et al [43]. In that experiment, dyads of randomly paired individuals were asked to complete visual puzzles by communicating with each other to uncover differences in their respective pictures when they could neither see their partner nor their partner's picture.…”

“…In the present analyses, we used the TDS framework to evaluate the stability of temporal relationships between different modalities of the participants, including waist, head, hand, gaze, and speech patterns. Details of the study can be seen in Tolston et al [43], but we briefly describe the experimental procedure below. The task consisted of finding differences in picture-puzzle pairs, with each puzzle pair being visually identical except for 10 differences.…”