Paired walkers with better first impression synchronize better

Abstract

This study measured automatic walking synchronization and how it associates with social impression. Previous studies discovered positive social consequence of motor synchrony with ecological paradigms (e.g. body movement synchrony between therapists and patients in clinical sessions, and the synchrony of side-by-side walkers). However, most studies of joint movement with high ecological validity face the same challenge, namely that conversations between participants might be the main or a partial contributor to the observed social benefits, as conversation is well documented to promote understanding and motor synchronization. We addressed this issue by using a novel paradigm to remove the conversation component and examined how synchrony per se interacted with social impression. Participants were paired to walk side by side in silence (i.e. without conversation) and their social impression toward each other was rated before/after the paired walk. Our results showed that walkers' first impression was positively associated with their step synchronization rate in the silent paired walk. Together with past findings, the bi-directional relation between body entrainment and social functions suggests that implicit nonverbal communication plays a significant role in providing a basis for interpersonal interaction. OPEN ACCESS Citation: Cheng M, Kato M, Saunders JA, Tseng Ch (2020) Paired walkers with better first impression synchronize better. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0227880.

Development of ‘ibuki’ an electrically actuated childlike android with mobility and its potential in the future society

“…It is known that people's movement while walking influences one another [28]. For example, when two people are walking, the mutual first impressions change the degree of entrainment of each individual's gait [29]. Using this mobile robot platform, in the future, we will investigate how the motion of CoM, that is, an additional degree of freedom, influences human-robot interaction [30].…”

Infant-adult synchrony in spontaneous and nonspontaneous interactions

“…Previous studies have reported that factors related to affiliation influences synchrony and vice versa. For example, people who do not like each other tend to be less in sync [ 106 , 163 ] than people who like each other [ 108 , 121 ]. Research also show increases in variables related to affect and affiliation between adults following a nonspontaneous synchronization, positive affect [ 30 ], social bonding [ 35 ], and trust [ 109 ].…”

“…Conversely, experimental studies elicit synchrony in adults through joint tasks that require intentional or unintentional synchronization in time and form with a referent (e.g., a metronome, a pre-recorded video, or another adult participant). Examples of such joint tasks include finger tapping [107,115], rocking in a rocking chair [116,117], swinging pendulums [118][119][120], climbing stairs [106], walking [121][122][123][124] or jumping [125].…”

Exploring the “Dark Matter” of Social Interaction: Systematic Review of a Decade of Research in Spontaneous Interpersonal Coordination

“…A first set of studies investigated rhythmic activities, such as walking (Cheng et al, 2017(Cheng et al, , 2020, rocking chairs (Demos et al, 2012), finger flexion (Nordham et al, 2018), "body conversation" (Galbusera et al, 2019), or required participants to stay near each other without any conversation or a common goal (Varlet et al, 2011.…”

“…A first set of studies used the terminology interpersonal coordination referring to "dynamical process of self-organization, " "spatiotemporal organization of movement, " or "dynamical entrainment" (Varlet et al, 2011Demos et al, 2012;Fujiwara et al, 2016;Paxton and Dale, 2017;Nordham et al, 2018;Fujiwara et al, 2019;Wiltshire et al, 2019). On the other hand, others used the terminology synchrony, referring to "variables of a system becoming entrained" or as "specious present, " and "smooth meshing in time of the simultaneous rhythmic activity" or "the coordinated overall body movement" of two interacting individuals (Schmidt et al, 2012;Tschacher et al, 2014Tschacher et al, , 2018Abney et al, 2015;Cheng et al, 2017Cheng et al, , 2020Lozza et al, 2018;Galbusera et al, 2019;Sun et al, 2019). Finally, Hale et al (2020) referred to mimicry and complementary behavior.…”