Social motor coordination during adult–child interactions

Abstract

Social motor coordination (SMC) pertains to the timing of contingent movements during social interactions and is of high relevance for successful social and musical interactions. Semi-automated, objective methods are increasingly being used to analyze SMC, though it is unclear if these methods are feasible in naturalistic settings with young children. The purpose of the current preliminary study was to explore SMC in adult-child dyads during semi-structured social interactions. Thirteen dyads (mean age of children = 36 months) participated in a predictable turn-taking task from a social communication assessment, and a semi-automated frame-difference approach was used to capture movement activity. Relative timing and activity approaches revealed that, while there is some evidence of co-occurring movement, the dyad predominantly exhibited patterns of responsive movement activity (e.g., turn taking or alternating movement) consistent with the activity's structure. Future work may extend these approaches to social musical interactions in order to examine movement coordination and prosocial behavior during joint music-making activities with young children.

Parent-child nonverbal engagement during spoken versus sung book-sharing in preschoolers with and without autism

“…Nevertheless, our findings of diagnostic group differences suggest such interpersonal movement coordination metrics may be a promising approach for further analysis of dyadic caregiver-child interaction in very young children with and without ASD. These results further demonstrate the feasibility of applying video-derived movement analysis with young children (e.g., Pfeiffer et al, 2018).…”

“…Nevertheless, our findings of diagnostic group differences suggest such interpersonal movement coordination metrics may be a promising approach for further analysis of dyadic caregiver–child interaction in very young children with and without ASD. These results further demonstrate the feasibility of applying video-derived movement analysis with young children (e.g., Pfeiffer et al, 2018). Future studies could examine interpersonal coordination during other types of play activities in young children, including during more natural settings (e.g., during a circle time activity on the floor or when explicitly instructed to use song-associated gestures), to further probe how context impacts interpersonal coordination in children with and without ASD.…”

“…We considered two measures of nonverbal engagement during parent–child musical and non-musical book sharing: Visual attention (gaze) and interpersonal movement coordination. We focused on these nonverbal measures of engagement due to their involvement in both musical and non-musical interactions (e.g., Kim et al, 2008; LaGasse, 2014; Paul et al, 2015; Tunçgenç & Cohen, 2018) and because they can be used with children with varying language levels (Kim et al, 2008; Pfeiffer et al, 2018). These measures also allowed us to consider the behaviors of each partner individually as well as within an interactional, dyadic framework.…”