Abstract
Perceiving and synchronizing to a piece of dance is a remarkable skill in humans. Research in this area is very recent and has been focused mainly on entrainment produced by regular rhythms. Here, we investigated entrainment effects on spectators perceiving a non-rhythmic and extremely slow performance issued from contemporary dance. More specifically, we studied the relationship between subjective experience and entrainment produced by perceiving this type of performance. We defined two types of entrainment. Physiological entrainment corresponded to cardiovascular and respiratory coordinated activities. Cognitive entrainment was evaluated through cognitive tasks that quantified time distortion. These effects were thought to reflect attunement of a participant’ internal temporal clock to the particularly slow pace of the danced movement. Each participant’ subjective experience—in the form of responses to questionnaires—were collected and correlated with cognitive and physiological entrainment. We observe: (a) a positive relationship between psychological entrainment and attention to breathing (their own one or that of dancers); and (b) a positive relationship between cognitive entrainment (reflected as an under-estimation of time following the performance) and attention to their own breathing, and attention to the muscles’ dancers. Overall, our results suggest a close relationship between attention to breathing and entrainment. This proof-of-concept pilot study was intended to prove the feasibility of a quantitative situated paradigm. This research is inscribed in a large-scale interdisciplinary project of dance spectating (labodanse.org).
Highlights
Dance and Spectating Dance is a fundamental form of human expression that involves rhythmic or arrhythmic body movements, and often but not always is accompanied by music
We investigated modulations of physiological and cognitive states induced when spectators behold a dance performance and if they were correlated with their subjective experience of spectating
In a semi-live setting we investigated whether synchronization of respiratory rates between the dancers and the public during the performance is associated with the subjective experience of the spectators
Summary
Dance and Spectating Dance is a fundamental form of human expression that involves rhythmic or arrhythmic body movements, and often but not always is accompanied by music It is performed alone or as a collective activity and is practiced in many cultures as a form of emotional expression, social interaction, or exercise. Different persons may have different attitudes in relation to an artwork, which, in turn, may affect the way they perceive an artwork (Macel, 2008). In this scenario, spectating is both the specific ways we observe dance and the specific ways dance affects us. We aimed at investigating how dance perception affects us, on cognitive and physiological dimensions, and how these modulations are related to our subjective experience
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