Abstract
Motion synchrony correlates with effective and well-rated human interaction. However, people do not remain locked in synchrony; Instead, they repeatedly enter and exit synchrony. In many important interactions, such as therapy, marriage and parent-infant communication, it is the ability to exit and then re-enter synchrony that is thought to build strong relationship. The phenomenon of entry into zero-phase synchrony is well-studied experimentally and in terms of mathematical modeling. In contrast, exit-from-synchrony is under-studied. Here, we focus on human motion coordination, and examine the exit-from-synchrony phenomenon using experimental data from the mirror game paradigm, in which people perform joint improvised motion, and from human tracking of computer-generated stimuli. We present a mathematical mechanism that captures aspects of exit-from-synchrony in human motion. The mechanism adds a random motion component when the accumulated velocity error between the players is small. We introduce this mechanism to several models for human coordinated motion, including the widely studied HKB model, and the predictor-corrector model of Noy, Dekel and Alon. In all models, the new mechanism produces realistic simulated behavior when compared to experimental data from the mirror game and from tracking of computer generated stimuli, including repeated entry and exit from zero-phase synchrony that generates a complexity of motion similar to that of human players. We hope that these results can inform future research on exit-from-synchrony, to better understand the dynamics of coordinated action of people and to enhance human-computer and human-robot interaction.
Highlights
When people interact productively they often synchronize their motion [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. This synchrony has been studied in the fields of developmental psychology [10,11], social neuroscience [12,13,14], robotics [15,16], joint action [17,18,19] and coordination dynamics [20,21,22,23,24]
We find that over most of the tracking motion, people’s velocity traces weaved around the computer generated input signal, showing undershoots and overshoots of the stimulus velocity. This wavy motion had a mean frequency of about 1 Hz, and is termed jitter [70,71] (Fig 1a)
This agrees with previous studies of the mirror game, in which followers showed similar jitter around the leaders trajectory [59,61], as well as the earlier work of Miall and colleagues on manual tracking [70,71,72,73]
Summary
When people interact productively they often synchronize their motion [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] This synchrony has been studied in the fields of developmental psychology [10,11], social neuroscience [12,13,14], robotics [15,16], joint action [17,18,19] and coordination dynamics [20,21,22,23,24]. Studies in coordination dynamics showed that people tapping fingers [5,23] or rocking chairs [24] tend to synchronize and reach a shared rhythm [5,25]. Synchrony has been shown to correlate with good interpersonal outcomes such as enhanced cooperation [46,47] and rapport [4,17,48,49,50]
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