Abstract
To move a hard table together, humans may coordinate by following the dominant partner’s motion [1–4], but this strategy is unsuitable for a soft mattress where the perceived forces are small. How do partners readily coordinate in such differing interaction dynamics? To address this, we investigated how pairs tracked a target using flexion-extension of their wrists, which were coupled by a hard, medium or soft virtual elastic band. Tracking performance monotonically increased with a stiffer band for the worse partner, who had higher tracking error, at the cost of the skilled partner’s muscular effort. This suggests that the worse partner followed the skilled one’s lead, but simulations show that the results are better explained by a model where partners share movement goals through the forces, whilst the coupling dynamics determine the capacity of communicable information. This model elucidates the versatile mechanism by which humans can coordinate during both hard and soft physical interactions to ensure maximum performance with minimal effort.
Highlights
When moving into a new home, workers help each other to manipulate various objects such as hard tables and soft mattresses
Humans are talented at coordinating movements with one another through a multitude of objects such as a hard table or a soft mattress
How do we coordinate physical movements governed by such differing mechanics? Our task is inspired by a pair moving through a dancefloor during Tango dancing; we tested subjects in pairs who jointly chased a moving target with their right hands, which were banded together by either a strong, medium or weak elastic band
Summary
When moving into a new home, workers help each other to manipulate various objects such as hard tables and soft mattresses. They may verbally agree which room to move towards, but will rely on subtle haptic cues provided by touch and proprioceptive sensing to coordinate their movement through narrow corridors and stairs. Manipulating a soft object like a mattress, which has internal degrees of freedom, may require more complex forms of coordination as one can rely less on the partner to move the object skillfully, and the object’s mechanics influences the perception of the partner’s force [6]. To physically interact in such versatile scenarios with different coupling dynamics, humans may change their behavior depending on how hard or soft the interaction is, but we do not know whether nor how people do so
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