Abstract
In human groups performing oscillatory tasks, it has been observed that the frequency of participants' oscillations reduces when compared to that acquired in solo. This experimental observation is not captured by the standard Kuramoto oscillators, often employed to model human synchronization. In this work, we aim at capturing this observed phenomenon by proposing three alternative modifications of the standard Kuramoto model that are based on three different biologically-relevant hypotheses underlying group synchronization. The three models are tuned, validated and compared against experiments on a group synchronization task, which is a multi-agent extension of the so-called mirror game.
Highlights
Joint action can be regarded as any form of embodied social interaction where two or more individuals tend to coordinate their movements, often in a highly synchronized way in space and time, in order to reach a common goal
In this article, starting from the observation that human agents performing a joint oscillatory task together slow down their motion, we proposed three different models to capture this phenomenon based on different biologically-relevant hypotheses underlying sensorimotor group synchronization
The results presented in this manuscript suggest that two models emerge as the ones that better capture the experimental observations, that is, Model 2, which includes a mechanism of selective attention toward the players that are more consistent in their solo conditions, and Model 3, which includes time delays in the dynamics to account for the time needed for information processing
Summary
Joint action can be regarded as any form of embodied social interaction where two or more individuals tend to coordinate their movements, often in a highly synchronized way in space and time, in order to reach a common goal. Modeling Frequency Reduction in Human Groups a recent experimental study on intentional group synchronization showed that humans reduce the frequency of oscillation of their fingers when they are asked to attain unison in space and time (Bardy et al, 2020), thereby suggesting that individuals modulated their behavior to maximize perceptual coupling and increase their level of synchronization. Motivated by these experimental findings, we propose three new versions of the standard Kuramoto model, each of them anchored into a specific and functionally relevant hypothesis. Using the three collected datasets, we experimentally tuned, validated, and compared the three models, in terms of their ability to match the synchronization levels and oscillation frequency reduction observed in the experiments
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