Abstract
Haptic communication between humans plays an important role in society. Although this form of communication is ubiquitous at all levels of society and of human development, little is known about how synchronized coordination of motion between two persons leads to higher-order cognitive functions used in communication. In this study, we developed a novel experimental paradigm of a coin-collecting task in which participants used their hands to control a rod to jointly collect the coins on the screen. We characterized the haptic interactions between paired participants while they were taking part in a cooperative task. The individual participants first completed this task on their own and then with a randomly assigned partner for the cooperative task. Single participant experiments were used as a baseline to compare results of the paired participants. Forces applied to the rod were translated to four possible haptic states which encode the combination of the haptic interactions. As a next step, pairs of consecutive haptic states were then combined into 16 possible haptic signals which were classified in terms of their temporal patterns using a Tsallis q-exponential function. For paired participants, 80% of the haptic signals could be fit by the Tsallis q-exponential. On the other hand, only 30% of the signals found in the single-participant trials could be fit by the Tsallis q-exponential. This shows a clear difference in the temporal structures of haptic signals when participants are interacting with each other and when they are not. We also found a large difference in the number of haptic signals used by paired participants and singles. Single participants only used 1/4 of the possible haptic signals. Paired participants, on the other hand, used more than half of the possible signals. These results suggest that temporal structures present in haptic communication could be linked to the emergence of language at an evolutionary level.
Highlights
For social animals, moving bodies in a coordinated manner plays an important role in facilitating social interactions
The question still arises: What mechanisms allow partners in collaborative tasks to exchange and interpret haptic signals? This haptic communication is done through the action-perception loops in which the participants move their hands and feel the force transmitted by their partner. The key to this haptic communication is to couple the action-perception loops between the paired participants, i.e., one sends the haptic signal to the other, the other receives the haptic signal, processes information and sends back the haptic signal, and the action-perception loop continues. This kind of coupling of the action-perception loops through haptic interactions should be characterized as a function of time; we aim to reveal the temporal structure of the haptic communication
The analysis presented in this paper focuses on characterizing the temporal structures of haptic signals that naturally emerge from the haptic interactions
Summary
For social animals, moving bodies in a coordinated manner plays an important role in facilitating social interactions. The paired participants, while jointly lifting and moving an object, generated haptic channels that they used to communicate with each other (Sebanz et al, 2006; van der Wel et al, 2011). We hypothesize that this haptic channel is used to transmit bi-directional haptic signals carrying information about the participant’s target on the display. In order to study the temporal correlations, present in haptic communication between paired participants, we developed a joint coin-collecting paradigm In this paradigm, participants jointly controlled a plastic cylinder to collect coins on a computer display. We characterized the force-force interactions for both single and paired participants and analyzed their temporal patterns in order to extract features of haptic signaling between paired participants in a cooperative task
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