Social and Interpersonal Coordination

Overview

The goal of these programs of research is to use Gibson’s ecological theory of perception, human movement science, and methods from dynamical systems perspectives to study neglected issues regarding how we perceive and act with others. This includes identifying the dynamic structure inherent to the stable patterns of interpersonal perception, movement, and coordination, as well as uncovering the informational couplings and perception-action cycles that exist between interacting individuals and how the joint activity of two or more individuals can be understood as an autonomous, self-organized, and functionally defined perception-action system.

Interpersonal Coordination

When two people interact, for instance, during a conversation, both are almost always in motion. As a speaker’s posture shifts, the listener’s does too, and the two together become coordinated with the speaker's speech rhythms. Such social coordination happens all the time as movements are subtly and unintentionally synchronized as in an unconscious dance. In this research, we study the perceptual processes that support social interactions, namely the processes that allow the coordination of movements in natural interactions. We record how the subtle postural and overt rhythmic movements (limb movements while swinging a pendulum, torso movements while rocking in a chair) are unintentionally and intentionally coordinated in time, using the techniques and methods of dynamical systems theory. This includes examining how and what information couples the perception and action of interacting individuals both temporally and spatially (focusing in particular on visual and verbal information). For instance, during a joint problem-solving task, individuals are induced to incidentally see the rhythmic movements of another individual, or merely communicate with one another verbally. The results of such studies demonstrate how individuals spontaneously (unintentionally) coordinated rhythmic movements when visual information is available (Richardson, Marsh, & Schmidt, 2005; Richardson, Marsh, Isenhower , Goodman, & Schmidt, 2007, and exhibit an increased level of postural entrainment during verbal exchanges (Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003; Shockley, Baker, Richardson, Fowler, 2007).

Recent studies have also examined how rhythmic coordination is affected by competitive vs. cooperative tasks, and natural vs. rhythmic speaking. In addition, experiments have examined the degree to which interpersonal coordination is mediated by the amount or clarity of visual, verbal, or other auditory information (e.g., music) for pairs or groups of participants who are rocking in chairs. Such methods allow us to examine the social psychological consequences of temporal coordination of movement for rapport and for group processes. Recent applications have examined how children who are autistic or of typical development differ in their spontaneous response to the rhythmic movements of another.

Interpersonal Affordance and the Dynamics of Embodied Cooperative Action

Despite the fundamental importance of cooperation to understanding how we form alliances with others in the process of becoming a group or a team, and for understanding between-person conflict, research on cooperation as a dynamic, embodied process is almost nonexistent. Rather, what we know about cooperative action is limited to how individuals make strategic decisions in a series of static game-like decisions that are cooperative or competitive.

In contrast, we study cooperative action as an emergent self-organized process that is not necessarily driven by strategic decisions or cognitive activity, but as behavior that can arise spontaneously in response to environmental demands—as a natural animal-environment process whereby goal directed perception and action is constrained by the detection of possibilities for action, know as affordances. As the animation below indicates, when one form of action (climbing stairs in common manner) becomes impossible, individuals shift their style of action by employing additional bodily degrees of freedom, including the use of tools, or another individual.

Approached from this perspective, the presence of another person provides new affordances for joint action that are actualized when individuals spontaneously form a social perception-action system (see Marsh et al., 2006; Marsh, Richardson, Schmidt, & Johnston, in press). In this sense, two (or more) individuals form a social collective or synergy that can be characterized as a perception-action systems in and of itself. Our paradigm involves having individuals move objects presented continuously in either an ascending, descending, or random order (e.g. planks of wood presented by a conveyor belt) either alone or together (Richardson, Marsh & Baron, 2007). Consistent with past affordance research, we find that behavioral transitions are determined by body-scaled information. That is, shifts between 1 and 2 hand action, and between solo and joint action are a function of the individual’s action system(s) relative to properties of the environmental objects. Moreover we find that the joint perception-action system has notable characteristics common to dynamical systems such as hysteresis. Thus a pair’s previous trajectory of action (cooperative action in the descending condition; solo action in the ascending condition) persists somewhat past the point at which, in the random condition, participants would typically transition.

More recent experiments explore the physical and cognitive constraints on the emergence of a social collective or interpersonal synergy (Lopresti-Goodman, Richardson, Baron, Carello, & Marsh, in press) using pairs of individuals who have different action capabilities (Isenhower, Richardson, Baron, Carello, & Marsh, under review).

Faculty: Claudia Carello, Carol A. Fowler, Bruce Kay, Kerry L. Marsh, Till Frank

Collaborators: Reuben Baron, Roger Chaffin, Lucy Johnston, Michael J. Richardson, Richard C.Schmidt, Kevin Shockley

Current Graduate Students: Stacy Lopresti-Goodman (CESPA), Rob Isenhower (CESPA), Alex Demos & Kristen Begosh (language & cognition), Jennifer R. Daniels (social), and Randi Garcia (social).

Grant Support

NSF grant BSC-0240266 awarded to Richard C. Schmidt.

NSF grant BSC-0240277 awarded to C. A. Fowler, K. L. Marsh, and M. J. Richardson.

NSF grant BCS-0342802 awarded to K. L. Marsh, R. M. Baron, C. Carello, and M. J. Richardson.

Autism Speaks (formerly Cure Autism Now) Innovative Technology for Autism (ITA) Grant (PI: K. L. Marsh)

Representative Publications

Fowler, C. A. Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., & Shockley, K. D. (2008). Language use, coordination, and the emergence of cooperative action. In A. Fuchs & V. K. Jirsa (Eds.) Coordination: Neural, behavioral and social dynamics (pp. 261-279). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Lopresti-Goodman, S., Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., Carello, C., & Baron, R. M. (in press). Task constraints on affordance boundaries. Motor Control.

Lopresti-Goodman, S., Richardson, M. J., Silva, P. L., & Schmidt, R. C. (2008). Period basin of entrainment for unintentional visual coordination. Journal of Motor Control, 40, 3-10

Marsh, K. L., Richardson, M. J., Baron, R. M., & Schmidt, R. C. (2006). Contrasting approaches to perceiving and acting with others. Ecological Psychology, 18, 1-37.

Marsh, K. L., Johnston, L., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (in press). Toward a radically embodied, embedded social psychology. European Journal of Social Psychology {special issue: Modalities of Social Life: Roadmaps for an Embodied Social Psychology}.

Marsh, K. L., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (revision submitted for review). Social connection through joint action and interpersonal coordination. Topics in Cognitive Science {special issue: Joint Action – Social and Cognitive Mechanisms}.

Richardson, M. J., Lopresti-Goodman, S., Mancini, M., Kay, B. A., & Schmidt, R. C. (2008). Comparing the attractor strength of intra- and interpersonal interlimb coordination using cross recurrence analysis. Neuroscience Letters, 438, 340-345.

Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., & Baron, R. M. (2007). Judging and actualizing intrapersonal and interpersonal affordances. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33, 845-859 .

Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., Isenhower, R., Goodman, J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2007). Rocking together: Dynamics of intentional and unintentional interpersonal coordination. Human Movement Science, 26, 867-891.

Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., & Schmidt, R. C. (2005). Effects of visual and verbal interaction on unintentional interpersonal coordination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(1), 62-79.

Richardson, M. J. Marsh, K. L., & Schmidt, R. C. (in press). Challenging egocentric notions of perceiving, acting, and knowing. In L. F. Barrett, B. Mesquita and E. Smith. (Eds.),"Mind in context. Guilford (Publication date: December 2008).

Schmidt, R. C., Bienvenu, M., Fitzpatrick, P. A., & Amazeen, P. G. (1998). A comparison of intra- and interpersonal interlimb coordination: Coordination breakdowns and coupling strength. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24(3), 884-900.

Schmidt, R. C., Carello, C., & Turvey, M. T. (1990). Phase transitions and critical fluctuations in the visual coordination of rhythmic movements between people. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16(2), 227-247.

Schmidt, R. C., & O'Brien, B. (1997). Evaluating the dynamics of unintended interpersonal coordination. Ecological Psychology, 9(3), 189-206.

Schmidt, R. C., & Richardson, M. J. (2008). Dynamics of interpersonal coordination. In A. Fuchs & V. K. Jirsa (Eds.) Coordination: Neural, behavioral and social dynamics (281-307). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Schmidt, R. C., Richardson, M. J., Arsenault, C., & Galantucci, B. (2007). Visual tracking and entrainment to an environmental rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3, 860-870.

Shockley, K. D., Baker, A. A., Richardson, M. J., & Fowler, C. A. (2007). Articulatory constraints on interpersonal postural coordination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33, 201-208.

Shockley, K., Santana, M. V., & Fowler, C. A. (2003). Mutual interpersonal postural constraints are involved in cooperative conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29(2), 326-332.