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), and exhibit an increased level of postural entrainment during verbal exchanges (Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003). 

         

 

Recent studies have also examined how rhythmic coordination is affected by competitive vs. cooperative tasks, natural vs. rhythmic speaking, and the degree to which interpersonal coordination is mediated by the amount or clarity of visual and/or verbal information. Additional studies examine the consequences of temporal coordination of movement for social psychological processes such as rapport and group formation, and examine whether the informational versus cognitive grounding of synchrony and social mimicry processes differ. Applications currently planned include examining whether autistic vs. non-autistic individuals different 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 systems (unit). 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 and Baron, in preparation). Consistent with past affordance research, we find that behavioral transitions are determined by body-scaled information. That is, shifts between 1and 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 are exploring the physical and social psychological constraints on the emergence of a social collective or interpersonal synergy, using pairs of individuals who have different action capabilities and who are strangers or friends, as well as examining the social psychological effects of cooperative action constrained by information specific to action possibilities in the animal-animal-environment system.

 

 

Faculty: Claudia Carello, Carol A. Fowler, Bruce Kay, Kerry L. Marsh, Michael J. Richardson

 

Collaborators: Reuben Baron, Lucy Johnston, Richard C. Schmidt, Kevin Shockley

 

Graduate Students: Aimee Baker (UC), Stacy Lopresti-Goodman, Rob Isenhower, Steven Harrison, Annie Olmstead

 

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.

Baker, A. A., Shockley, K. D., Richardson, M. J., & Fowler, C. A. (in preparation). Constraints on interpersonal postural coordination

Marsh, K. L., Richardson, M. J., Baron, R. M., & Schmidt, R. C. (submitted) Contrasting approaches to perceiving and acting with others.

Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., & Baron, R. M. (in preparation). One-effector and two-effector lifting: The mutually nested structure of affordances and perception-action systems.

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.

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., Richardson, M. J., Arsenault, C., & Galantucci, B. (in preparation).  Visual tracking and rhythmic coordination.

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.

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.