The Stance Leads the Dance: The Emergence of Role in a Joint Supra-Postural Task

Successfully meeting a shared goal usually requires co-actors to adopt complementary roles. However, in many cases, who adopts what role is not explicitly predetermined, but instead emerges as a consequence of the differences in the individual abilities and constraints imposed upon each actor. Perhaps the most basic of roles are leader and follower. Here, we investigated the emergence of “leader-follower” dynamics in inter-personal coordination using a joint supra-postural task paradigm (Ramenzoni et al., 2011; Athreya et al., 2014). Pairs of actors were tasked with holding two objects in alignment (each actor manually controlled one of the objects) as they faced different demands for stance (stable vs. difficult) and control (which actor controlled the larger or smaller object). Our results indicate that when actors were in identical stances, neither led the inter-personal (between actors) coordination by any systematic fashion. Alternatively, when asymmetries in postural demands were introduced, the actor with the more difficult stance led the coordination (as determined using cross-recurrence quantification analysis). Moreover, changes in individual stance difficulty resulted in similar changes in the structure of both intra-personal (individual) and inter-personal (dyadic) coordination, suggesting a scale invariance of the task dynamics. Implications for the study of interpersonal coordination are discussed

The Human-Body-in-Coordination as Perceptual Instrument

Recent evidence suggests that the human body in locomotor coordination performs dual roles, acting to propel the body over the surface of support, and embodying haptic information arising from and specific to the movement of the body as a whole with respect to the substrate. Here we show that blindfolded human subjects, trained to crawl using gait patterns that differed in the spatio-temporal symmetries defined with respect to the arms and legs in coordination, perceived distance travelled quadrupedally. These results suggest that 1) the body in coordination gives rise to a haptic measure of how one is moving through the world relative to the substrate and 2) that the measure that results is specific to the softly assembled global organization of the locomotor action system

The Human-Body-in-Coordination as Perceptual Instrument

Recent evidence suggests that the human body in locomotor coordination performs dual roles, acting to propel the body over the surface of support, and embodying haptic information arising from and specific to the movement of the body as a whole with respect to the substrate. Here we show that blindfolded human subjects, trained to crawl using gait patterns that differed in the spatio-temporal symmetries defined with respect to the arms and legs in coordination, perceived distance travelled quadrupedally. These results suggest that 1) the body in coordination gives rise to a haptic measure of how one is moving through the world relative to the substrate and 2) that the measure that results is specific to the softly assembled global organization of the locomotor action system

Comparing bivariate and multivariate timeseries analysis in joint action using cross-recurrence quantification analysis

When pursuing a shared goal, pairs of individuals act in ways that reflect the reciprocal relationships between individual and interpersonal capabilities, demands, and actions. One important question facing researchers is how to best analyze these joint action data given the many behaviors spread out across multiple actors that contribute to achieving the shared outcome. In this paper, we compare the analysis of interpersonal motor coordination when using a single measured timeseries from each actor to using multivariate (more than two) timeseries when using cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Pairs of participants completed a joint Fitts’s task by moving their arms between two targets relative to one another (in-phase or anti-phase). Asymmetries in the task demands were produced by varying the relative distances participants had to move between targets and individual stance demands. Our results indicate that when using a multivariate timeseries from each actor for phase space reconstruction, CRQA was more sensitive to changes in coordination dynamics brought about by these experimental manipulations, suggesting that when available, joint action researchers would benefit from using multivariate timeseries in the analysis of behavior

Multi-scale interactions in interpersonal coordination

Background: Interpersonal coordination is an essential aspect of daily life, and crucial to performance in cooperative and competitive team sports. While empirical research has investigated interpersonal coordination using a wide variety of analytical tools and frameworks, to date very few studies have employed multifractal techniques to study the nature of interpersonal coordination across multiple spatiotemporal scales. In the present study we address this gap. Methods: We investigated the dynamics of a simple dyadic interpersonal coordination task where each participant manually controlled a virtual object in relation to that of his or her partner. We tested whether the resulting hand-movement time series exhibits multi-scale properties and whether those properties are associated with successful performance. Results: Using the formalism of multifractals, we show that the performance on the coordination task is strongly multi-scale, and that the multi-scale properties appear to arise from interaction-dominant dynamics. Further, we find that the measure of across-scale interactions, multifractal spectrum width, predicts successful performance at the level of the dyad. Conclusion: The results are discussed with respect to the implications of multifractals and interaction-dominance for understanding control in an interpersonal context

Synchronization Assessment for Collective Behavior

Team cognition can be defined as the ability that humans haveto coordinate with others through a complex environment.Sports offer exquisite examples of this dynamic interplayrequiring decision making and other perceptual-cognitiveskills to adjust individual decisions to the team self-organization and vice-versa. Considering players of a team asperiodic phase oscillators, synchrony analyses can be used tomodel the coordination of a team. Nonetheless, a mainlimitation of current models is that collective behavior iscontext independent. In other words, players of a team can behighly synchronized without this corresponding to ameaningful coordination dynamics relevant to the context ofthe game. Considering these issues, the aim of this study wasto develop a method of analysis sensitive to the context forevidence-based measures of team cognition

Dynamic structures of parent-child number talk: An application of categorical cross-recurrence quantification analysis and companion to Duong et al. (2024)

Social interactions, particularly parent-child conversations, play a critical role in children’s early learning and pre-academic skill development. While these interactions are bidirectional, complex, and dynamic, much of the research in this area tends to separate speakers’ talk and capture the frequency of words or utterances. Beyond the aggregation of talk exists rich information about conversational structures and processes, such as the extent to which speakers are aligned or reciprocate each other’s talk. These measures can be derived using categorical cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA), a method that quantifies the temporal structure and co-visitation of individual and sequential events, e.g., utterances between speakers. In this paper, we present an application of CRQA, following the protocol described in our tutorial paper (Duong et al., 2024, this issue), to describe alignment in parent-child conversations about numbers and math (i.e., number talk). We used the ‘crqa’ package in R and the code used in this application is available in the Supplemental Materials. Further, the CRQA measures derived from this application were compared to traditional frequency measures of talk, i.e., counts of utterances, in the prediction of children’s math skills. Overall, we showed that (1) CRQA can be applied to existing transcription data to uncover theoretically-driven patterns of parent-child talk that are not captured by common frequency measures and (2) these CRQA measures offer additional, rich information about interactions beyond frequencies of talk and can be used to predict individual differences in children’s math skills

Exploring dynamic structures of dyadic conversations using categorical cross recurrence quantification analysis: A tutorial

Social interactions are defined by the dynamic and reciprocal exchange of information in a process referred to as mutual alignment. Statistical methods for characterizing alignment between two interacting partners are emerging. In general, they exploit the temporal organization of dyadic interactions to uncover the effect of one partner on the other and the extent to which partners are aligned. This paper describes and provides a tutorial on one such method, categorical cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA), which quantifies the temporal structure and co-visitation of individual and sequential states of interest. CRQA is a useful descriptive technique that can be used to explore the extent, structures, and patterns of partner alignment within dyadic interactions. We provide a brief technical introduction to CRQA and a tutorial on its application to understanding parent-child linguistic interactions using the ‘crqa’ package in R (Coco, Monster, Leonardi, Dale, & Wallot, 2021)