Understanding the effects of rhythmic coordination on children's prosocial behaviours

Joint rhythmic activities are known to be able to enhance prosociality in both adults and children. A large body of research shows that rhythmic coordination could promote bonding and increase prosocial behaviours such as helping, cooperating and sharing, suggesting that rhythmic interaction could be an effective tool to promote children&#39;s prosocial development. Nevertheless, the mechanism underlying the prosocial effects of rhythmic activities remains under debate. In this brief paper, we review a selection of literature that examines this mechanism from the perspective of interpersonal coordination, discussing the roles mimicry, synchrony, coordination and shared intentionality play in the process. In the end, we provide recommendations for future work to advance our understanding of the effects of rhythmic interaction on prosociality and future practice to improve children&#39;s prosocial development.</p

Effects of Rhythmic Turn-Taking Coordination on Five-Year-Old Children's Prosocial Behaviors

Rhythmic activities such as joint music-making and synchronous moving are known to produce prosocial effects in both adults and children, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. One possible mechanism is that the time-locked, fine-grained coordination characteristic of rhythmic activities plays a key role in producing powerful prosocial effects. The present study investigated how coordination in a joint music-making task would influence kindergarteners&#39; prosociality toward both coperformers and unaffiliated strangers. The study involved 138 Chinese children (72 girls, M = 5 years and 6 months, range = 5.0 to 6.0 years) from urban middle-class families. Participants were paired and instructed to play percussion instruments in alternation accompanying a song. In the fine-grained coordination condition, the dyad alternated every measure, resulting in a moment-to-moment coordinative experience; in the coarse-grained coordination condition where the coordination was sparser, the dyad alternated every eight measures. Children in the fine-grained coordination condition were subsequently more willing to help their partner complete a block-assembly task and more generous in sharing stickers with unknown children in a dictator game, compared with children in the coarse-grained coordination condition. These findings demonstrate that fine-grained coordination in rhythmic activities increases prosociality above and beyond having a shared goal of coperforming, supporting that coordination is an integral part of the prosocial mechanism. The prosocial effects of joint rhythmic activities generalized beyond the coperformers to anonymous strangers, indicating that the role of coordination may change from directing specific bonding in infancy to encouraging general prosociality from early childhood and onward.</p

Topometric imitation learning for route following under appearance change

Traditional navigation models in autonomous driving rely heavily on metric maps, which severely limits their application in large scale environments. In this paper, we introduce a two-level navigation architecture that contains a topological-metric memory structure and a deep image-based controller. The hybrid memory extracts visual features at each location point with a deep convolutional neural network, and stores information about local driving commands at each location point based on metric information estimated from egomotion information. The topological-metric memory is seamlessly integrated with a conditional imitation learning controller through the navigational commands that drives the vehicle between different vertices without collision. We test the whole system in teach-and-repeat experiments in an urban driving simulator. Results show that after being trained in a separate environment, the system could quickly adapt to novel environments with a single teach trial and follow route successively under various illumination and weather conditions.</p

Temporal predictability promotes prosocial behavior in 5-year-old children.

Although interpersonal coordinative activities have been shown to produce prosocial effects in both adults and children, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. While most approaches focus on the effect of mimicry and synchronous behavioral matching, we hypothesize that temporal predictability might play a central role in producing prosocial effects, as it directs coordination and might therefore strengthen shared intentionality. In a percussion task with pairs of 5-year old children, we manipulated temporal predictability and movement similarity/predictability between the pair's movements. Temporal predictability was manipulated by instructing the pair to play the instruments either to beats that were evenly-spaced, and therefore predictable, or to beats that were random, and therefore unpredictable. Movement similarity/predictability was manipulated by having the pair play rhythmic patterns that were similar, predictable, or independent from each other. Children who played to predictable beats were more willing to solve problems cooperatively with their partners and to help when their partners had an accident. In contrast, there was no positive effect of rhythmic predictability or similarity. These results are the first to show that temporal predictability affects prosociality independent of movement similarity or predictability. We conclude that the predictable time frame commonly seen in coordinative activities may be key to strengthening shared intentionality and producing prosocial effects

It's How You Teach, Not What You Teach: Preschoolers Prefer Coordinative Instruction from Informants

When children make decisions about whom to trust or learn from, they consider not only the informant’s reliability but also the social bond. Previous research often assigned a social label to informants without investigating how the interactive dynamics between informants and children influence learning and trust. This study investigates 3- to 6-year-old children’s preference towards informants who deliver instructions with or without coordination. In two experiments, children evaluated coordinative and non-coordinative informants on game-playing capability, willingness to engage with or learn from the informants, and selective trust in unrelated tasks. Children consistently preferred coordinative informants, perceiving them as more capable and trustworthy, over informants who demonstrated the information without coordinative turn-taking. This preference persisted across age groups, challenging previous notions about children's preference for information completeness. The findings highlight the prosocial effects of coordination, extending its influence beyond peer relationships to significantly impact selective trust when learning from knowledgeable individuals

INFLUENCE OF INTERNALIZING PROBLEMS ON ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN CHINESE ADOLESCENTS: THE MEDIATING EFFECT OF ATTENTION PROBLEMS

Adolescent mental health has become a public concern, and it is necessary to know how problem behaviors affect academic achievement. The current study surveyed 12,672 adolescents in eastern China, and results indicated clinical cut-offs on each problem behavior. We then examined how internalizing problems lead to negative academic results. Findings suggest Attention problems are a key factor. Anxiety/depression and somatic complaints have no direct effect on academic performance but are mediated by attention problems. This study can serve practice of schooling and parenting, and provide basis for developing clinical intervention strategy in [email protected]

When Boys Are More Generous Than Girls: Effects of Gender and CoordinationLevel on Prosocial Behavior in 4-year-old Chinese Children

Children develop a sense of joint commitment and sharedintentionality during collaborative activities, which mayproduce prosocial effects in social coordinative activities.Past studies have found mixed results on the prosocial effectof shared intentionality. We hypothesized that it is the degreeof coordination and not simply shared intentionality thatfacilitates social bonding. In a block-assembly task with 4-year-old children, we manipulated degree of coordination.Children in the continuous high-level coordination conditionwere more generous in a Dictator Game and more willing tohelp their partner complete a task, compared with childrenwho engaged in a task with the same end-product thatrequired less coordination. Surprisingly, we also found thatboys shared more resources than girls, a result that weattributed to the emphasis on the importance of generosity formales in Chinese culture

Rhythmic Coordination Affects Children’s Perspective-Taking during Online Communication

We examined how rhythmic activities affect children’s perspective-taking in a referential communication task with 69 Chinese 5- to 6-year-old children. The child first played an instrument with a virtual partner in one of three coordination conditions: synchrony, asynchrony, and antiphase synchrony. Eye movements were then monitored with the partner giving instructions to identify a shape referent which included a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., big cubic block). Participants with awareness of their partner’s perspective could, in principle, identify the intended referent before the shape was named when the target contrast (a small cubic block) was in shared ground whereas a competitor contrast was occluded for the partner. Children in the asynchrony and antiphase synchrony conditions, but not the synchrony condition, showed anticipatory looks to the target, suggesting that playing instruments asynchronously or in alternation facilitates perspective-taking, likely by training self-other discrimination and inhibitory control

Effect of transfer type on labor's role in ownership judgments

Many property issues in real life occur in the transfer contexts. Previous studies have investigated the role of creation and value change in people's use of the labor rule when solving property issues involving conflicting cues between labor and first possession, but have neglected the possible effect of transfer types. This study explored how items get transferred from the original owner to the next affected adults' use of the labor rule when assigning ownership. Eighty-two participants (M-age = 22.10 years) read some scenarios in which a person modified some redwoods into a set of furniture after he (a) was requested to store the redwoods for another person, (b) borrowed the redwoods from another person, or (c) found the redwoods lost by another person. Participants were then asked to decide whether the original possessor or the modifier of the transferred objects was the owner, and to explain their answers. The results showed that most subjects were inclined to select the laborer as owner in the losing context, and support the original possessor as owner in the storing context. Participants were more likely to justify their answers with the first possession heuristic in the storing context, but more likely to justify their answers with transfer types in the borrowing context and justify their answers with knowledge and intention in the losing context. The study shows that transfer types affect use of the labor rule in adults' ownership judgments, and may shed light on legislation and court decisions in real life