TY - JOUR

T1 - Tilting Together

T2 - An Information-Theoretic Characterization of Behavioral Roles in Rhythmic Dyadic Interaction

AU - Trendafilov, Dari

AU - Schmitz, Gerd

AU - Hwang, Tonghun

AU - Effenberg, Alfred Oliver

AU - Polani, Daniel

N1 - Funding information: The authors acknowledge support by EU HORIZON2020-FETPROACT-2014 No. 641321.

PY - 2020/5/25

Y1 - 2020/5/25

N2 - Every joint collaborative physical activity performed by a group of people, e.g., carrying a table, typically leads to the emergence of spatiotemporal coordination of individual motor behavior. Such interpersonal coordination can arise solely based on the observation of the partners' and/or the object's movements, without the presence of verbal communication. In this paper, we investigate how the social coupling between two individuals in a collaborative task translates into measured objective and subjective performance indicators recorded in two different studies. We analyse the trends in the dyadic interrelationship based on the information-theoretic measure of transfer entropy and identify emerging leader-follower roles. In our experimental paradigm, the actions of the pair of subjects are continuously and seamlessly fused, resulting in a joint control of an object simulated on a tablet computer. Subjects need to synchronize their movements with a 90° phase difference in order to keep the object (a ball) rotating precisely on a predefined circular or elliptic trajectory on a tablet device. Results demonstrate how the identification of causal dependencies in this social interaction task could reveal specific trends in human behavior and provide insights into the emergence of social sensorimotor contingencies.

AB - Every joint collaborative physical activity performed by a group of people, e.g., carrying a table, typically leads to the emergence of spatiotemporal coordination of individual motor behavior. Such interpersonal coordination can arise solely based on the observation of the partners' and/or the object's movements, without the presence of verbal communication. In this paper, we investigate how the social coupling between two individuals in a collaborative task translates into measured objective and subjective performance indicators recorded in two different studies. We analyse the trends in the dyadic interrelationship based on the information-theoretic measure of transfer entropy and identify emerging leader-follower roles. In our experimental paradigm, the actions of the pair of subjects are continuously and seamlessly fused, resulting in a joint control of an object simulated on a tablet computer. Subjects need to synchronize their movements with a 90° phase difference in order to keep the object (a ball) rotating precisely on a predefined circular or elliptic trajectory on a tablet device. Results demonstrate how the identification of causal dependencies in this social interaction task could reveal specific trends in human behavior and provide insights into the emergence of social sensorimotor contingencies.

KW - causality

KW - collaborative interaction

KW - information theory

KW - interpersonal coordination

KW - sensorimotor contingencies

KW - social interaction

KW - transfer entropy

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086167930&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00185

DO - 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00185

M3 - Article

C2 - 32523522

VL - 14

JO - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

JF - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

SN - 1662-5161

M1 - 185

ER -