Tilting Together

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

authored by

Dari Trendafilov, Gerd Schmitz, Tonghun Hwang, Alfred Oliver Effenberg, Daniel Polani

Abstract

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.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Sports Science

External Organisation(s)

Johannes Kepler University of Linz (JKU)
University of Hertfordshire

Type

Article

Journal

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Volume

14

No. of pages

13

ISSN

1662-5161

Publication date

25.05.2020

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology, Neurology, Psychiatry and Mental health, Biological Psychiatry, Behavioral Neuroscience

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00185 (Access: Open)