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Social Motor Coordination
Everyday human actions often occur in a social context. Past psychological research has found that the motor behavior of socially situated individuals tends to be coordinated. My research performed over the last 20 years has sought to understand the mutuality, accommodation and synchrony found in everyday interactional coordination. For my dissertation and thereafter, I demonstrated the generality of the oscillatory basis of rhythmic coordination by investigating the visual coordination of rhythmic movements between two people. Interestingly, the same patterns of coordination appear in within- and between-person interlimb coordination. This implies that the same dynamical principles that govern the coordination of rhythmic movements across the CNS of a single person govern the coordination of rhythmic movements of two people connected only by visual information (Schmidt, Carello, & Turvey, 1990; Schmidt & Turvey, 1994; Amazeen, Schmidt, & Turvey, 1995; Schmidt, Bienvenu, Fitzpatrick, & Amazeen, 1998). Colleagues and I have also demonstrated that these same dynamical organizing principles can coordinate the rhythmic movements of two people unintentionally (Richardson, Marsh & Schmidt, 2005; Schmidt & O'Brien, 1997) and that the weaker, intermittent coordination that ensues is affected by both perceptual (e.g., attentional focus and information pick-up activity of the visual system) and dynamical constraints (e.g., intrapersonal rhythmic synergies and period basin of entrainment). Other research has investigated how traditional social and personality properties of a dyad (rapport, social competence) relate to dynamical properties of a dyad’s coordinated movements and how the stability of coordinated movements mirrors the stability of mental connectedness experienced in social interactions. |
