Congruency Effects in Interpersonal Coordination

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2013-12, Vol.39 (6), p.1541-1556
• Main Authors: Fine, Justin M., Gibbons, Cameron T., Amazeen, Eric L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activity levels. Psychomotricity; Adolescent; Adult; Arm; Arm movements; Biological and medical sciences; Coordination; Experimental psychology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Intention; Interpersonal Interaction; Interpersonal Relations; Limbs; Male; Mirror Neurons; Motor ability; Movement; Movement - physiology; Perceptual Motor Coordination; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychomotor activities; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Recruitment; Simulation; Social Behavior; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/a0031953

Research on interpersonal coordination has demonstrated that incongruent tasks lead to unintended movements in the orthogonal plane. These effects have been interpreted using both an embodied simulation and coordination dynamics approach. To distinguish between these two perspectives, two experiments examined whether this congruency effect is best defined spatially or anatomically. In the first experiment, participants coordinated congruent and incongruent rhythmic arm movements with an actor. To dissociate spatial and anatomical congruency, the actor was rotated 90° in the coronal plane for half of the trials. In the second experiment, participants coordinated movements of different limbs (leg and arm). Spatial and anatomical congruency was dissociated here by rotating the actor in the transverse plane. In both experiments, the unintended movements associated with the congruency effect emerged as a function of spatial congruency; there was no congruency effect associated with anatomical congruency. The data suggests that these unintended movements represent the recruitment of additional df necessary to stabilize an unstable form of coordination.