The SOCIAL COORDINATION project (2008 – present)

Acronym: SOCIAL COORDINATION
Name: Social coordination
Type: Collaborative project
Funds: SKILLS European integrated project - SCAD french ANR
UM1 key researchers: Ludovic Marin - Benoît Bardy – Julien Lagarde - Manuel Varlet (PhD student) - Jonathan Delmonte (Phd student)
Collaborators: Richard Schmidt (College of Holy Cross, USA) –  Thierry Chaminade (CNRS Marseille) - Delphine Capdevielle - Stéphane Raffard - Jean-Philippe Boulenger (Montpellier Academic Hospital) - Emanuele Ruffaldi - Alessandro Filppeschi (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy)

SOCIAL COORDINATION is a theoretical and experimental project investigating the origins of interpersonal social motor coordination, in domains such as sport (team rowing), rehabilitation (schizophrenia and social phobia), and robotics (anthropomorphic agents).

Theory and past research:

Social interaction is the hallmark of the human species. Past social and developmental psychological research has demonstrated that people interacting do not only communicate with language, their bodily movements are also tacitly coordinated. Social psychologists have been investigating naturalistic behavioral ‘entrainment’ processes in social interactions since the 1960’s and found that this motor coordination embodies functionally important dyadic psychological characteristics such as rapport. We take little notice of this coordination in our everyday social interactions. However, everyone notices a breakdown in the fluidity of an interaction with a patient with a social disorder. In pathologies such as schizophrenia and social phobia, this breakdown is not limited to verbal interactions but extends to nonverbal motor behaviors. Dysfunctional motor coordination could be a patent cue of social disorder.

Similarly, in team sport such as team rowing, the individual skills of elite atheletes are often equivalent and the difference in performance between two teams strongly depends on the ability of the athletes to work together in a highly synchronized way. When rowing as a crew for instance, rowers do not have only to produce as much force as possible on the oars. For the same individual movement patterns, the highest speed of the boat is obtained when movements of the rowers in the team are synchronized. Unsynchronized movements cause additional displacements of the boat increasing the friction and thus decreasing its speed, especially for higher rates of movement.

 Finally, artificial agents such as humanoid robots also still lack the ability to coordinate with another agent. This absence could participate to the feeling of repulsion that has been attributed to realistic albeit imperfect anthropomorphic agents. While this “uncanny valley of eeriness" experience was originally attributed to the appearance and motion of androids, recent developments point to the importance of integrated behaviors. In this context, the lack of motor coordination is a very promising candidate to explain the eeriness feeling when interacting with android robots.

Current research:

The Social coordination project now investigates interpersonal synchronization in three main areas.

Social postural coordination: We investigate in this part whether a visual coupling between two people can produce spontaneous interpersonal postural coordination and change their intrapersonal postural coordination involved in the control of stance. In recent studies (e.g., Varlet et al., 2011), we examined the front-to-back head displacements of participants and the angular motion of their hip and ankle during a visual tracking task performed alone and paired. Our results showed that visually paired participants exhibited spontaneous coordination between the movements of their head, hip, and ankle. Moreover, the visual coupling modified the spontaneous intrapersonal ankle-hip coordination dynamics of participants and their performance during visual tracking. Generally, our findings demonstrate reciprocal relations between intrapersonal and interpersonal coordination during social interaction.

Social Coordination in Agents with Deficits (SCAD). Social phobia patients are reluctant to take part in an interaction and to maintain eye contact with another person. Their behavior is characterized by behavioral inhibition as well as awkward hand gestures and body posture. The association of social and motor disorders raises the question of dysfunctional motor coordination. In order to determine whether these patients are less synchronized because of impairment specific to social cognition or because of the pathology’s indirect influence on motor behavior, we will compare their coordination with schizophrenic patients whose attentional deficit is most salient. If results support that dysfunction of motor coordination results from a specific impairment of social cognition in social phobics patients, we will then assess the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavior therapy using a humanoid robot to strengthen patients’ coordination and improve the social competence of their interactions. This work is in progress. Please visit the SCAD web site for more details.

Interpersonal coordination during team rowing. As mentionned above, a good synchronization between members of the crew is a contributing factor of performance on a 2000 race. Because one limitation of the learning of team rowing in outdoor conditions is the difficulty, both for coach and rowers, to have an accurate estimation of the inter-personal coordination, efficient feedbacks are difficult to give to the trainees. Off-line videos can be used to obtain an accurate estimation of the synchronization, but they do not allow the delivery of feedbacks in real-time. In this research, we combine virtual reality rendering and real-time motion capturing  to investigate whether it is possible to learn the specific interpersonal coordination skill with a virtual teammate on an indoor rowing machine, and to transfer the acquired skill to synchronizing with a real teammate. In our learning protocol,  the synchronization can be either spontaneous (no feedback other than the presence of the avatar), or increased by a visual feedback displayed on the avatar body giving real-time information about their coordination. Our first results (Varlet et al., submitted) reveal that participants improve their ability to synchronize with the virtual teammate in both groups, helping them when synchronizing in a transfer task with a real teammate, and that this learning is better for the participants that had the increased feedback available.

Key references (downloadable version in page Vitae):

1. Filippeschi, A., Ruffaldi, E., Frisoli, A., Avizzano, C., Varlet, M., Marin, L., Lagarde, J., Bardy, B. G., & Bergamasco, M. (2009). Dynamic models of team rowing for a virtual environment rowing training system. International Journal of Virtual Reality,  8, 19-26.

2. Ruffaldi, E., Filippeschi, A., Avizzano, C. A., Bardy, B. G., Gopher, D., & Bergamasco, M. (2011). Feedbacks, affordances, and accelerators for training sports in virtual environments. Presence, in press.

3. Varlet, M., Marin, L., Lagarde, J., & Bardy, B. G. (2011). Social postural coordination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37, 473-483.

4. Varlet, M., Marin, L., Raffard, S., Schmidt, R. C., Capdevielle, D., Boulenger, J. P., Del-Monte, J., & Bardy, B. G. (2012). Impairments of social motor coordination in schizophrenia. PLoS ONE, 7(1): e29772.