Interpersonal movement coordination in jointly moving a rocking Board

Abstract

Most studies of interpersonal movement coordination have, to date, focused on the tacit entrainment of rhythmic motion patterns in tasks that lack any shared action goal (see e.g. Schmidt & O’Brien, 1997; Richardson et al., 2006). In the present study we investigated how subject pairs coordinate their movements when deliberately trying, on a rocking board, to track a visually presented motion pattern. In particular, we asked our subject pairs to jointly produce rocking movements of predefined amplitude-frequency combinations. The question that we addressed was whether we could differentiate between incidental and deliberate control of the rocking-board movements by the dyads. The results show that also in collaborative motor control dyads are capable of exploiting biomechanics while overriding such constraints when bringing task performance under deliberate control.