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Interpersonal coordination of body movement—or similarity in patterning and timing of body movement between interaction partners—is well documented in face-to-face (FTF) conversation. Here, we investigated the degree to which interpersonal coordination is impacted by the amount of visual information available and the type of interaction conversation partners are having. To do so within a naturalistic context, we took advantage of the increased familiarity with videoconferencing (VC) platforms and with limited visual information in FTF conversation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Pairs of participants communicated in one of three ways: FTF in a laboratory setting while socially distanced and wearing face masks; VC in a laboratory setting with a view of one another's full movements; or VC in a remote setting with a view of one another's face and shoulders. Each pair held three conversations: affiliative, argumentative, and cooperative task-based. We quantified interpersonal coordination as the relationship between the two participants' overall body movement using nonlinear time series analyses. Coordination changed as a function of the contextual constraints, and these constraints interacted with coordination patterns to affect subjective conversation outcomes. Importantly, we found patterns of results that were distinct from previous research; we hypothesize that these differences may be due to changes in the broader social context from COVID-19. Taken together, our results are consistent with a dynamical systems view of social phenomena, with interpersonal coordination emerging from the interaction between components, constraints, and history of the system.

Thin-slice methodology has provided us with abundant behavioral streams that self-reported measures would fail to capture, but traditional analytical paradigms in social and personality psychology cannot fully capture the temporal trajectories of person perception at zero acquaintance. At the same time, empirical investigations into how persons and situations jointly predict behavior enacted in situ are scarce, despite the importance of examining real-world behavior to understand any phenomenon of interest. To complement existing theoretical models and analyses, we propose the dynamic latent state-trait model blending dynamical systems theory and person perception. We present a data-driven case study using thin-slice methodology to demonstrate the model. This study provides direct empirical support for the proposed theoretical model on person perception at zero acquaintance highlighting the target, the perceiver, the situation, and time. The results of the study demonstrate that dynamical systems theory approaches can be leveraged to provide information about person perception at zero acquaintance above and beyond that of more traditional approaches. Classification code: 3040 (Social Perception & Cognition)

Perception-action coordination (also known as sensorimotor synchronization, SMS) is often studied by analyzing motor coordination with auditory rhythms. The current study assesses phasing—a compositional technique in which two people tap the same rhythm at varying phases by adjusting tempi—to explore how SMS is impacted by individual and situational factors. After practice trials, participants engaged in the experimental phasing task with a metronome at tempi ranging from 80–140 beats per minute (bpm). Multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis (MdRQA) was used to compare nonlinear dynamics of phasing performance. Varying coupling patterns emerged and were significantly predicted by tempo and linguistic experience. Participants who successfully phased replicated findings from an original case study, demonstrating stable tapping patterns near in-phase and antiphase, while those unsuccessful at phasing showed weaker attraction to in-phase and antiphase.

The current research study characterized syntactic productivity across a range of 5-year-old children with autism and explored the degree to which this productivity was associated with standardized measures of language and autism symptomatology. Natural language samples were transcribed from play-based interactions between a clinician and participants with an autism diagnosis. Speech samples were parsed for grammatical morphemes and were used to generate measures of MLU and total number of utterances. We applied categorical recurrence quantification analysis, a technique used to quantify patterns of repetition in behaviors, to the children’s noun-related and verb-related speech. Recurrence metrics captured the degree to which children repeated specific lexical/grammatical units (i.e., recurrence rate) and the degree to which children repeated combinations of lexical/grammatical units (i.e., percent determinism). Findings indicated that beyond capturing patterns shown in traditional linguistic analysis, recurrence can reveal differences in the speech productions of children with autism spectrum disorder at the lexical and grammatical levels. We also found that the degree of repeating noun-related units and grammatical units was related to MLU and ADOS Severity Score, while the degree of repeating unit combinations (e.g., saying “the big fluffy dog” or the determiner-adjective-adjective-noun construction multiple times), in general, was only related to MLU.

Interpersonal coordination of body movement—or the similarity in patterning and timing of body movement between interaction partners over time—is a well-documented phenomenon in face-to-face (FTF) conversation. The present study will investigate the degree to which interpersonal coordination is impacted by the amount of visual information available and the type of interaction conversation partners are having. To do so within a naturalistic context, we take advantage of changes induced by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has changed communication, with mitigation efforts having forced nearly everyone to engage over videoconferencing (VC) platforms (which limit body visibility but not face visibility) or to meet FTF with public health constraints (which limit face visibility but not body visibility). We will ask 69 pairs of participants to communicate in one of three ways: (1) socially distanced FTF while wearing masks; (2) VC in a laboratory where each partner will see one another's full torso; or (3) VC in a remote setting where each partner will see only one another's face and shoulders. Each pair will hold three conversations: (a) affiliative, (b) argumentative, and (c) task-based. We will quantify interpersonal coordination by extracting overall amounts of movement from videos of the participants using well-validated computer vision methods and then calculating the relationship between the two participants' movement using nonlinear time series analyses. In doing so, we will be able to identify the degree to which visual information and conversational context shape the emergence of interpersonal coordination within now-naturalistic modes of interaction.

In recent years, political activists have taken to social media platforms to rapidly reach broad audiences. Despite the prevalence of micro-blogging in these sociopolitical movements, the degree to which virtual mobilization reflects or drives real-world movements is unclear. Here, we explore the dynamics of real-world events and Twitter social cohesion in Syria during the Arab Spring. Using the nonlinear methods cross-recurrence quantification analysis and windowed cross-recurrence quantification analysis, we investigate if frequency of events of different intensities are coupled with social cohesion found in Syrian tweets. Results indicate that online social cohesion is coupled with the counts of all, positive, and negative events each day but shows a decreased connection to negative events when outwardly directed events (i.e., source events) were considered. We conclude with a discussion of implications and applications of nonlinear methods in political science research.

With increasing demand for training in data science, extracurricular or "ad hoc" education efforts have emerged to help individuals acquire relevant skills and expertise. Although extracurricular efforts already exist for many computationally intensive disciplines, their support of data science education has significantly helped in coping with the speed of innovation in data science practice and formal curricula. While the proliferation of ad hoc efforts is an indication of their popularity, less has been documented about the needs that they are designed to meet, the limitations that they face, and practical suggestions for holding successful efforts. To holistically understand the role of different ad hoc formats for data science, we surveyed organizers of ad hoc data science education efforts to understand how organizers perceived the events to have gone-including areas of strength and areas requiring growth. We also gathered recommendations from these past events for future organizers. Our results suggest that the perceived benefits of ad hoc efforts go beyond developing technical skills and may provide continued benefit in conjunction with formal curricula, which warrants further investigation. As increasing numbers of researchers from computational fields with a history of complex data become involved with ad hoc efforts to share their skills, the lessons learned that we extract from the surveys will provide concrete suggestions for the practitioner-leaders interested in creating, improving, and sustaining future efforts.

Abstract Previous research has demonstrated reliable fluctuations in attentional processes during the course of the day. Everyday life experience sampling, during which participants respond to “probes” delivered at random intervals throughout the day on their mobile devices, is an effective tool for capturing such diurnal fluctuations in a naturalistic way. The existence of diurnal fluctuations in the case of mind-wandering, however, has not been examined to date. We did so in two studies. In the first study, we employed everyday experience sampling to obtain self-reports from 146 university students who rated the degree of free movement in their thoughts multiple times per day over five days. These time course data were analyzed using multilevel modelling. Freely moving thought was found to fluctuate reliably over the course of the day, with lower ratings reported in the early morning and afternoon and higher ratings around midday and evening. In the second study, we replicated these effects with a reanalysis of data from a past everyday experience-sampling study. We also demonstrated differences in parameter values for the models representing freely moving thought and two common conceptualizations of mind-wandering: task-unrelated thought and stimulus-independent thought. Taken together, the present results establish and replicate a complex pattern of change over the course of the day in how freely thought moves, while also providing further evidence that freedom of movement is dissociable from other dimensions of thought such as its task-relatedness and stimulus-dependence. Future research should focus on probing possible mechanisms behind circadian fluctuations of thought dynamics.

Using fractal analyses to study events allows us to capture the scale-independence of those events, that is, no matter at which level we study a phenomenon, we should get roughly the same results because events exhibit similar structure across scales. This is demonstrably true in mathematical fractals but is less assured in behavioral fractals. The current research directly tests the scale-independence hypothesis in the behavioral domain by exploring the fractal structure of aggression, a social phenomenon comprising events that span temporal scales from minutes of face-to-face arguments to centuries of international armed conflicts. Using publicly available data, we examined the temporal fractal structure of four scales of aggression: wars (very macrolevel, worldwide data), riots (macrolevel, worldwide data), violent crimes (microlevel, data gathered from cities and towns in the United States of America), and body movement during arguments (very microlevel, data gathered on American participants). Our results lend mixed support to the scale-independence hypothesis and provide insight into the self-organization of human interactions.

Coordination within and between organisms is one of the most complex abilities of living systems, requiring the concerted regulation of many physiological constituents, and this complexity can be particularly difficult to explain by appealing to physics. A valuable framework for understanding biological coordination is the coordinative structure, a self-organized assembly of physiological elements that collectively performs a specific function. Coordinative structures are characterized by three properties: (1) multiple coupled components, (2) soft-assembly, and (3) functional organization. Coordinative structures have been hypothesized to be specific instantiations of dissipative structures, non-equilibrium, self-organized, physical systems exhibiting complex pattern formation in structure and behaviors. We pursued this hypothesis by testing for these three properties of coordinative structures in an electrically-driven dissipative structure. Our system demonstrates dynamic reorganization in response to functional perturbation, a behavior of coordinative structures called reciprocal compensation. Reciprocal compensation is corroborated by a dynamical systems model of the underlying physics. This coordinated activity of the system appears to derive from the system’s intrinsic end-directed behavior to maximize the rate of entropy production. The paper includes three primary components: (1) empirical data on emergent coordinated phenomena in a physical system, (2) computational simulations of this physical system, and (3) theoretical evaluation of the empirical and simulated results in the context of physics and the life sciences. This study reveals similarities between an electrically-driven dissipative structure that exhibits end-directed behavior and the goal-oriented behaviors of more complex living systems.

Much work on communication and joint action conceptualizes interaction as a dynamical system. Under this view, dynamic properties of interaction should be shaped by the context in which the interaction is taking place. Here we explore interpersonal movement coordination or synchrony—the degree to which individuals move in similar ways over time—as one such context-sensitive property. Studies of coordination have typically investigated how these dynamics are influenced by either high-level constraints (i.e., slow-changing factors) or low-level constraints (i.e., fast-changing factors like movement). Focusing on nonverbal communication behaviors during naturalistic conversation, we analyzed how interacting participants' head movement dynamics were shaped simultaneously by high-level constraints (i.e., conversation type; friendly conversations vs. arguments) and low-level constraints (i.e., perceptual stimuli; non-informative visual stimuli vs. informative visual stimuli). We found that high- and low-level constraints interacted non-additively to affect interpersonal movement dynamics, highlighting the context sensitivity of interaction and supporting the view of joint action as a complex adaptive system.

The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend the concept of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment--as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter--during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time-locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention at three time scales. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient content during the debates: Across well-known remarks in each debate, mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after it occurs; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.

Caregiver support is an important contextual factor in the daily functioning of children with cerebral palsy (CP), but few studies have examined child-caregiver interactions during collaborative motor tasks to identify characteristics of effective support that should be promoted in clinical interventions. The aims of this exploratory study were to (1) describe the interaction dynamics of children with CP and typically developing (TD) children with their respective caregivers during a collaborative motor task and (2) develop clinically relevant hypotheses regarding features of child-caregiver interactions that relate to effective caregiver support. Twelve child-caregiver dyads (6 including children with CP, 6 including TD children) participated. Each dyad attempted to construct the tallest tower structure in 10 min using marshmallows and raw spaghetti. Time-series of upper extremity positions were obtained through motion capture and used to examine child-caregiver movement coordination. Videos were coded for language structure and number of building materials used. Five TD dyads and one CP dyad successfully constructed a free-standing tower. During periods of increased tower breakage, TD dyads demonstrated increased movement coordination compared to CP dyads. Unsuccessful dyads (most of whom were CP dyads) demonstrated interaction dynamics characterized by the child leading in movement during periods of increased tower breakage. Overall, in TD dyads, caregivers used more interrogatives than imperatives, and children used more imperatives than interrogatives. This pattern was reversed for CP dyads. From these results we identified future hypotheses about aspects of interactions that may facilitate collaborative motor performance (and thus caregiver support) between children with CP and their caregivers.