On an ordinary day, people perform actions that affect other people's behavior resulting in outcomes that affect both. Such social interactions are dynamic, far ranging, and usually require an exchange of information between the parties involved. A simple example is two persons modifying their approach to an elevator to accommodate each other's passage through the narrow space. More complex situations involve a teacher providing guidance to a pupil based on the pupil's own actions or training foreign military personnel to accomplish some function that depends on the latter's previous experiences. How are such social interactions to be quantified and understood? What goes on in a person's brain when they interact with another and what principles and mechanisms govern the coordination between brains? The investigators of this project constitute an interdisciplinary team whose expertise spans physics, cognitive science and neuroscience. They use the concepts, methods and tools of coordination dynamics, the science of coordination, to investigate both the behavioral and neural underpinnings of social behavioral interactions. The basic experimental paradigm involves coordination of movements between two people or between an individual and a computer avatar endowed with human-like capabilities. Pairs of people perform simple actions in front of each other and the investigators monitor key behavioral and neural variables that reveal how strongly each affects the other. By testing specific predictions of a mathematical model of coupled dynamical systems, the investigators aim to understand how social coordination evolves in time and to determine the respective strength of one person's influence on another.
Modern technology is always seeking to enhance human experience and productivity. The notion of 'others' has been expanded to include not only real human beings but also cyber-individuals, as evident in the increasing roles played by robotics and virtual environments in everyday human transactions. In crucial experiments, a human subject interacts with a virtual partner, an avatar driven by the investigators' mathematical model of coupled dynamical systems, thereby allowing the investigators to manipulate parameters (the 'personality' or 'attitude' of the virtual partner) that are not normally accessible in studies of live interactions. Thus the present project may not only uncover rules of ordinary social coordination but also offer a principled approach to human-machine interaction. In addition, the project will disseminate knowledge about complex systems and dynamical approaches to human social behavior. The investigators will train undergraduate and graduate students in advanced methods and analysis techniques that cut across the behavioral and social sciences, the physics and mathematics of coupled dynamical systems, and neuroscience and brain imaging. The development of new measuring instruments that may apply to any arbitrary social interaction is a target. Such training aims to bring forth a new generation of interdisciplinary scientist who will be equipped to integrate studies of brain, behavior and social function within a much needed dynamical framework.
