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Synchronicities that shape the perception of joint action.

ABSTRACT: In joint performances spanning from jazz improvisation to soccer, expert performers synchronize their movements in ways that novices cannot. Particularly, experts can align the velocity profiles of their movements in order to achieve synchrony on a fine-grained time scale, compared to novices who can only synchronize the duration of their movement intervals. This study investigated how experts' ability to engage in velocity-based synchrony affects observers' perception of coordination and their aesthetic experience of joint performances. Participants observed two moving dots on a screen and were told that these reflect the hand movements of two performers engaging in joint improvisation. The dots were animated to reflect the velocity-based synchrony characteristic of expert performance (in terms of jitter of the velocity profile: Experiment 1, or through aligning sharpness of the velocity profile: Experiment 2) or contained only interval-based synchrony. Performances containing velocity-based synchrony were judged as more coordinated with performers rated as liking each other more, and were rated as more beautiful, providing observers with a stronger aesthetic experience. These findings demonstrate that subtle timing cues fundamentally shape the experience of watching joint actions, directly influencing how beautiful and enjoyable we find these interactions, as well as our perception of the relationship between co-actors.

SUBMITTER: McEllin L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7511333 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Synchronicities that shape the perception of joint action.

McEllin Luke L Knoblich Günther G Sebanz Natalie N

Scientific reports 20200923 1

In joint performances spanning from jazz improvisation to soccer, expert performers synchronize their movements in ways that novices cannot. Particularly, experts can align the velocity profiles of their movements in order to achieve synchrony on a fine-grained time scale, compared to novices who can only synchronize the duration of their movement intervals. This study investigated how experts' ability to engage in velocity-based synchrony affects observers' perception of coordination and their ...[more]

PMID: 32968191

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Project description:Fantoni & Gerbino (2014) showed that subtle postural shifts associated with reaching can have a strong hedonic impact and affect how actors experience facial expressions of emotion. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP), they found consistent congruency effects in participants who performed a facial emotion identification task after a sequence of visually-guided reaches: a face perceived as neutral in a baseline condition appeared slightly happy after comfortable actions and slightly angry after uncomfortable actions. However, skeptics about the penetrability of perception (Zeimbekis & Raftopoulos, 2015) would consider such evidence insufficient to demonstrate that observer's internal states induced by action comfort/discomfort affect perception in a top-down fashion. The action-modulated mood might have produced a back-end memory effect capable of affecting post-perceptual and decision processing, but not front-end perception. Here, we present evidence that performing a facial emotion detection (not identification) task after MAMIP exhibits systematic mood-congruent sensitivity changes, rather than response bias changes attributable to cognitive set shifts; i.e., we show that observer's internal states induced by bodily action can modulate affective perception. The detection threshold for happiness was lower after fifty comfortable than uncomfortable reaches; while the detection threshold for anger was lower after fifty uncomfortable than comfortable reaches. Action valence induced an overall sensitivity improvement in detecting subtle variations of congruent facial expressions (happiness after positive comfortable actions, anger after negative uncomfortable actions), in the absence of significant response bias shifts. Notably, both comfortable and uncomfortable reaches impact sensitivity in an approximately symmetric way relative to a baseline inaction condition. All of these constitute compelling evidence of a genuine top-down effect on perception: specifically, facial expressions of emotion are penetrable by action-induced mood. Affective priming by action valence is a candidate mechanism for the influence of observer's internal states on properties experienced as phenomenally objective and yet loaded with meaning.

Dataset Information

Synchronicities that shape the perception of joint action.

Publications

Synchronicities that shape the perception of joint action.

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