Dyadic body competence predicts movement synchrony during the mirror game

Abstract

The process of synchronizing our body movements with others is known to enhance rapport, affect, and prosociality. Furthermore, emerging evidence suggests that synchronizing activities may enhance cognitive performance. Unknown, by contrast, is the extent to which people's individual traits and experiences influence their ability to achieve and maintain movement synchrony with another person, which is key for unlocking the social and affective benefits of movement synchrony. Here, we take a dyad-centered approach to gain a deeper understanding of the role of embodiment in achieving and maintaining movement synchrony. Using existing data, we explored the relationship between body competence and body perception scores at the level of the dyad, and the dyad's movement synchrony and complexity while playing a 2.5-min movement mirroring game. The data revealed that dyadic body competence scores positively correlate with movement synchrony, but not complexity, and that dyadic body perception scores are not associated with movement synchrony or complexity. Movement synchrony was greater when the more experienced member of the dyad was responsible for copying movements. Finally, movement synchrony and complexity were stable across the duration of the mirror game. These findings show that movement synchrony is sensitive to the composition of the dyad involved, specifically the dyad's embodiment, illuminating the value of dyadic approaches to understanding body movements in social contexts.

Keywords: body competence; body perception; embodiment; kinematics; mirror game; motor synchrony; perception-action coupling.

Figure 1

Top: Participant (red) plays the mirror game with an experimental confederate (blue). Upper-body movements were video-recorded using a pair of GoPros, one facing each member of the dyad. Bottom: Movement synchrony and complexity were calculated using the coordinates of each person’s joints per frame, as tracked using OpenPose software.

Figure 2

Top row: Distribution of dyadic body competence and body perception scores. Dashed line indicates the mean. Middle row: Relationship between movement synchrony and dyadic measures of body competence and body perception. Bottom row: Relationship between movement complexity and dyadic measures of body competence and body perception.

Figure 3

Development of movement synchrony and over the course of the 2.5-min mirror game, in discrete 15-s windows.

Figure 4

Left: Movement synchrony when the participant takes the role of the mirror-game leader and follower. Middle: Relationship between level of synchrony and confederate session (a proxy for increasing expertise) with participant as leader (lighter hue) and follower (darker hue). Right: Movement complexity when the participant takes the role of the mirror-game leader and follower.