Wednesday, August 16th from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m.
Université de Montréal, Pavilion Marie-Victorin, Conference Room A-103
Modeling individuals’ temporal synchrony to account for perceived social interactions
Abstract: Humans’ complex behaviors such as speech, music, or dance depend on the precise coordination of actions with external sounds. Yet, there are large differences in people’s capacities to process the temporal aspects of verbal and nonverbal stimuli. Besides, temporal synchronization is a keystone of social interactions; for example, people report increased social connection and positive feelings about a person with whom they engage in synchronous behavior. Important questions that arise are how synchronization between social partners is influenced by individual differences in temporal processing skills, and how this affects social connection and interpersonal liking. I will present two studies in which we investigated whether each person’s spontaneous production rate and the social context contribute to the range of synchrony in the general population. We then manipulated the quality of the synchronization in intervention conditions to address the causal relationship between observed temporal synchrony and perceived social interaction. We used computational approaches to model participants’ synchronization accuracy. I will focus on a promising dynamical system’s oscillator (delay-coupled) model that captured individual differences in auditory-motor synchronization and accounted for the differences in social interaction based on the intrinsic frequency of the oscillators and a coupling strength index.
