A developmental and clinical perspective of rhythmic interpersonal coordination: From mimicry toward the interconnection of minds

Keeping distance or getting closer: How others' emotions shape approach-avoidance postural behaviors and preferred interpersonal distance

Understanding the influence of emotions on social interactions is important for a global understanding of the dynamics of human behavior. In this study, we investigated the interplay between emotions, spontaneous approach or avoidance tendencies, and the regulation of interpersonal distance. Fifty-seven healthy adults participated in a three-part experiment involving exposure to approaching or withdrawing emotional faces (neutral, happy, sad, fearful, disgusted, angry). The sequence began with an initial computerized stop-distance task, followed by a postural task in which participants' approach or avoidance tendencies were quantified via center of pressure (CoP-Y) displacements on a force platform, and concluded with a final computerized stop-distance task. Our findings revealed a gradient in postural responses, with the most forward CoP-Y displacements for neutral and happy faces, indicative of approach tendencies. These were followed by lesser forward displacements for sad and fearful faces, and most pronounced backward displacements for disgusted and angry faces, indicating avoidance. Furthermore, we observed modulations in participants' preferred interpersonal distance based on emotional cues, with neutral and happy faces associated with shorter distances, and disgusted and angry faces linked to larger distances. Despite these similar results, no direct correlation was found between CoP-Y and preferred interpersonal distance, underscoring a dissociation between spontaneous and voluntary social behaviors. These results contribute to a better understanding of how emotional expressions shape social interactions and underscore the importance of considering emotional cues, postural action tendencies, and interpersonal distance in facilitating successful social interactions.

From child-peer similarity in imitative behavior to matched peer-mediated interventions in autism

Self-consciousness develops through a long process, from pre-reflexive consciousness relying on body perception, to "meta" self-awareness. It emerges from the imitative experience between children and their peers. This experience linked to the capacity to test structural similarities between oneself and others, is addressed according to the concept of interpersonal affordance. We hypothesize that the opportunity for co-actors to engage in a process of interpersonal coordination is underlined by their similarity in terms of morphological, behavioral and motor features. This experience can sustain the emergence of new affordances for objects for each co-actor, as well as new affordances in terms of joint actions. We apply this idea in the context of peer-mediated interventions (PMI) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We argue that, in PMI, an encounter between children with autism and similar peers would foster the opportunity to engage in a spontaneous process of interpersonal coordination. This process would enable the development of self-consciousness and the emergence of perception of interpersonal, self and other's affordances for children with autism. We conclude that metrics to assess morphological, behavioral and motor similarity should then be defined and used in future studies to test our hypothesis in children with autism versus TD children or between children with autism.

Motor Skill Improvement Using Compressive Garments in a Child with Multidimensional Impairments and Ehlers–Danlos Syndrome

We report the case of an 8-year-old child with a complex neurodevelopmental disorder, including severe developmental coordination disorder with dysgraphia, anxiety and depression, mild social functioning impairments, headache and chronic musculoskeletal pain, secondary to Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (EDS) hypermobility type. We explored whether wearing whole-body compressive garments (CGs) could improve his motor skills assessed through standardized and experimental procedures. In addition to the effectiveness of CGs on pain, we found partial improvements in his motor skills, specifically postural control, hand movements, and body schema representation, after wearing CGs for 15 days. During an experimental motor imitation task with a virtual tightrope walker, we found improvements in interpersonal synchronization with performances closer to those of typical developing (TD) controls. We conclude that CGs appear to be an innovative and interesting adjuvant treatment for motor skill impairments in children with multidimensional impairments involving EDS. These promising results require confirmation by further evidence-based research.

Motor performance, praxis, and social skills in autism spectrum disorder and developmental coordination disorder

Previous research has shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental coordination disorder (DCD) may have overlapping social and motor skill impairments. This study compares ASD, DCD, and typically developing (TD) youth on a range of social, praxis and motor skills, and investigates the relationship between these skills in each group. Data were collected on participants aged 8–17 (n = 33 ASD, n = 28 DCD, n = 35 TD). Overall, the clinical groups showed some similar patterns of social and motor impairments but diverged in praxis impairments, cognitive empathy, and Theory of Mind ability. When controlling for both social and motor performance impairments, the ASD group showed significantly lower accuracy on imitation of meaningful gestures and gesture to command, indicating a prominent deficit in these praxis skills in ASD.

Collective Rhythm as an Emergent Property During Human Social Coordination

The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or which are the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that the complexity of group dynamics can lead to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: an emergent collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics.

Bridging the gap between emotion and joint action

Our daily human life is filled with a myriad of joint action moments, be it children playing, adults working together (i.e., team sports), or strangers navigating through a crowd. Joint action brings individuals (and embodiment of their emotions) together, in space and in time. Yet little is known about how individual emotions propagate through embodied presence in a group, and how joint action changes individual emotion. In fact, the multi-agent component is largely missing from neuroscience-based approaches to emotion, and reversely joint action research has not found a way yet to include emotion as one of the key parameters to model socio-motor interaction. In this review, we first identify the gap and then stockpile evidence showing strong entanglement between emotion and acting together from various branches of sciences. We propose an integrative approach to bridge the gap, highlight five research avenues to do so in behavioral neuroscience and digital sciences, and address some of the key challenges in the area faced by modern societies.

Reciprocity and alignment: quantifying coupling in dynamic interactions

Recent accounts of social cognition focus on how we do things together, suggesting that becoming aligned relies on a reciprocal exchange of information. The next step is to develop richer computational methods that quantify the degree of coupling and describe the nature of the information exchange. We put forward a definition of coupling, comparing it to related terminology and detail, available computational methods and the level of organization to which they pertain, presenting them as a hierarchy from weakest to richest forms of coupling. The rationale is that a temporally coherent link between two dynamical systems at the lowest level of organization sustains mutual adaptation and alignment at the highest level. Postulating that when we do things together, we do so dynamically over time and we argue that to determine and measure instances of true reciprocity in social exchanges is key. Along with this computationally rich definition of coupling, we present challenges for the field to be tackled by a diverse community working towards a dynamic account of social cognition.

Seeing a Page in a Flipbook: Shorter Visual Temporal Integration Windows in 2-Year-Old Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience differences in visual temporal processing, the part of vision responsible for parsing continuous input into discrete objects and events. Here we investigated temporal processing in 2-year-old toddlers diagnosed with ASD and age-matched typically developing (TD) toddlers. We used a visual search task where the visibility of the target was determined by the pace of a display sequence. On integration trials, each display viewed alone had no visible target, but if integrated over time, the target became visible. On segmentation trials, the target became visible only when displays were perceptually segmented. We measured the percent of trials when participants fixated the target as a function of the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between displays. We computed the crossover point of the integration and segmentation performance functions for each group, an estimate of the temporal integration window (TIW), the period in which visual input is combined. We found that both groups of toddlers had significantly longer TIWs (125 ms) than adults (65 ms) from previous studies using the same paradigm, and that toddlers with ASD had significantly shorter TIWs (108 ms) than chronologically age-matched TD controls (142 ms). LAY SUMMARY: We investigated how young children, with and without autism, organize dynamic visual information across time, using a visual search paradigm. We found that toddlers with autism had higher temporal resolution than typically developing (TD) toddlers of the same age - that is, they are more likely to be able to detect rapid change across time, relative to TD toddlers. These differences in visual temporal processing can impact how one sees, interprets, and interacts with the world. Autism Res 2021, 14: 946-958. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Interactive Psychometrics for Autism With the Human Dynamic Clamp: Interpersonal Synchrony From Sensorimotor to Sociocognitive Domains

The human dynamic clamp (HDC) is a human-machine interface designed on the basis of coordination dynamics for studying realistic social interaction under controlled and reproducible conditions. Here, we propose to probe the validity of the HDC as a psychometric instrument for quantifying social abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and neurotypical development. To study interpersonal synchrony with the HDC, we derived five standardized scores following a gradient from sensorimotor and motor to higher sociocognitive skills in a sample of 155 individuals (113 participants with ASD, 42 typically developing participants; aged 5 to 25 years; IQ > 70). Regression analyses were performed using normative modeling on global scores according to four subconditions (HDC behavior "cooperative/competitive," human task "in-phase/anti-phase," diagnosis, and age at inclusion). Children with ASD had lower scores than controls for motor skills. HDC motor coordination scores were the best candidates for stratification and diagnostic biomarkers according to exploratory analyses of hierarchical clustering and multivariate classification. Independently of phenotype, sociocognitive skills increased with developmental age while being affected by the ongoing task and HDC behavior. Weaker performance in ASD for motor skills suggests the convergent validity of the HDC for evaluating social interaction. Results provided additional evidence of a relationship between sensorimotor and sociocognitive skills. HDC may also be used as a marker of maturation of sociocognitive skills during real-time social interaction. Through its standardized and objective evaluation, the HDC not only represents a valid paradigm for the study of interpersonal synchrony but also offers a promising, clinically relevant psychometric instrument for the evaluation and stratification of sociomotor dysfunctions.

Empathy, social relationship and co-occurrence in young adults with DCD

Empathy is defined as an emotional or cognitive response to another's emotional state. It is considered essential for navigating meaningful social interactions and is closely linked to prosocial behavior. Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is characterized by an impairment of motor coordination that has a marked impact on both academic and day-to-day living activities. Children and adolescents with DCD have been shown to have less developed social support and friendships. The research linking empathy and DCD is scarce. The aims of this study are to gain an understanding of the relationship between DCD and empathy in young adults with DCD only, and with DCD coupled with other neurodevelopmental disorders, in comparison with typically developing adults.

METHODS

The study included 212 young adults aged 18-40 years. The subjects in this study were from mainstream populations in the UK. The study groups included: (a) "DCD only" with 42 individuals; (b) "DCD + ASD" with 21 individuals; (c) "DCD + ADHD" with 45 individuals; (d) "DCD + ASD + ADHD" with 29 individuals; and (e) the control group of 75 individuals.

RESULTS

ANOVA on the Empathy Questionnaire (EQ) showed a statistically significant difference between groups (F [4,257] = 35.63; p < 0.001; η_p² = 0.409). No significant differences were found between the DCD-only and the control. MANOVA was performed to assess differences in the Socialising and Friendship Questionnaire (SAF-Q) scores. The results showed a statistically significant difference between groups (F [8,257] = 9.98; p < 0.001; η = 0.162). Pearson correlation coefficients were performed, revealing significant high correlations between the EQ and the two parts of the SAF-Q ("past" and "currently").

CONCLUSION

The results of this study indicate that social difficulties in the DCD-only group are not due to lack of empathy, but may be driven by an accumulation of external factors. In this study we also concluded that DCD does not appear to be the factor that reduces the ability to empathize, but rather the presence of ADHD and/or ASD.

Interpersonal Synchronization, Motor Coordination, and Control Are Impaired During a Dynamic Imitation Task in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: Impairments in imitation abilities have been commonly described in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). How motricity in interpersonal coordination impacts imitation, during long lasting semi-ecological conditions, has not been carefully investigated.

Methods: Eighty-five children and adolescents (39 controls with typical development, TD; 29 patients with ASD; 17 patients with developmental coordination disorder, DCD), aged 6 to 20 years, participated to a behavioral paradigm in which participants, standing and moving, interacted with a virtual tightrope walker standing and moving as well. During the protocol, we measured automatically and continuously bodily postures and movements from RGB sensor recording to assess participants' behavioral imitation.

Results: We show that (1) interpersonal synchronization (as evidenced by the synchrony between the participant's and the tightrope walker's bars) and (2) motor coordination (as evidenced by the synchrony between the participant's bar and its own head axis) increased with age and were more impaired in patients with ASD. Also, motor control as evidenced by the movement angle standard deviations of participants' bar and head were significantly impaired in ASD compared to TD or DCD.

Conclusion: Interpersonal synchronization and motor coordination during ecological interaction show both subtle impairment in children with ASD as compared to children with TD or DCD. These results questioned how motricity mature in terms of motor control and proprioception in children with ASD.