Papers by Auriel Washburn
Topics in Cognitive Science
Musical collaboration emerges from the complex interaction of environmental and informa-tional co... more Musical collaboration emerges from the complex interaction of environmental and informa-tional constraints, including those of the instruments and the performance context. Music improvisation in particular is more like everyday interaction in that dynamics emerge spontaneously without a rehearsed score or script. We examined how the structure of the musical context affords and shapes interactions between improvising musicians. Six pairs of professional piano players improvised with two different backing tracks while we recorded both the music produced and the movements of their heads, left arms, and right arms. The backing tracks varied in rhythmic and harmonic information, from a chord progression to a continuous drone. Differences in movement coordination and playing behavior were evaluated using the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems, with the aim of uncovering the multiscale dynamics that characterize musical collaboration. Collectively, the findings indicated that each backing track afforded the emergence of different patterns of coordination with respect to how the musicians played together, how they moved together, as well as their experience collaborating with each other. Additionally, listeners' experiences of the music when rating audio recordings of the improvised performances were related to the way the musicians coordinated both their playing behavior and their bodily movements. Accordingly, the study revealed how complex dynamical systems methods (namely recurrence analysis) can capture the turn-taking dynamics that characterized both the social exchange of the music improvisation and the sounds of collaboration more generally. The study also demonstrated how musical improvisation provides a way of understanding how social interaction
emerges from the structure of the behavioral task context.
Dancers entrain more effectively than non-dancers to another actor’s movements
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014
For many everyday sensorimotor tasks, trained dancers have been found to exhibit distinct and som... more For many everyday sensorimotor tasks, trained dancers have been found to exhibit distinct and sometimes superior (more stable or robust) patterns of behavior compared to non-dancers. Past research has demonstrated that experts in fields requiring specialized physical training and behavioral control exhibit superior interpersonal coordination capabilities for expertise-related tasks. To date, however, no published studies have compared dancers' abilities to coordinate their movements with the movements of another individual-i.e., during a so-called visual-motor interpersonal coordination task. The current study was designed to investigate whether trained dancers would be better able to coordinate with a partner performing short sequences of dance-like movements than non-dancers. Movement time series were recorded for individual dancers and non-dancers asked to synchronize with a confederate during three different movement sequences characterized by distinct dance styles (i.e., dance team routine, contemporary ballet, mixed style) without hearing any auditory signals or music. A diverse range of linear and non-linear analyses (i.e., cross-correlation, cross-recurrence quantification analysis, and cross-wavelet analysis) provided converging measures of coordination across multiple time scales. While overall levels of interpersonal coordination were influenced by differences in movement sequence for both groups, dancers consistently displayed higher levels of coordination with the confederate at both short and long time scales. These findings demonstrate that the visual-motor coordination capabilities of trained dancers allow them to better synchronize with other individuals performing dance-like movements than non-dancers. Further investigation of similar tasks may help to increase the understanding of visual-motor entrainment in general, as well as provide insight into the effects of focused training on visual-motor and interpersonal coordination.
Interpersonal Anticipatory Synchronization: The Facilitating Role of Short Visual-Motor Feedback Delays
Manipulation of environmental constraints has been shown to influence the relative amounts of vol... more Manipulation of environmental constraints has been shown to influence the relative amounts of voluntary and involuntary control employed by a person to complete a task, as well as the resulting structure of performance variability. Generally, the voluntary control required when no constraints are present leads to self-similar changes in performance, some constraint provides involuntary control that leads to random fluctuations in performance, and constraint which provides feedback about performance accuracy can result in anti-persistent variability. The current study investigated whether providing two groups of individuals with different intentions for the same task would produce changes in voluntary and involuntary control similar to that observed following the manipulation of task constraints. Results indicated that a difference in intention does result in divergent uses of voluntary and involuntary control and distinctly different structures in performance variability.
The current study investigated whether the influence of available task constraints on power-law s... more The current study investigated whether the influence of available task constraints on power-law scaling might be moderated by a participant’s task intention. Participants performed a simple rhythmic movement task with the intention of controlling either movement period or amplitude, either with or without an experimental stimulus designed to constrain period. In the absence of the stimulus, differences in intention did not produce any changes in power-law scaling. When the stimulus was present, however, a shift toward more random fluctuations occurred in the corresponding task dimension, regardless of participants’ intentions. More importantly, participants’ intentions interacted with available task constraints to produce an even greater shift toward random variation when the task dimension constrained by the stimulus was also the dimension the participant intended to control. Together, the results suggest that intentions serve to more tightly constrain behavior to existing environmental constraints, evidenced by changes in the fractal scaling of task performance.
Harmony From Chaos? Perceptual-Motor Delays Enhance Behavioral Anticipation in Social Interaction
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2015
Effective interpersonal coordination is fundamental to robust social interaction, and the ability... more Effective interpersonal coordination is fundamental to robust social interaction, and the ability to anticipate a coactor's behavior is essential for achieving this coordination. However, coordination research has focused on the behavioral synchrony that occurs between the simple periodic movements of coactors and, thus, little is known about the anticipation that occurs during complex, everyday interaction. Research on the dynamics of coupled neurons, human motor control, electrical circuits, and laser semiconductors universally demonstrates that small temporal feedback delays are necessary for the anticipation of chaotic events. We therefore investigated whether similar feedback delays would promote anticipatory behavior during social interaction. Results revealed that coactors were not only able to anticipate others' chaotic movements when experiencing small perceptual-motor delays, but also exhibited movement patterns of equivalent complexity. This suggests that such del...
Cognitive processing, Jan 22, 2015
The current study investigated whether the influence of available task constraints on power-law s... more The current study investigated whether the influence of available task constraints on power-law scaling might be moderated by a participant's task intention. Participants performed a simple rhythmic movement task with the intention of controlling either movement period or amplitude, either with or without an experimental stimulus designed to constrain period. In the absence of the stimulus, differences in intention did not produce any changes in power-law scaling. When the stimulus was present, however, a shift toward more random fluctuations occurred in the corresponding task dimension, regardless of participants' intentions. More importantly, participants' intentions interacted with available task constraints to produce an even greater shift toward random variation when the task dimension constrained by the stimulus was also the dimension the participant intended to control. Together, the results suggest that intentions serve to more tightly constrain behavior to exist...
Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, 2014
Ample past research demonstrates that human rhythmic behavior and 1 rhythmic coordination reveal ... more Ample past research demonstrates that human rhythmic behavior and 1 rhythmic coordination reveal complex dynamics. More recently, researchers have 2 begun to examine the dynamics of coordination with complex, fractal signals. Here, 3 we present preliminary research investigating how recurrence quantification tech-4 niques might be applied to study temporal coordination with complex signals.
Dancers entrain more effectively than non-dancers to another actor’s movements
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014
For many everyday sensorimotor tasks, trained dancers have been found to exhibit distinct and som... more For many everyday sensorimotor tasks, trained dancers have been found to exhibit distinct and sometimes superior (more stable or robust) patterns of behavior compared to non-dancers. Past research has demonstrated that experts in fields requiring specialized physical training and behavioral control exhibit superior interpersonal coordination capabilities for expertise-related tasks. To date, however, no published studies have compared dancers' abilities to coordinate their movements with the movements of another individual-i.e., during a so-called visual-motor interpersonal coordination task. The current study was designed to investigate whether trained dancers would be better able to coordinate with a partner performing short sequences of dance-like movements than non-dancers. Movement time series were recorded for individual dancers and non-dancers asked to synchronize with a confederate during three different movement sequences characterized by distinct dance styles (i.e., dance team routine, contemporary ballet, mixed style) without hearing any auditory signals or music. A diverse range of linear and non-linear analyses (i.e., cross-correlation, cross-recurrence quantification analysis, and cross-wavelet analysis) provided converging measures of coordination across multiple time scales. While overall levels of interpersonal coordination were influenced by differences in movement sequence for both groups, dancers consistently displayed higher levels of coordination with the confederate at both short and long time scales. These findings demonstrate that the visual-motor coordination capabilities of trained dancers allow them to better synchronize with other individuals performing dance-like movements than non-dancers. Further investigation of similar tasks may help to increase the understanding of visual-motor entrainment in general, as well as provide insight into the effects of focused training on visual-motor and interpersonal coordination.
Journal of Motor Behavior, 2014
Complex patterns of interlimb coordination, such as multifrequency relationships of 1:2, 2:3, or ... more Complex patterns of interlimb coordination, such as multifrequency relationships of 1:2, 2:3, or 3:4, are difficult to perform intentionally without extensive practice. The current study investigated whether these patterns might nonetheless occur spontaneously given an appropriate balance between the movement frequencies, or oscillatory periods, of an individual's movements and a visual-environmental stimulus. In order to test this, participants swung a fixed-period wrist-pendulum while observing an oscillating computer-generated stimulus. Results indicated that at given differences in period, 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4 coordination patterns emerged between the participant and stimulus. This suggests that large period differences do not altogether prevent the emergence of rhythmic visuomotor coordination, but instead provide the opportunity for complex patterns of coordination to emerge spontaneously.
When jazz musicians perform an improvisational piece of music their behaviors are not fully presc... more When jazz musicians perform an improvisational piece of music their behaviors are not fully prescribed in advance. Nonetheless their actions become so tightly coordinated and their decisions so seamlessly intertwined that the musicians behave as a single synergistic unit rather than a collection of individuals. A fundamental aspect of such musical improvisation is the bodily movement coordination that occurs among the performing musicians, with the embodied interaction of musicians both supporting and constraining musical creativity. Here we consider the ability of pairs of piano players to improvise, to spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers. We demonstrate the ability of the time-evolving patterns of inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of nonlinear time series analyses to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. Cross wavelet spectral analysis is applied to the musical movements of pairs of improvising pianists, a method that isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination across a range of nested time-scales. Additionally, cross-recurrence quantification analysis is applied to the series of notes produced by each musician to assess when and how often they visit the same musical states throughout the improvisation. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies.
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Papers by Auriel Washburn
emerges from the structure of the behavioral task context.
emerges from the structure of the behavioral task context.