Our Research

We often observe individuals expertly coordinating their bodily movements with other individuals around them. Whether crossing a road with a group of individuals at a cross-walk, moving a table and chairs with friends or family, or shaking hands with a colleague, individuals frequently perform social behavioral coordination in a robust and flexible manner, with seemingly little or no effort. A central question in the study of joint action and social coordination concerns how the observed movements of other individuals and objects in the environment influence the production of one’s own actions. While several researchers have theorized that such phenomena are the result of the pre-motor cortex representing action execution and observation simultaneously and in a common code, known as the motor contagion account, I argue that the dynamic patterns of coordination that exist between produced and observed movements naturally arise from holistic interactions between the neural, biomechanical, and perceptual subsystems of the agents and the agents’ environment. My research has focused on the interpersonal coordination that arises between agents while performing different tasks. This work, in general has demonstrated that co-acting individuals can become temporarily organized to form acting systems, and that therefore we should study behaviors happening in social situations at the level of the co-acting system, rather than the individuals separately. 
 

My first semester teaching at Colby I taught my Human Movement seminar plus collaborative research course and had one group of students who were interested in investigating how a person’s emotional state might affect interpersonal coordination. This was a well-designed project spear-headed by a hard-working group of students. We discovered a complex relationship between emotion, liking and interpersonal coordination. One of the students, Margaret Hall ’20, reached out to me once she had graduated and we decided the project was interesting enough to polish the paper and try to get it published. We were successful in getting it to publication. I like to highlight this particular study because it is the first time I am lucky enough to get a student motivated to see the whole process through and it was a very rewarding experience. 
 

The second project stemming from the seminar that I would like to highlight is one that was part of the fall of 2021. Students in this course are often interested in how athleticism or being part of a sport team affects coordination abilities and influences the level of interpersonal coordination they might be able to achieve. One group of students studied how interpersonal coordination was affected by whether participants were part of a varsity team sport, an individual sport, or no varsity membership at all. Interestingly, they found that participants who play in a team varsity sport showed significantly more interpersonal coordination while rocking chairs next to another team varsity player than individual varsity athletes and non-athletes. There was no significant difference in level of interpersonal coordination for individual varsity athletes and non-athletes. This was an interesting finding, since we expected that any athlete would show an enhanced level of interpersonal coordination. However, upon closer inspection, we realized that all the team varsity athlete pairs were comprised of team-mates, which is a big confound. This group of students – Eliza Dean ’22, Katharine Dougherty ’22, and Javon Williams ’23 – were so interested in the project that we are currently collecting more data to actually answer a more complex question. We have decided to dig deeper and try to untangle the athletic aspects from the social connections that might be forged by belonging to the same team or being close friends. We are still collecting data for this project with the hope of completing data collection by the end of spring semester 2026.

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