
Guido OrgsUniversity College London | UCL · Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Guido Orgs
Professor
Working on the cognitive neuroscience of movement, performance, dance and liveness.
About
73
Publications
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Introduction
My research deals with visual, temporal and aesthetic perception of human movement.
I am interested in how motor expertise influences perception of other people's actions and the role of movement structure and meaning in aesthetic perception of human movement and the live performing arts.
Currently, I also investigate joint actions and group behaviour in performing dance.
Additional affiliations
October 2009 - August 2013
Education
January 2005 - December 2008
October 2003 - July 2007
October 1999 - October 2004
Publications
Publications (73)
Objective(s)
To determine (1) the quality of systematic reviews about dance-based intervention in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and (2) standard evidence for dance-based intervention efficacy based on the categories of The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) from the World Health Organization’s (WHO...
Studies demonstrate that low frequencies and syncopation can enhance groove—the pleasurable urge to move to music. This study examined the simultaneous effect of low-frequency amplitude and syncopation on groove by manipulating basslines in house music, a subgenre of electronic dance music (EDM). One hundred and seventy-nine participants listened t...
Performing dance is an intrinsically social art form where at least one person moves while another person watches. Dancing in groups promotes social bonding, but how does group dance affect the people watching? A group of dancers and dance novices watched a 30 min dance video individually in an fMRI scanner. In a follow-up behavioural study, the sa...
The appreciation of dance, film, and other temporal art forms relies on the continuous integration of auditory and visual streams. In this study, we investigate how bimodal audiovisual preferences arise from unimodal auditory and visual preferences. To this end, we created and validated the open-resource complexity in audiovisual aesthetics stimulu...
Background
The perception of biological motion requires accurate prediction of the spatiotemporal dynamics of human movement. Research on Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) suggests deficits in accurate motor prediction, raising the question whether not just action execution, but also action perception is perturbed in this disorder.
Aims
To...
Live performances, where groups of people collectively experience dance, music, or theatre, are a ubiquitous feature of human cultures. Yet, neuroscientific studies of these inherently social art forms almost exclusively involve people watching video or sound recordings alone in a laboratory. Across three live dance performances, we simultaneously...
Performing dance is an intrinsically social art form where at least one person moves while another person watches. Dancing in groups promotes social bonding, but how does group dance affect the people watching? In this study, we show that movement synchrony among dancers of a live performers predicts brain synchrony among dance viewers. Dancers and...
Live gatherings, such as music concerts, football matches, or watching films in the cinema, underpin culture and are inherently social events. Here, we test if an illusory experience of social liveness can be induced artificially by adding audience reactions to music recordings. We created a set of musical excerpts mixed with positive, negative, an...
Aesthetic cognitivism assumes a positive relationship between aesthetic experience and knowledge acquisition. Here, we study this relationship in the context of contemporary dance. 207 audience members watched either a live performance or a screening of a contemporary dance duet, where some participants wore mobile EEGs. All participants reported o...
Introduction
This research uses the production method to study aesthetic preference for sequences of human body postures. In two experiments, participants produced image sequences based on their aesthetic preferences, while we measured the visual aesthetic features displayed in the compositions.
Methods
In Experiment 1, participants created static...
The perception of biological motion is an important social cognitive ability. Models of biological motion perception recognize two processes that contribute to the perception of biological motion: a bottom-up process that binds optic-flow patterns into a coherent percept of biological motion and a top-down process that binds sequences of body-postu...
Clark and Fischer's depiction hypothesis is based on examples of western mimetic art. Yet social robots do not depict social interactions, but instead perform them. Similarly, dance and performance art do not rely on depiction. Kinematics and expressivity are better predictors of dance aesthetics and of effective social interactions. In this way, s...
Studying social interaction in real-world settings is of increasing importance to social cognitive researchers. Theatre provides an ideal opportunity to study rich face-to-face interactions in a controlled, yet natural setting. Here we collaborated with Flute Theatre to investigate interpersonal synchrony between actors-actors, actors-audience and...
Although the ability to detect the actions of other living beings is key for adaptive social behavior, it is still unclear if biological motion perception is specific to human stimuli. Biological motion perception involves both bottom-up processing of movement kinematics ('motion pathway) and top-down reconstruction of movement from changes in body...
Background:
Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD) is a dissociative disorder encompassing pronounced disconnections from the self and from external reality. As DDD is inherently tied to a detachment from the body, dance/movement therapy could provide an innovative treatment approach.
Materials and methods:
We developed two online dance...
Movement perception involves both motion and form processing. Previous research has shown that processing along the motion pathway requires a familiar but not necessarily a human shape. However, the role of objecthood and animacy in the form pathway is less clear. Here, we used EEG frequency tagging to study how objecthood and animacy influence bot...
The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions. However, it remains unclear whether atypical responsiveness to suggestion is similarly present in depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). 55 DDD patients and 36 healthy controls completed a standardised behav...
The performing arts are temporal arts. Experiencing dance, music and theatre is a dynamic process that occurs over time and is often shared between groups of people. The continuous and collective nature of the experience of any live performance poses unique challenges to a quantitative or neuroscientific approach to audience research. This chapter...
The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions. However, it remains unclear whether atypical responsiveness to suggestion is similarly present in depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). 55 DDD patients and 36 healthy controls completed a standardised behav...
The human brain has dedicated mechanisms for processing other people’s movements. Previous research has revealed how these mechanisms contribute to perceiving the movements of individuals but has left open how we perceive groups of people moving together. Across three experiments, we test whether movement perception depends on the spatiotemporal re...
Objective: Depersonalization–derealization disorder (DDD) is characterized by diverse symptomatology overlapping with anxiety and dissociative disorders, but the sources of this variability are poorly understood. This study aims to determine whether symptom heterogeneity is attributable to the presence of latent subgroups.
Method: We applied laten...
A dominant theory of embodied aesthetic experience (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 197) posits that the appreciation of visual art is linked to the artist's movements when creating the artwork, yet a direct link between the kinematics of drawing actions and the aesthetics of drawing outcomes has not been experimentally...
Western European and East Asian cultures show marked differences in aesthetic appreciation of the visual arts. East Asian aesthetics are often associated with a holistic focus on balance and harmony, in contrast to Western aesthetics, which often focus on the expression of the individual. In this study, we examined whether cultural differences also...
Humans and other animals have evolved to act in groups, but how does the brain distinguish multiple people moving in group from multiple people moving independently? Across three experiments, we test whether biological motion perception depends on the spatiotemporal relationships among people moving together. In Experiment 1, we apply EEG frequency...
Dance has become an important topic for research in empirical aesthetics, social and motor cognition, and as an intervention for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Despite the growing scientific interest in dance, no standardized psychometric instrument exists to assess people’s dance experience. Here, we introduce the Goldsmiths D...
Dance and music appear to belong together: Conventional definitions of dance often conceive it as a rhythmical activity in which a series of steps is performed to musical accompaniment. Indeed, dance and music share many similarities such as rhythm and may have co-evolved as a form of nonverbal communication between groups of people. Despite a rich...
What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subjective features like familiarity with the observed movement, but has rarely studied objective features like speed or acceleration. We manipulated the kinematic complexity of observed actions by creating dance sequences that varied in movement timing, but...
Dance has become an important for research in empirical aesthetics, social and motor cognition, and as an intervention for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Despite this growing scientific interest in dance, no standardised psychometric instrument exists to assess people’s dance experience. Here, we introduce the Goldsmiths Dance...
Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) has become an increasingly recognized and used treatment, though primarily used to target psychological and physical wellbeing in individuals with physical, medical, or neurological illnesses. To contribute to the relative lack of literature within the field of DMT for clinical mental health disorders, using a narrative...
What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subjective features like familiarity with the observed movement but has rarely studied objective features like speed or acceleration. We manipulated the kinematic complexity of observed actions, by creating dance sequences that varied in movement timing, but...
Dance is intrinsically a social art form, and is often performed and experienced in groups.
Interaction among the dancers, such as synchronisation, predicted aesthetic appreciation of audience in a live performance. Meanwhile, the human brain processes action from multiple agents differently from the action of a single agent. However, neuroaestheti...
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how audiovisual congruency influences continuous aesthetic and psychophysiological responses to contemporary dance. Two groups of spectators watched a recorded dance performance that included the performer’s steps, breathing and vocalizations, but no music....
We introduce a method of using wrist-worn accelerometers to measure non-verbal social coordination within a group that includes autistic children. Our goal was to record and chart the children's social engagement - measured using interpersonal movement synchrony - as they took part in a theatrical workshop that was specifically designed to enhance...
Highly demanding cognitive-motor tasks can be negatively influenced by the presence of auditory stimuli. The human brain attempts to partially suppress the processing of potential distractors in order that motor tasks can be completed successfully. The present study sought to further understand the attentional neural systems that activate in respon...
Sensing data from wearables have been extensively evaluated for fitness tracking, health monitoring or rehabilitation of individuals. However, we believe that wearable sensing can go beyond the individual and offer insights into social dynamics and interactions with other users by considering multi-user data. In this work, we present a new approach...
When two people move in synchrony, they become more social. Yet it is not clear how this effect scales up to larger numbers of people. Does a group need to move in unison to affiliate, in what we term unitary synchrony; or does affiliation arise from distributed coordination, patterns of coupled movements between individual members of a group? We d...
Table S1. Optimized parameters by task.
Often music is used to emphasize particular dance gestures, or dance can be used to illustrate particular passages of music. While each form relies on different sensory modalities, previous studies have demonstrated the ability to deduce the common structures between music and dance, even when each form is presented independently. However, from an...
Synchronized movement is a ubiquitous feature of dance and music performance. Much research into the evolutionary origins of these cultural practices has focused on why humans perform rather than watch or listen to dance and music. In this study, we show that movement synchrony among a group of performers predicts the aesthetic appreciation of live...
Averaged performer (red) and spectator (blue) variables for all four performances.
(S) Synchrony, (A) Acceleration, (V) Visual Change, (E) Enjoyment, (T) Perceived togetherness, (H) Heart rate.
(EPS)
Descriptive statistics for all four performances.
(DOCX)
Pearson correlations for all performer and spectator variables.
(A) Acceleration, (V) Visual Change, (S) Performed synchrony, (T) Perceived togetherness, (E) Enjoyment, (H) Heart rate, * = p <.01, ** = p <.001, *** = p <.0001.
(DOCX)
Choreographic score.
The choreographic score describes the movement tasks for performers in detail. The score should be used according to the following guidelines.
Don’t add anything to the score that isn’t there.
Don’t take away anything from the score that is actually specified.
The score specifies parameters of movement, not specific movement...
Excerpt of P3.
The video excerpt shows gradual synchronization of the group, tipping over into walking/running. Videos of all four performances are available to view at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDAYdl_CLkZj2qWBDkxxVug4c5HQmCiB1.
(M4V)
The present study sought to further understanding of the brain mechanisms that underlie the effects of music on perceptual, affective, and visceral responses during whole-body modes of exercise. Eighteen participants were administered light-to-moderate intensity bouts of cycle ergometer exercise. Each exercise bout was of 12-min duration (warm-up [...
Socially situated thought and behaviour are pervasive and vitally important in human society. The social brain has become a focus of study for researchers in the neurosciences, psychology, biology and other areas of behavioural science, and it is becoming increasingly clear that social behaviour is heavily dependent on shared representations. Any s...
The brain mechanisms by which music-related interventions ameliorate fatigue-related symptoms during the execution of fatiguing motor tasks are hitherto under-researched. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of music on brain electrical activity and psychophysiological measures during the execution of an isometric fatig...
A neurocognitive model of aesthetic appreciation in dance.
Book Chapter to be published in:
SHARED REPRESENTATIONS: SENSORIMOTOR FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL LIFE Sukhvinder S. Obhi & Emily S. Cross, Editors, Cambridge University Press 2016.
The human brain readily perceives fluent movement from static input. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated brain mechanisms that mediate fluent apparent biological motion (ABM) perception from sequences of body postures. We presented body and nonbody stimuli varying in objective sequence duration and fluency of apparent movem...
We have investigated links between biological motion perception and time perception. Participants compared the durations of two paired visual frames, inside which task-irrelevant sequences of static body postures were presented. The sequences produced apparent movements of shorter and longer path lengths, depending on the sequential order of body p...
Professional ball game players report the feeling of the ball 'slowing-down' before hitting it. Because effective motor preparation is critical in achieving such expert motor performance, these anecdotal comments imply that the subjective passage of time may be influenced by preparation for action. Previous reports of temporal illusions associated...
Appreciating human movement can be a powerful aesthetic experience. We have used apparent biological motion to investigate the aesthetic effects of three levels of movement representation: body postures, movement transitions and choreographic structure. Symmetrical (ABCDCBA) and asymmetrical (ABCDBCA) sequences of apparent movement were created fro...
Alternating between static images of human bodies with an appropriate interstimulus interval (ISI) produces apparent biological motion. Here we investigate links between apparent biological motion and time perception. We presented two pictures of the initial and final positions of a human movement separated by six different ISIs. The shortest movem...
In two experiments, we investigated time perception during apparent biological motion. Pictures of initial, intermediate, and final positions of a single movement were presented, with interstimulus intervals that were constant within trials but varied across trials. Movement paths were manipulated by changing the sequential order of body postures....
Humans appear to be the only animals to have developed the practice and culture of art. This practice presumably relies on special processing circuits within the human brain associated with a distinct subjective experience, termed aesthetic experience, and preferentially evoked by artistic stimuli. We assume that positive or negative aesthetic judg...
We presented professional dancers and non-dancers with videos of two movement styles, dance movements and everyday movements. Participants were asked to indicate by a button press to which category a movement belonged. We computed event-related desynchronization (ERD) in alpha and beta frequency bands between 7.5 and 25 Hz relative to a visual base...
We assessed conceptual priming for environmental sounds in two tasks using pairs of a visually presented word (prime) and an environmental sound (probe). In the physical task, participants indicated to which ear the sound was presented. In the semantic task, participants judged whether a word labeled a sound correctly. The physical always preceded...
Conceptual priming for environmental sounds was examined in two tasks using pairs of a visually presented word (prime stimulus) and an environmental sound (probe stimulus). In the first task (physical task) participants had to indicate to which ear the sound was presented. In the second task (semantic task) participants judged whether word and soun...
In this study we examined conceptual priming using environmental sounds and visually displayed words. Priming for sounds and words was observed in response latency as well as in event-related potentials. Reactions were faster when a related word followed an environmental sound and vice versa. Moreover both stimulus types produced an N400-effect for...
Responding to a stimulus that had to be ignored previously is usually slowed-down (negative priming effect). This study investigates the reaction time and ERP effects of the negative priming phenomenon in the auditory domain. Thirty participants had to categorize sounds as musical instruments or animal voices. Reaction times were slowed-down in the...
Die vorliegende Arbeit umfasst drei Experimente zur semantischen Verarbeitung von Umweltgeräuschen, untersucht im Paradigma der semantischen Bahnung. Neben Verhaltensmaßen werden hierbei in ereigniskorrelierten Potentialen (EKPs) N400-Effekte betrachtet. Im ersten Experiment erzeugten Umweltgeräusche im direkten Vergleich mit visuell dargebotenen W...
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