Julien Laroche

Université de Montpellier | UM1 · EUROMOV, Movement to Health (M2H) Lab.

Creativity is a key skill for the twenty-first century, where the individual and collective imperative to adapt is omnipresent. Yet, it is still unclear how to put creativity theories into practice, which signals a lacuna in our understanding of the pragmatic means by which we get creative. This paper starts from the identification of a number of g...

This editorial outlines the outcome of an interdisciplinary session on collective sense-making through dance improvisation, which took place during the ‘Neural and Social Bases of Creative Movement’ workshop. We argue that joint improvisation practices place the scientist in a privileged position to reveal the nature of cognitive and creative behav...

Acting in concert with others, a key aspect of our social life, requires behavioral coordination between persons on multiple timescales. When zooming in on the kinematic properties of movements, it appears that small speed fluctuations, called submovements, are embedded within otherwise smooth end-point trajectories. Submovements, by occurring at a...

Movements are naturally composed of submovements, i.e. recurrent speed pulses (2–3 Hz), possibly reflecting intermittent feedback-based motor adjustments. In visuomotor (unimanual) synchronization tasks, partners alternate submovements over time, indicating mutual coregulation. However, it is unclear whether submovement coordination is organized di...

Music and dance can change our sense of time. They rely on synchronizing our movements with auditory events and with other people, both involve memory and anticipation for audiences and performers alike, and both facilitate moments of flow and pleasure. Performing Time captures the manifold facets of our experience of time in music and dance, from...

A group of children engaged in collective free play can spontaneously create new rules, learn to follow them, or find opportunities to break established ones. This rule-playing can be considered as a specific manifestation of the more general phenomenon of collective creativity. In behavioral sciences, collective creativity is often discussed as a...

Social behaviors rely on the coordination of multiple effectors within one’s own body as well as between the interacting bodies. However, little is known about how coupling at the interpersonal level impacts coordination among body parts at the intrapersonal level, especially in ecological, complex, situations. Here, we perturbed interpersonal sens...

In this multiple single-cases study, we used dance to train Sensorimotor Synchronization (SMS), motor and cognitive functions in children with Developmental Cerebellar Anomalies (DCA). DCA are rare dysfunctions of the cerebellum that affect motor and cognitive skills. The cerebellum plays an important role in temporal cognition including SMS which...

Most animal species group together and coordinate their behavior in quite sophisticated manners for mating, hunting or defense purposes. In humans, coordination at a macroscopic level (the pacing of movements) is evident both in daily life (e.g., walking) and skilled (e.g., music and dance) behaviors. By examining the fine structure of movement, we...

In this article we explore an epistemic approach we name dis/embodiment and introduce “Articulations,” an interdisciplinary project bringing together Virtual Reality (VR) designers, cognitive scientists, dancers, anthropologists, and human–machine interaction specialists. According to Erin Manning, our sense of self and other emerges from processes...

Shaping both the environment and the embodiment of the users in that virtual world, VR offers designers and cognitive scientists the unprecedented potential to virtually explore a vast set of interactions between persons, and persons and their environment. By design, VR tools offer a formidable opportunity to revisit the links between body movement...

Most animal species group together and coordinate their behavior in quite sophisticated manners for mating, hunting or defense purposes. In humans, coordination at a macroscopic level (the pacing of movements) is evident both in daily life (e.g., walking) and skilled (e.g., music and dance) behaviors. By examining the fine structure of movement, we...

Collective dance improvisation (e.g., traditional and social dancing, contact improvisation) is a participatory, relational and embodied art form which eschews standard concepts in aesthetics. We present our ongoing research into the mechanisms underlying the lived experience of "togetherness" associated with such practices. Togetherness in collect...

Free improvisations are unprecedented and underdetermined: their content and the way they unfold are not known in advance. Improvised performances have to be actively shaped over time. To do so, the improviser must articulate his embodied experience. In other words, he has to make sense of his experience1 by relying on his bodily know-how. And so t...

Sensitivity to temporal contingencies appears early in life and plays a key role in the ontogeny of socio-cognitive abilities in humans (Nadel et al., 1999; Gratier and Apter-Danon, 2009). The tendency for rhythmic coordination, sometimes referred to as “entrainment,” requires sensory-motor coupling (Phillips-Silver et al., 2010). In most of the fi...

According to Bernard Stiegler, teaching is the prime issue for philosophy. We address this issue through case studies in music education, by analyzing interactive improvisations. We define our pedagogical device as a system of care in which articulations between the different organological levels (human organs, by which a learner get involved wit...

This paper addresses the issue of “being together,” and more specifically the issue of “being together in time.” We provide with an integrative framework that is inspired by phenomenology, the enactive approach and dynamical systems theories. To do so, we first define embodiment as a living and lived phenomenon that emerges from agent-world couplin...

Embodied mind theories underline the role of the body in the act of knowing. According to the enactive approach, we learn to perceive and to know through our bodily interactions with the world (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). However, such an approach remains incomplete as long as sociality is not taken into account (Froese & Di Paolo, 2009). Rece...

Cet article explore trois cas d'improvisations interactives libres, réalisées entre un élève et son professeur dans le contexte de la pédagogie Kaddouch. L'analyse musicologique de ces interactions permet de construir un système conceptuel rendant compte des techniques d'interactions utilisées dans cette pédagogie et de leurs effets sur l'apprentis...