Michael J Richardson

Michael J Richardson
Macquarie University · School of Psychological Sciences

PhD, Professor

About

197
Publications
104,184
Reads
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9,043
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2005 - July 2006
University of Connecticut
Position
  • PostDoc Position
August 2006 - August 2009
Colby College
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
September 2009 - present
University of Cincinnati
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (197)
Article
Full-text available
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 a...
Chapter
Full-text available
A truly embodied-embedded approach to behavior promises a radical change in how scientists conceptualize cognitive agents (both biological and nonbiological) and how they proceed to understand the behavioral order of such agents, both empirically and theoretically. This chapter views that cashing in the promissory note requires that perceiving, act...
Chapter
Full-text available
Here we review a range of interpersonal and multiagent phenomena that demonstrate how the formal and conceptual principles of symmetry, and spontaneous and explicit symmetry-breaking, can be employed to investigate , understand, and model the lawful dynamics that underlie self-organized social action and behavioral coordination. In doing so, we pro...
Article
Full-text available
Effectively coordinating one's behaviors with those of others is essential for successful multiagent activity. In recent years, increased attention has been given to understanding the dynamical principles that underlie such coordination because of a growing interest in behavioral synchrony and complex-systems phenomena. Here, we examined the behavi...
Article
Full-text available
Multiagent activity is commonplace in everyday life and can improve the behavioral efficiency of task performance and learning. Thus, augmenting social contexts with the use of interactive virtual and robotic agents is of great interest across health, sport, and industry domains. However, the effectiveness of human–machine interaction (HMI) to effe...
Article
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The control of swarms has emerged as a paradigmatic example of human-autonomy teaming. This review focuses on understanding human coordination behaviours, while controlling evasive autonomous agents, to inform the design of human-compatible teammates. We summarize the solutions employed by human dyads, as well as the verbal communication and divisi...
Article
Reuben Baron’s pioneering work on the ecological approach to social interaction and affordances has profoundly impacted our understanding of how the perception of others’ behavior is shaped by the dynamic interplay between agents and their environments. Building on his foundational work, we provide an overview of a recent study (Alhasan et al., 202...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated whether dynamical perceptual-motor primitives (DPMPs) could also be used to capture human navigation in a first-person herding task. To achieve this aim, human participants played a first-person herding game, in which they were required to corral virtual cows, called targets, into a specified containment zone. In addition to...
Article
Full-text available
Interpersonal coordination is a key determinant of successful social interaction but can be disrupted when people experience symptoms related to social anxiety or autism. Effective coordination rests on individuals directing their attention towards interaction partners. Yet little is known about the impact of the attentional behaviours of the partn...
Article
Autistic people often experience difficulties navigating face-to-face social interactions. Historically, the empirical literature has characterised these difficulties as cognitive ‘deficits’ in social information processing. However, the empirical basis for such claims is lacking, with most studies failing to capture the complexity of social intera...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Solving problems with others not only reduces the time required to complete a challenge but may also enable the discovery of novel strategies that qualitatively change how a problem is approached. At the dyadic level, the laboratory-based 'shepherding task' demonstrated that, when tasked to contain evasive agents to a centralized location, some par...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Interpersonal coordination is a key determinant of successful social interaction but is disrupted for people who experience social anxiety. Effective coordination rests on individuals directing their attention toward others, an effect well-documented in previous literature. Yet, little research has considered the concurrent behaviour of interaction...
Article
Effective team behavior in high-performance environments such as in sport and the military requires individual team members to efficiently perceive the unfolding task events, predict the actions and action intents of the other team members, and plan and execute their own actions to simultaneously accomplish individual and collective goals. To enhan...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated the utility of supervised machine learning (SML) and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for modeling and understanding human decision-making during multiagent task performance. Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks were trained to predict the target selection decisions of expert and novice players completin...
Conference Paper
Social motor coordination is an important mechanism responsible for creating shared understanding but can be a challenge for Autistic individuals. Social virtual reality (VR) provides an opportunity to create a safe and inclusive environment for which interactions can be augmented to promote social interactivity. Due to the bi-directional nature of...
Conference Paper
Recommender systems designed to augment human decision-making in multi-agent tasks need to not only recommend actions that align with the task goal, but which also maintain coordinative behaviors between agents. Further, if these systems are to be used for skill training, they need to impart implicit learning to its users. This work compared a reco...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the challenges associated with virtually mediated communication, remote collaboration is a defining characteristic of online multiplayer gaming communities. Inspired by the teamwork exhibited by players in first-person shooter games, this study investigated the verbal and behavioral coordination of four-player teams playing a cooperative on...
Article
Full-text available
Deep learning-based approaches to markerless 3D pose estimation are being adopted by researchers in psychology and neuroscience at an unprecedented rate. Yet many of these tools remain unvalidated. Here, we report on the validation of one increasingly popular tool (DeepLabCut) against simultaneous measurements obtained from a reference measurement...
Article
Full-text available
People working as a team can achieve more than when working alone due to a team's ability to parallelize the completion of tasks. In collaborative search tasks, this necessitates the formation of effective division of labor strategies to minimize redundancies in search. For such strategies to be developed, team members need to perceive the task's r...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Perceptual-motor tasks offer redundant solutions to achieve a goal. However, not all solutions are equally robust to error-producing noise or variability and thus, skill learning can be viewed as a search process to identify behaviors that are error-tolerant. Throwing a ball to hit a target is one such example of a complex perceptual-motor skill th...
Preprint
Full-text available
This study uses supervised machine learning (SML) and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) to model, predict and understand human decision-making during skillful joint-action. Long short-term memory networks were trained to predict the target selection decisions of expert and novice actors completing a dyadic herding task. Results revealed that...
Article
Effective team performance often requires that individuals engage in team training exercises. However, organizing team-training scenarios presents economic and logistical challenges and can be prone to trainer bias and fatigue. Accordingly, a growing body of research is investigating the effectiveness of employing artificial agents (AAs) as synthet...
Chapter
This book brings together scholarship in performance studies, cognitive science, sociology, literature, anthropology, psychology, architecture, philosophy and sport science to ask how tightly knit collaboration works. Innovative methodological approaches are applied to detailed case studies from martial arts, tango, social interaction, Body Weather...
Article
Full-text available
Social animals have the remarkable ability to organize into collectives to achieve goals unobtainable to individual members. Equally striking is the observation that despite differences in perceptual-motor capabilities, different animals often exhibit qualitatively similar collective states of organization and coordination. Such qualitative similar...
Article
Full-text available
The coordination of attention between individuals is a fundamental part of everyday human social interaction. Previous work has focused on the role of gaze information for guiding responses during joint attention episodes. However, in many contexts, hand gestures such as pointing provide another valuable source of information about the locus of att...
Chapter
Recent innovations in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have allowed for the development of artificial agents that can outperform human counterparts. But when it comes to multiagent task contexts, the behavioral patterning of AI agents is just as important as their performance. Indeed, successful multi-ag...
Article
Full-text available
Rapid advances in the field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) over the past several years have led to artificial agents (AAs) capable of producing behavior that meets or exceeds human-level performance in a wide variety of tasks. However, research on DRL frequently lacks adequate discussion of the low-level dynamics of the behavior itself and in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Team interaction involves the division of labor and coordination of actions between members to achieve a shared goal. Although the dynamics of interactions that afford effective coordination and performance have been a focus in the cognitive science community, less is known about how to generate these flexible and adaptable coordination patterns. T...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In many team-based activities, members search for information to gain situational awareness and thereby structure their own behavior. The extent to which members are coupled and in control of their surrounding environment can be accessed via the fluctuations of their searching behaviors. To facilitate prospective control, assistive technologies suc...
Article
Observational learning can enhance the acquisition and performance quality of complex motor skills. While an extensive body of research has focused on the benefits of synchronous (i.e., concurrent physical practice) and non-synchronous (i.e., delayed physical practice) observational learning strategies, the question remains as to whether these appr...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing...
Article
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Most human actions are composed of two fundamental movement types, discrete and rhythmic movements. These movement types, or primitives, are analogous to the two elemental behaviors of nonlinear dynamical systems, namely, fixed-point and limit cycle behavior, respectively. Furthermore, there is now a growing body of research demonstrating how vario...
Conference Paper
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The current study incorporates concepts from dynamical systems theory (DST) and embodied cognition to propose a novel method of answering traditional questions in social psychology. Namely, we were interested in understanding postural sway complexity during the important interpersonal task of disclosing a hidden stigmatized identity (e.g., mental h...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Many everyday tasks require individuals to work together as a team to achieve a task goal. For many complex or high-stakes multi-agent activities, team members are required to participate in simulated training exercises to develop the task- and team-work (coordination) skills needed to maximize task performance. Such training, however, can be both...
Article
Full-text available
Human behaviour, along with any natural/biological behaviour, has varying degrees of intrinsic ‘noise’ or variability. Many studies have shown that the structure or patterning of this variability is sensitive to changes in task and constraint. Furthermore, two or more humans interacting together often begin to exhibit similar structures of behaviou...
Article
Full-text available
Research investigating the dynamics of coupled physical systems has demonstrated that small feedback delays can allow a dynamic response system to anticipate chaotic behavior. This counterintuitive phenomenon, termed anticipatory synchronization, has been observed in coupled electrical circuits, laser semi-conductors, and artificial neurons. Recent...
Chapter
The shepherding problem is interesting for multiagent systems research as it requires multiple actors (e.g., dogs, humans) to exert indirect control over autonomous agents (e.g., sheep, cattle) for containment or transportation. Accordingly, plenty of research has focused on designing algorithms for robotic agents to solve such tasks. Almost no res...
Article
Full-text available
Interactive or collaborative pick-and-place tasks occur during all kinds of daily activities, for example, when two or more individuals pass plates, glasses, and utensils back and forth between each other when setting a dinner table or loading a dishwasher together. In the near future, participation in these collaborative pick-and-place tasks could...
Article
Synchronized group dancing is one of the hallmarks of both coordination and cooperation in the humans species. While a large amount of research has focused on joint action in dyads, the mechanisms of coordination in larger groups are not well understood. In the present study, we explored the coordination dynamics of a group of folk dancers by exami...
Article
The actualization of action possibilities (i.e., affordances) can often be accomplished in numerous ways. For instance, an individual could walk over to a rubbish bin to drop an item in or throw the piece of rubbish into the bin from some distance away. The aim of the current study was to investigate the action dynamics that emerge from such under-...
Article
Human motion is highly variable due to the effects of interaction with the environment and the intentionality of movement. Current assistive device control systems struggle to support this variable human motion as they restrict typically uncontrolled degrees of freedom resulting in unnatural, mechanistic and highly repetitive (i.e., artificially in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Working with others not only improves behavioral efficiency, but also facilitates learning. Such multiagent activity is fundamental to everyday life and, increasingly, virtual and robotic agents are finding a place in these contexts. The effectiveness of human-machine interaction (HMI), however, relies on artificial systems being able to anticipate...
Article
When two people synchronize their rhythmic behaviors (e.g., finger tapping; walking) they match one another not only at a local scale of beat-to-beat intervals, but also at a global scale of the complex (fractal) patterns of variation in their interval series. This "complexity matching" had been demonstrated in a variety of timing behaviors, but th...
Article
Full-text available
The ability to move one’s body from sitting to standing is a crucial ability for independent living. Especially for seniors with decreasing muscular strength, sit-to-stand (STS) transitions are exceptionally risky and often call for assistance. In general, an STS transition is a complex full-body activity that requires the synergistic coordination...
Article
Full-text available
Even high functioning children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit impairments that affect their ability to carry out and maintain effective social interactions in multiple contexts. One aspect of subtle nonverbal communication that might play a role in this impairment is the whole-body motor coordination that naturally arises between peopl...
Conference Paper
Behavioral dynamics models provide an observationally grounded basis for HRI algorithms and provide another tool for creating robust, natural, and interpretable HRI systems. Here, an HRI pick-and-place algorithm was implemented based on a behavioral dynamics model of human decision-making dynamics in an interpersonal pick-and-place task. Participan...
Article
Full-text available
Lack of adequate physical activity in children is an epidemic that can result in obesity and other poor health outcomes across the lifespan. Physical activity interventions focused on motor skill competence continue to be developed, but some interventions, such as neuromuscular training (NMT), may be limited in how early they can be implemented due...
Article
Full-text available
Musical collaboration emerges from the complex interaction of environmental and informational 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...
Article
Full-text available
Humans spontaneously entrain their movements to visual rhythms in the environment. Previous research has shown that the strength of such unintentional visuomotor entrainment is enhanced when observing rhythms characterized by the nonlinear, Rayleigh kinematics typical of human movements; such movements are characterized by greater slowness towards...
Conference Paper
Humans often engage in tasks that require or are made more efficient by coordinating with other humans. The coordination involved in these tasks can be understood in terms of the behavioral and affordance dynamics of socially embedded agents engaged in joint action activities. Behavioral dynamics provide mathematical (differential equation) models...
Article
Full-text available
This study examines the relation of language use to a person's ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or "inner speech") impairments. The perf...
Conference Paper
Approximately 1.5 million senior citizens live under nursing supervision, and most require assistance with at least one or more Activities of Daily Living (ADL). These include transferring in and out of chairs, beds and toilets, which necessitates the ability to perform sit-to-stand transitions. The sit-to-stand transition is a complex full-body ac...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Biological systems are capable of acting in a shared environment to produce emergent, self-organized behavior that is the result of the constraints imposed by local interactions– such as bird flocking or ant swarming behavior. These examples present minimal demands for a shared-intention between co-actors, whereas other instances necessitate the fo...
Article
Full-text available
Impairments in social interaction and communication are critical features of ASD but the underlying processes are poorly understood. An under-explored area is the social motor synchronization that happens when we coordinate our bodies with others. Here, we explored the relationships between dynamical measures of social motor synchronization and ass...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
By integrating theories and methodologies from a diverse range of scientific disciplines (e.g., physics, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology and robotics engineering) the present work is aimed at harnessing self-organized anticipatory synchronization in order to advance human-robotic interaction (HRI). This phenomenon is characterized by th...
Article
Impairments in social interaction and communication are critical features of ASD but the underlying processes are poorly understood. An under-explored area is the social motor synchronization that happens when we coordinate our bodies with others. Here, we explored the relationships between dynamical measures of social motor synchronization and ass...
Article
Full-text available
Humans commonly engage in tasks that require or are made more efficient by coordinating with other humans. In this paper we introduce a task dynamics approach for modeling multi-agent interaction and decision making in a pick and place task where an agent must move an object from one location to another and decide whether to act alone or with a par...