Richard C Schmidt

College of the Holy Cross · Department of Psychology

Past research has revealed that natural social interactions contain interactional synchrony. The present study describes new methods for measuring interactional syn-chrony in natural interactions and evaluates whether the behavioral synchronization involved in social interactions is similar to dynamical synchronization found generically in nature....

It has been demonstrated that motor coordination of interacting people plays a crucial role in the success of social exchanges. Abnormal movements have been reported during interpersonal interactions of patients suffering from schizophrenia and a motor coordination breakdown could explain this social interaction deficit, which is one of the main an...

Recently there has been much interest in social coordination of motor movements, or as it is referred to by some researchers, joint action. This paper reviews the cognitive perspective's common coding/mirror neuron theory of joint action, describes some of its limitations and then presents the behavioral dynamics perspective as an alternative way o...

Conversations encompass continuous exchanges of verbal and nonverbal information. Previous research has demonstrated that gestures dynamically entrain each other and that speakers tend to align their vocal properties. While gesture and speech are known to synchronize at the intrapersonal level, few studies have investigated the multimodal dynamics...

In order to establish natural social synchrony between two humans, two requirements need to be fulfilled. First, the coupling must be bi-directional. The two humans react to each other’s actions. Second, natural social bodily synchronization has to be intentional or unintentional. Assuming that these essential aspects of human-human interactions ar...

The goal of this study was to analyze the interpersonal coordination of patients suffering from schizophrenia (SZ) using a humanoid robot NAO. NAO is controlled by a neutrally-inspired model that allows it to be able to synchronize its movements with human movements. Using a robot has the advantage in that it can be modified and controlled without...

The goal of this study was to evaluate the impact of unintentional (spontaneous) coordination on high attentional visual load. More precisely, we wondered whether such coordination could free up some attentional resources and help improve performance in other more demanding attentional tasks. An experiment was performed in which participant attenti...

Atypical sensory processing is common in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), but their role in adaptive difficulties and problem behaviors is poorly understood. Our aim was to determine the prevalence and type of atypical sensory processing in children with ASD and investigate its impact on their adaptive functioning and maladaptive behaviors. We stud...

The social and motor context in which restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) occur in autism and their relationship to social traits are not well-understood. Participants with and without autism completed tasks that varied in social and motor engagement and RRB frequency was measured. Motor and verbal RRBs were most common, RRBs varied based on...

Previous research has reported changes in mu rhythm, the central rhythm of the alpha frequency band, in both intentional and spontaneous interpersonal coordination. The current study was designed to extend existing findings on social synchrony to the pendulum swinging task and simultaneously measured time unfolding behavioral synchrony and EEG esti...

Previous research has found that spontaneous synchronization of bodily movements emerges when people interact. This dynamic interactional synchrony occurs in all kinds of everyday movements and has been demonstrated empirically in a variety of social contexts. The objective of this study is to advance our understanding of the dynamical processes th...

This study aimed to combine co-activation as well as anterior and posterior cruciate ligament force estimations with the motor unit activation strategies employed by the primary muscles that are involved in the movement at the knee joint. Fourteen male subject performed 25 maximal concentric isokinetic leg extension muscle actions at 120 s−1. Elect...

Atypical sensory processing has been described in autism spectrum disorder. The goal of this systematic review is to investigate the links between sensory processing, adaptive behaviours, and attention skills in children with autism spectrum disorder. The PRISMA guidelines were followed and a search was conducted using electronic databases: Medline...

Difficulty in social communication and interaction is a primary diagnostic feature of ASD. Research has found that adolescents with ASD display various impairments in social behavior such as theory of mind (ToM), emotion recognition, and social synchrony. However, not much is known about the relationships among these dimensions of social behavior....

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0193906.].

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...

Rapid progress in the area of humanoid robots offers tremendous possibilities for investigating and improving social competences in people with social deficits, but remains yet unexplored in schizophrenia. In this study, we examined the influence of social feedbacks elicited by a humanoid robot on motor coordination during a human-robot interaction...

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...

Coordinating interpersonal motor activity is crucial in martial arts, where managing spatiotemporal parameters is emphasized to produce effective techniques. Modeling arm movements in an Aikido technique as coupled oscillators, we investigated whether more-skilled participants would adapt to the perturbation of weighted arms in different and predic...

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...

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...

Impairments in social interaction and communicating with others are core features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the specific processes underlying such social competence impairments are not well understood. An important key for increasing our understanding of ASD-specific social deficits may lie with the social motor synchronization that ta...

Background: Electromyographic (EMG) and mechanomyographic (MMG) studies of fatigue have generally utilized maximal isometric or dynamic muscle actions, but sport- and work-related activities involve predominately submaximal movements. Therefore, the purpose of the present investigation was to examine the torque, EMG, and MMG responses as a result...

Social interactions typically involve movements of the body that become synchronized over time and both intentional and spontaneous interactional synchrony have been found to be an essential part of successful human interaction. However, our understanding of the importance of temporal dimensions of social motor synchrony in social dysfunction is li...

Interpersonal motor coordination is considered to be an integral part of maintaining successful social interactions. Research has shown that simply coordinating one’s movements with another actor can influence rapport as well as feelings of social connection and social competence. Past research has also found that deficits in social motor coordinat...

Functionally stable and robust interpersonal motor coordination has been found to play an integral role in the effectiveness of social interactions. However, the motion-tracking equipment required to record and objectively measure the dynamic limb and body movements during social interaction has been very costly, cumbersome, and impractical within...

Introduction: Nowadays, high-technology (utilization of avatars or robots) has been becoming widely used in medical rehabilitation programs. The biggest advantage of the high-tech agents is to help designing individualized rehabilitation plans and saving caregivers' time. Since previous research in human-human interaction showed that the way indivi...

Abstract: Schizophrenia is often characterized by nonverbal communication deficits that directly impact patients’ everyday life and often induce stigmatization. Although clinicians have developed several interventions and training sessions for these patients, paradoxically, these interventions are not focused on social motor interaction. The goal o...

The current project examined how changes to task constraints impacted the behavioral dynamics of an interpersonal collision avoidance task previously examined and modeled by Richardson and colleagues (2015). Overall, the results demonstrate that decreasing the cost associated with colliding influences the stability and symmetry of the movement dyna...

Historically, movement noise or variability is considered to be an undesirable property of biological motor systems. In particular, noise is typically assumed to degrade the emergence and stability of rhythmic motor synchronization. Recently, however, it has been suggested that small levels of noise might actually improve the functioning of motor s...

Understanding stable patterns of interpersonal movement coordination is essential to understanding successful social interaction and activity (i.e., joint action). Previous research investigating such coordination has primarily focused on the synchronization of simple rhythmic movements (e.g., finger/forearm oscillations or pendulum swinging). Very...

What leads healthy individuals to abnormal feelings of contact with schizophrenia patients remains obscure. Despite recent findings that human bonding is an interactive process influ-enced by coordination dynamics, the spatiotemporal organization of the bodily movements of schizophrenia patients when interacting with other people is poorly understo...

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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 capabi...

Semantic priming tasks are classically used to influence and implicitly promote target behaviors. Recently, several studies have demonstrated that prosocial semantic priming modulated feelings of social affiliation. The main aim of this study was to determine whether inducing feelings of social affiliation using priming tasks could modulate nonverb...

Many of our everyday actions are performed in a social setting and are coordinated with the actions of other people. Research has found that stable and effective social motor coordination breaks down in pathologies such as autism and schizophrenia, is related to the psychological connectedness of individuals, and consequently, important for the dev...

Semantic priming tasks are classically used to influence and implicitly promote target behaviors. Recently, several studies have demonstrated that prosocial semantic priming modulated feelings of social affiliation. The main aim of this study was to determine whether inducing feelings of social affiliation using priming tasks could modulate nonverb...

Advances in video and time series analysis have greatly enhanced our ability to study the bodily synchronization that occurs in natural interactions. Past research has demonstrated that the behavioral synchronization involved in social interactions is similar to dynamical synchronization found generically in nature. The present study investigated h...

Every day, we visually coordinate our movements with environmental rhythms. Despite its ubiquity, it largely remains unclear why certain visual rhythms or stimuli facilitate such visuomotor coordination. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether the velocity profile of a rhythmic stimulus modulated the emergence and stability of this...

Background: Motor deficits have long been associated with autism but the role they play in social and emotional functioning is poorly understood. In addition, social movement coordination has been shown to facilitate social connection and may be abnormal in children with autism (Fitzpatrick et al., 2013). Recent advances in technology have result...

Background: The processes underlying the social deficits of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are not fully understood. When human beings interact with others, we implicitly coordinate our bodies and this has been found to facilitate interpersonal connections (e.g., Lakin & Chartrand, 2003). It is possible that such social movement co...

Defined by a persistent fear of embarrassment or negative evaluation while engaged in social interaction or public performance, social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most common psychiatric syndromes. Previous research has made a considerable effort to better understand and assess this mental disorder. However, little attention has been paid...

Intermediate endophenotypes emerge as an important concept in the study of schizophrenia. Although research on phenotypes mainly investigated cognitive, metabolic or neurophysiological markers so far, some authors also examined the motor behavior anomalies as a potential trait-marker of the disease. However, no research has investigated social moto...

a b s t r a c t Expressive behaviour plays a crucial role in the success of social interactions. Abnormality of expressive behaviour has been reported in interpersonal interactions of patients suffering from schizophrenia and social phobia, two debilitating mental disorders with important social deficits. However, no study has compared the expressi...

Il est actuellement admis que les symptômes négatifs apparaissent précocement dans la maladie schizophrénique et seraient plus prédictifs du fonctionnement futur des patients que les symptômes positifs. L’apathie, symptôme transnosographique puisqu’on le retrouve dans un ensemble de maladies neurologiques, fait partie des symptômes négatifs fréquem...

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suffer from numerous impairments in social interaction that affect both their mental and bodily coordination with others. We explored here whether interpersonal motor coordination may be an important key for understanding the profound social problems of children with ASD. We employed a set of experimenta...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have significant visuomotor processing deficits, atypical motoric behavior, and often substantial problems connecting socially. We suggest that the perceptual, attentional, and adaptive timing deficiencies associated with autism might directly impact the ability to become a socially connected unit w...

This study aimed to determine whether underlying factors such as interpersonal attention and mood contributed to Wilthermuth and Heath’s (2009) finding that that interpersonal motor synchrony increases cooperative behavior. In a hand clapping condition, participants played a hand clapping signaling game that required motor synchrony. In another con...

In competitive sport game behavior, certain interpersonal patterns of movement coordination evolve even though each individual player only intends to exert their own strategy to win. To investigate this interpersonal pattern formation process, we asked pairs of naïve participants to engage in a play-tag game in which they had to remove a tag fasten...

Detail of role detection procedure. A: An example of time series of and observed in a late-longest trial performed by pair # 5. B: calculated from the data presented in Figure S1 A. Vertical dotted line indicates timings of role transition (or recursion) indicated by zero-crossing point of .C: and it's zero-crossing points in 15–20s region in Figur...

Heart rates and HRR before and during each trial. (EPS)

A supplementary measure of strike-movement time. Players’ striking movements in matches were measured to identify players’ physical constraints and the task properties of kendo. The strike movements were measured during the tobikomi-men (lunge-and-strike) movement. Players frequently attempted to strike an opponent’s head (men) from an interpersona...

Descriptive numerical information regarding each of #1 to #5 pair's performance. N. of Trials: Number of trial repetition. Dur.: Duration of a trial (in seconds). N. of TP.: Numbers of thrusts (and parries) in each trial. Thrusts were estimated from numbers of peaks observed in a time series of inter-participant distance (examples of data were show...