Name:Diya, Chutani

School/Affiliation:McMaster University

Co-Authors:Kiah Prince, Steven Brown

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Short Bio:

Diya Chutani is in her final year at the Georgia Institute of Technology, getting a BS in Neuroscience with a Minor in Physics. She conducts perceptual decision-making research in the Wheeler Lab, and this past summer, she did a research internship in the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University, where she contributed to several projects, including the one presented here, examining whether individual rhythmic entrainment abilities predicted synchrony performance in pairs. This experience solidified her ambitions to get a PhD in Neuroscience, during which she hopes to do research on music cognition, specifically in relation to rhythmic entrainment and synchrony.

Abstract:

Are the most synchronous groups made up of highly expert individuals? Or do groups benefit from having individuals with varying skill levels? In groups composed exclusively of experts, individuals may compete for a leadership role, whereas mixed groups might allow for clearer complementarity of roles. To answer this question, we examined a dyadic dance task in which novices performed a simple dance step in synchrony while facing one another. To quantify synchrony, we used accelerometers on participants’ ankles to examine cross-correlations between the movements of the performers. In a separate task, we measured each individual’s ability to entrain their finger tapping to a metronome beat. We used the Resultant Length Vector from circular distributions of the tapping data as a measurement of tapping consistency. The key question was whether the most synchronous dyads were those in which both members demonstrated high finger-tapping consistency. To our surprise, we found that dyads mismatched for finger-tapping ability had the highest synchrony; however, this was not significantly different from dyads where finger-tapping ability was higher for both individuals. We did see a significant positive correlation between differences in consistency across dyads and higher synchrony on the dance step task, indicating dyads with larger differences exhibited better synchrony performance. These results demonstrate that group synchrony might benefit from a mixture of individual-level skills such that complementary roles can emerge.