Food and Paper: From Synchrony to Coupling: Individual Timing and Emotional Modulation

Abstract

How do people fall into sync, and what determines how strongly they adapt to one another? In ECoSync, I investigate how emotions and individual differences affect interpersonal synchronization. Rather than looking only at how synchronized two people appear, I use a delay-coupled computational model to estimate how strongly each person adapts to the other. This has highlighted the importance of individual spontaneous timing tendencies, while also raising questions about how emotional states may alter these patterns of adaptation. I will present a series of rhythmic interaction experiments in which we vary the information partners receive from one another and induce emotional states through performance feedback. More recently, we have added eye tracking to examine how these processes are reflected in pupil responses. I will discuss how these findings have developed across experiments and how they are shaping the next steps of the project.

Bio

Andrii Smykovskyi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at RITMO, University of Oslo. His research focuses on interpersonal synchronization and the processes that allow people to adapt to one another during rhythmic interaction. In his ECoSync project, he investigates how individual differences and emotional states shape interpersonal coupling, combining behavioural experiments, computational modelling, and physiological measures such as eye tracking and pupil dilation.