Health & Medicine
How People Dance and Move Without Bumping into One Another
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Apr 19, 2015 06:28 PM EDT
People manage to move around one another with few "accidents." But how do we manage to avoid bumping into one another? Scientists have taken a closer look at the delicate dynamics of social movement.
In order to better understand human movement, the researchers examined 12 pairs of volunteers simultaneously moving objects on a 50-inch computer screen from one location to another-without bumping their objects into each other-using a hand-held motion-tracking sensor to control their movements.
"The task was chosen because many joint actions involve the continuous production of repetitive movements over time," wrote the authors in a news release. "For instance, the same or similar movements are performed in a repetitive manner when two individuals are loading a dishwasher, stacking a pile of blocks or magazines, or dancing or (Kung fu) fighting together. These social activities, however, do not involve the incidental inphase or antiphase movement synchronization that has been the focus of previous studies of social coordination."
The scientists found that nearly all of the pairs fell into the same stable pattern of coordination, with one participant adopting a more straight-line trajectory between the targets, and the partner falling into an elliptical trajectory.
The findings may help with making strides in understanding the coordination of interpersonal movement and support research in areas ranging from social coordination of children with autism to people with schizophrenia to human interaction with robotics and sport rehabilitation.
The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
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First Posted: Apr 19, 2015 06:28 PM EDT
People manage to move around one another with few "accidents." But how do we manage to avoid bumping into one another? Scientists have taken a closer look at the delicate dynamics of social movement.
In order to better understand human movement, the researchers examined 12 pairs of volunteers simultaneously moving objects on a 50-inch computer screen from one location to another-without bumping their objects into each other-using a hand-held motion-tracking sensor to control their movements.
"The task was chosen because many joint actions involve the continuous production of repetitive movements over time," wrote the authors in a news release. "For instance, the same or similar movements are performed in a repetitive manner when two individuals are loading a dishwasher, stacking a pile of blocks or magazines, or dancing or (Kung fu) fighting together. These social activities, however, do not involve the incidental inphase or antiphase movement synchronization that has been the focus of previous studies of social coordination."
The scientists found that nearly all of the pairs fell into the same stable pattern of coordination, with one participant adopting a more straight-line trajectory between the targets, and the partner falling into an elliptical trajectory.
The findings may help with making strides in understanding the coordination of interpersonal movement and support research in areas ranging from social coordination of children with autism to people with schizophrenia to human interaction with robotics and sport rehabilitation.
The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone