Influence of Visual Information on Interpersonal Coordination of Head- and Body- Movement During Dyad Conversations

We investigated the influence of visual information on interpersonal coordination of head- and body- movement during dyadic conversations. Visual information was manipulated by locating a partition at a halfway point between participants. Interpersonal coordination dynamics between head- and body- movement was also compared. To quantify the amount of such movement, human pose estimation software was used. The time series of each body part were submitted to the cross-recurrence quantification analysis to assess the degree of coordination. We hypothesized that unavailability of visual information increase interpersonal bodily coordination and experimental manipulation affects interpersonal coordination during conversation but does differently between head- and body- movement levels. As predicted, results revealed that occlusion of visual information increased head-movement coordination between participants while no significant difference was found in body-movement coordination between conditions. Further investigations on the mechanism of such different influences of perceptual information on coordination dynamics at multiple levels should be pursued