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Vision adds to haptics when dyads perform a whole-body joint balance task

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Abstract

When two or more people aim to produce joint action outcomes they need to coordinate their individual actions in space and time. Successful joint action performance has been reported to depend, among others, on visual and somatosensory information provided to the joint actors. This study investigated whether and how the systematic manipulation of visual information modulates real-time joint action when dyads performed a whole-body joint balance task. To this end, we introduced the Joint Action Board (JAB) where partners guided a ball through a maze towards a virtual hole by jointly shifting their weight on the board under three visual conditions: (1) the Follower had neither visual access to the Leader nor to the maze; (2) the Follower had no visual access to the maze but to the Leader; (3) the Follower had full visual access to both the Leader and to the maze. Joint action performance was measured as completion time of the maze task; interpersonal coordination was examined by means of kinematic analyses of both partners’ motor behaviour. We predicted that systematically adding visual to the available haptic information would result in a significant increase in joint performance and that Leaders would change their coordination behavior depending on these conditions. Results showed that adding visual information to haptics led to an increase in joint action performance in a Leader–Follower relationship in a joint balance task. In addition, interpersonal coordination behavior (i.e. sway range of motion, time-lag between partner’s bodies etc.) changed dependent on the provided visual information between partners in the jointly executed task.

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Acknowledgements

We cordially thank Matthias Bischoff for providing insightful thoughts on the study setup.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Muenster, Horstmarer Landweg 62b, 48149, Muenster, Germany

    Eric Eils, Leonie Sieverding, Marc H. E. de Lussanet & Karen Zentgraf

  2. Institute of Sport Science, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Rouwen Cañal-Bruland

  3. Otto-Creutzfeld Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany

    Karen Zentgraf

Authors
  1. Eric Eils
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  2. Rouwen Cañal-Bruland
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  3. Leonie Sieverding
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  4. Marc H. E. de Lussanet
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  5. Karen Zentgraf
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Correspondence to Eric Eils.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Eils, E., Cañal-Bruland, R., Sieverding, L. et al. Vision adds to haptics when dyads perform a whole-body joint balance task. Exp Brain Res 235, 2089–2102 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4952-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4952-1

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