Biology subjects

Konvalinka, I.

Publications and source records attributed to Konvalinka, I..

8 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Asymmetric listening conditions perturb verbal and nonverbal coordination dynamics during conversation

Human conversation depends on continuous coordination across verbal and nonverbal behaviour. Yet this coordination may become perturbed when one person experiences greater listening difficulty. Previous nonverbal joint action studies show that unequal task demands between partners can lead to complementary leader-follower dynamics, but whether similar patterns emerge during natural conversation remains unclear. We investigated how unequal listening conditions affect verbal and nonverbal coordination in 40 same-gender stranger dyads during three 10-minute face-to-face conversations. Each dyad participated in noise-free and asymmetric noise conditions, with one person exposed to speech-shaped noise at a time. Asymmetric noise reduced conversational flow and enjoyment, and shifted the balance of verbal contributions: noise-exposed participants took longer turns and contributed more speaking time, while their noise-free partners produced more backchannels. Interpersonal head-movement coordination became temporally asymmetric under noise, with movements of the noise-exposed participant more often preceding those of their partner. In contrast, interpersonal hand-movement coordination did not differ between conditions. Within individuals, hand coordination was stronger when participants themselves experienced noise than when their partner experienced noise. These findings demonstrate that perturbing one partner's auditory access affects coordination within and between individuals, revealing how unequal interaction demands produce different coordination patterns across verbal and nonverbal behaviour.

physiology↗

bioRxiv2026

Personal network features are embodied in real-time social interaction dynamics

People navigate dozens of social interactions daily. Through these, they construct and maintain diverse social networks. While personal dispositions drive how people interact and connect others, the resulting networks feed back into daily social experiences by creating interaction opportunities and modulating cognitive processes. Here, we show that peoples moment-to-moment interaction behaviors are informative of the structure of their personal social network, even if the interaction occurs between strangers. We paired 104 strangers to perform an interactive motor task and investigated whether emergent leader-follower roles and spontaneous movement synchronization reflected similarities or differences in their personal networks. Participants with tighter networks (smaller, denser, more constrained, and with fewer communities) relative to the interaction partner adapted their movements to the partner more. Using multivariate temporal response functions (mTRF) to measure neural encoding of self and others movements, we found that, conversely, participants with less tight networks exhibited higher neural encoding of their partners movements. This suggests that the network effect on behavioral adaptation was unlikely to be driven by heightened monitoring of the partner. Higher spontaneous movement synchronization was associated with higher personality agreeableness and personality similarity between interacting partners. Our results demonstrate that signatures of personal social environment manifest dynamically in real-time behaviors and that these effects are independent of personality effects. Thus, social networks set an additional context for interpersonal interaction even for partners without a prior relationship.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Friendship modulates physical effort and neural dynamics during group coordination in shared social networks

Human social interactions are embedded within social networks, yet how existing interpersonal relationships influence the behavioural and neural dynamics of collective action remains unclear. We combined social network mapping with three-person EEG-hyperscanning to investigate how friendship asymmetry within shared social networks modulates physical effort allocation during real-time coordination. Triads consisting of two close friends and one non-friend performed a novel joint force task. Non-friends consistently produced greater and more vigorous force relative to friends, particularly those embedded in smaller classroom social networks. At the neural level, non-friends also showed stronger alpha- and beta-band event-related desynchronization, inter-subject correlation, and group phase synchrony, indicating greater engagement of action-related and attentional processes. These findings suggest that non-friends invest more physical effort and attention when interacting in socially asymmetric group settings, demonstrating how real-world relational context within social networks is dynamically embodied in the neural and behavioural mechanisms supporting human group coordination.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Physical proximity, social familiarity, and acoustic environment modulate heart rate synchrony in real-world social interactions

Human social behaviour unfolds in complex real-world environments influenced by social and environmental factors, yet reliable markers of social engagement and connection remain elusive. Interpersonal physiological synchrony (IPS) has been proposed as one such marker, but its occurrence in everyday settings is not well established. To investigate the social and environmental factors that influence IPS, we continuously measured heart rate, GPS, and the acoustic environment from 72 participants across three multi-day trips to New York City, capturing naturalistic social behaviour. Across all three trips, heart rates reliably synchronized when participants were in close physical proximity, indicating that shared environmental context was sufficient to elicit IPS. IPS was stronger among socially familiar peers, and context dependent, emerging during close-proximity interactions and joint attention to shared stimuli, but not dispersed interactions. IPS was also modulated by acoustic context, with low-to-moderate sound pressure levels and moderate-to-high signal-to-noise ratios enhancing synchrony, while excessive environmental noise reduced it to levels comparable to non-interactive settings, which may reflect lower levels of joint engagement in noisier environments. These findings demonstrate that IPS emerges in naturalistic social settings and is modulated by physical proximity, social familiarity, social context, and the acoustic environment, establishing IPS as a reliable marker of real-world social engagement.

physiology↗

bioRxiv2025

The social, decoupled self: interpersonal synchronization of breathing alters intrapersonal cardiorespiratory coupling

People synchronize their behavioural and physiological rhythms with each other during social interaction. While interpersonal synchronization has largely been associated with positive effects such as social bonding, some evidence suggests that it may also impair self-regulation and disrupt intrapersonal coordination. Because respiration and heart rhythms are weakly coupled within individuals, we investigated whether synchronizing breathing with another person alters intra-personal cardiorespiratory coupling. Across two experiments, participants synchronized their breathing reciprocally (bidirectional interaction), unidirectionally with a confederate, or with pre-recorded breathing signals, while respiration and electrocardiography (ECG) were continuously measured. Relative phase analyses revealed that bidirectional breathing synchronization induced in-phase synchronization of heart rhythms between individuals. Critically, interpersonal synchronization coincided with cardiorespiratory decoupling: respiration and heart rhythms became more out-of-phase during interaction compared to resting baselines and the unidirectional condition. Moreover, stronger interpersonal respiratory synchronization predicted greater intra-personal cardiorespiratory decoupling, particularly when participants adapted their own breathing to another persons. These findings provide evidence that interpersonal physiological synchronization entails a trade-off with intra-personal physiological coupling, perturbing the phase relationship within ones own physiological system. We propose that aligning ones physiological rhythms with others strengthens self-other coupling but weakens intrapersonal coupling, pointing to a physiological mechanism of self-decoupling during social interaction. Graphical abstractWhen two people synchronize their breathing together, their heart rhythms also synchronize, while their intrapersonal cardiorespiratory rhythms become decoupled, with a perturbed phase-relationship between respiration and cardiac rhythms. Across two experiments, stronger interpersonal respiratory synchronization was associated with more pronounced intrapersonal cardiorespiratory decoupling. These findings suggest a physiological trade-off: aligning bodily rhythms with others strengthens self-other coupling, but may coincide with a phase shift in ones intrinsic cardiorespiratory rhythm. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=96 SRC="FIGDIR/small/679159v2_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (16K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@17e4675org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@143bf94org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@d6b841org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@dab5e2_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

physiology↗

bioRxiv2024

Two-brain microstates: A novel method for quantifying task-driven inter-brain asymmetry

BackgroundThe neural mechanisms underlying real-time social interaction remain poorly understood. While hyperscanning has emerged as a popular method to better understand inter-brain mechanisms, inter-brain methods remain underdeveloped, and primarily focused on inter-brain synchronization (IBS). New methodWe developed a novel approach employing two-brain EEG microstates, to investigate neural mechanisms during symmetric and asymmetric interactive tasks. Microstates are quasi-stable configurations of brain activity that have been proposed to represent basic building blocks for mental processing. Expanding the microstate methodology to dyads of interacting participants enables us to investigate quasi-stable moments of inter-brain synchronous and asymmetric activity. ResultsConventional microstates fitted to individuals were not related to the different interactive conditions. However, two-brain microstates were modulated in the observer-actor condition, compared to all other conditions where participants had more symmetric task demands, and the same trend was observed for the follower-leader condition. This indicates differences in resting state default-mode network activity during interactions with asymmetric tasks. Comparison with existing methodsHyperscanning studies have primarily estimated IBS based on functional connectivity measures. However, localized connections are often hard to interpret on a larger scale when multiple connections across brains are found to be important. Two-brain microstates offer an alternative approach to evaluate neural activity from a large-scale global network perspective, by quantifying task-driven asymmetric neural states between interacting individuals. ConclusionsWe present a novel method using two-brain microstates, including open-source code, which expands the current hyperscanning-EEG methodology to measure and potentially identify both synchronous and asymmetric inter-brain states during real-time social interaction.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

A Kuramoto model of self-other integration across interpersonal synchronization strategies

Human social behaviour is complex, and the biological and neural mechanisms underpinning it remain debated1,2. A particularly interesting social phenomenon is our ability and tendency to fall into synchrony with other humans3,4. Our ability to coordinate actions and goals relies on the ability to distinguish between and integrate self and other, which when impaired can lead to devastating consequences. Interpersonal synchronization has been a widely used framework for studying action coordination and self-other integration, showing that in simple interactions, such as joint finger tapping, complex interpersonal dynamics emerge. Here we propose a computational model of self-other integration via within- and between-person action-perception links, implemented as a simple Kuramoto model with four oscillators. The model abstracts each member of a dyad as a unit consisting of two connected oscillators, representing intrinsic processes of perception and action. By fitting this model to data from two separate experiments we show that interpersonal synchronization strategies rely on the relationship between within- and between-unit coupling. Specifically, mutual adaptation exhibits a higher between-unit coupling than within-unit coupling; leading-following requires that the follower unit has a low within-unit coupling; and leading-leading occurs when two units jointly exhibit a low between-unit coupling. These findings are consistent with the theory of interpersonal synchronization emerging through self-other integration mediated by processes of action-perception coupling4. Hence, our results show that chaotic human behaviour occurring on a millisecond scale can be modelled using coupled oscillators.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Musical interaction is influenced by underlying predictive models and musical expertise

Musical interaction is a unique model for understanding humans ability to align goals, intentions, and actions, which also allows for the manipulation of participants internal predictive models of upcoming events. Here we used polyrhythms to construct two joint finger tapping tasks that even when rhythmically dissimilar resulted in equal inter-tap intervals (ITIs). Thus, behaviourally a dyad of two musicians tap isochronously at the same rate, yet with their own distinct rhythmical context model (RCM). We recruited 22 highly skilled musicians (in 11 dyads) and contrasted the effect of having a shared versus non-shared RCM on dyads synchronization behaviour. As expected, tapping synchronization was significantly worse at the start of trials with non-shared models compared to trials with a shared model. However, the musicians were able to quickly recover when holding dissimilar predictive models. We characterised the directionality in the tapping behaviour of the dyads and found patterns mostly of mutual adaptation. Yet, in a subset of dyads primarily consisting of drummers, we found significantly different synchronization patterns, suggesting that instrument expertise can significantly affect synchronization strategies. Overall, this demonstrates that holding different predictive models impacts synchronization in musicians performing joint finger tapping.\n\nPublic significance statementThis study shows that when a pair of musicians thinks differently about a rhythm they play together, their performance is worse. However, they are able to recover back to normal performance levels after a few taps for which they use different strategies. Interestingly, we find that the strategies used by drummers may be different from other musicians.

neuroscience↗