Biology subjects

Snapiri, L.

Publications and source records attributed to Snapiri, L..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

From Individual to Shared Tempo: How Spontaneous Tempo Preferences Impact Joint Performance

Endogenous rhythmic structure is a key characteristic of our cognitive system, organizing both sensory processes and motor behavior. In the motor domain, recent studies demonstrated that individuals vary systematically in the spontaneous tempo of self-paced movement, exhibiting consistent tempo preferences across time, tasks, and cognitive demands. In our daily experience, we often need to perform with others, adjusting our motor signatures to support interpersonal coordination. The purpose of this study is to examine how individuals with distinct spontaneous tempi reconcile their personal tempo preferences with the need to synchronize during joint performance. To this end, we measured individuals spontaneous tempo across different days using three motor behaviors: tapping, walking, and bouncing. This design allowed us to examine both temporal consistency and cross-task consistency. Participants were then asked to perform these tasks together under two experimental conditions: (1) side-by-side, without explicit instructions to synchronize, and (2) with explicit instructions to synchronize their movements. Our findings replicate and extend recent work, demonstrating that individuals show stable rhythmic preferences across time, tasks, and interactive contexts. When performing together, two complementary patterns emerged. First, dyads converged on a common tempo around 2 Hz, reflecting a preferred tempo for joint rhythmic performance. Second, individuals retained a bias toward their own spontaneous tempo during joint performance, with faster or slower individuals performing correspondingly fast or slow within the range of dyadic tempo. Finally, individuals with more similar spontaneous tempi achieved greater synchrony and temporal stability when performing together. Thus, while individuals can flexibly adjust their spontaneous tempo to support joint action, personal tempo preferences remain a robust source of variability in how people perform and interact with others.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Similarity in Spontaneous Tempo Impacts Flow Experience and Coordination Dynamics During Joint Performance

Individuals tend to perform simple rhythmic tasks at a characteristic tempo, known as their spontaneous motor tempo. This motor trait, whether one naturally moves at a faster or slower pace, has been implicated in the ability to perform with external rhythmic structure across various tasks and experimental settings. In daily life, external rhythms often emerge through social interaction, as we continuously adapt to and move with rhythms generated by others. While previous studies have shown that individuals with similar spontaneous tempi can synchronize better in structured tasks, the role of individuals spontaneous tempo in unstructured, dynamic social interactions remains untested. In the current study, we examined how individuals spontaneous tempo shapes interpersonal coordination and subjective experience during an open-ended, free-form dyadic movement task. We first assessed individuals tempo using a spontaneous tapping task. Then, we measured interpersonal coordination patterns, including synchrony and leader-follower dynamics using a joint improvisation task inspired by the mirror game. Specifically, we developed a novel platform, composed of large transparent touch screens that resemble a shared window, on which individuals could continuously improvise motion together in an intuitive and playful manner. Participants alternated between game rounds with a designated leader and game rounds of leaderless improvisation. Following the mirror game, we also measured individuals subjective experience using a flow questionnaire. We found that individuals with similar spontaneous tempi reported greater flow experience during joint performance. Furthermore, we found that individuals with similar spontaneous tempi tended to synchronize less and were more variable and dynamic in their coordination patterns, specifically during leaderless improvisation rounds. Finally, we found that flow experience was highest when a participants movement tempo during the mirror game aligned with their own spontaneous tempo, regardless of their partners. These findings highlight individual spontaneous tempo as a meaningful trait that shapes both coordination dynamics and subjective experience during creative joint performance.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Rhythmic Modulation of Visual Discrimination is Dependent on Individuals' Spontaneous Motor Tempo

Rhythmic structure in our daily experience originates from various sources. It is generated endogenously and observed in spontaneous fluctuations in behaviour and performance. It can also arise exogenously from everyday stimuli, such as speech, motion and music. Here we examined how individual differences in spontaneous motor rhythms affect the tendency to use external rhythmic structure to guide perception. To measure individual differences in spontaneous rhythms of performance we utilized a spontaneous tapping task. To measure individual differences in perceptual rhythmic modulation we designed a visual discrimination task in which targets can appear either in-phase or out-of-phase with a preceding rhythmic stream of visual stimuli. We manipulated the tempo of the visual stream over different experimental blocks (0.77 Hz, 1.4 Hz, 2 Hz). We found that visual rhythmic stimulation modulates discrimination performance. The modulation was dependent on the tempo of stimulation, with maximal perceptual benefits for the slowest tempo of stimulation (0.77 Hz). Most importantly, the strength of modulation was also affected by individuals spontaneous motor tempo. Specifically, individuals with slower spontaneous tempi showed greater rhythmic modulation compared to individuals with faster spontaneous tempi. This discovery suggests that different tempi affect the cognitive system with varying levels of efficiency, and that self-generated rhythms impact our ability to utilize rhythmic structure in the environment for guiding perception and performance.

neuroscience↗