summary: The more a person can synchronize to a simple beat, the more they can synchronize their pupils with other people’s pupils.
sauce: Dartmouth College
According to a new Dartmouth study published in , how well you sync to a simple beat predicts how well you sync with other minds. scientific report.
Previous studies have demonstrated that the pupillary dilation patterns of speakers and listeners are spontaneously synchronized, indicating shared attention. The team set out to understand how tendencies to synchronize in this way change at the individual level and generalize across contexts.
“We were very surprised to discover that how well the pupil dilates and constricts to something as simple as a rhythmic beat predicts how we attend to other people. He holds a PhD in Psychology and Brain Science from Dartmouth College at the time of his research, and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“What this suggests is that there may be some kind of underlying mechanism that could integrate the different ways we talk about synchrony.”
This survey consisted of two surveys. In the first study, individuals were asked to listen to a series of tones and indicate which tones were softer than others while tracking pupillary responses.
Each individual completed this ‘oddball detection task’ during nine separate sessions held on different dates and times for each session. The researchers found that there was steady, individual-specific variation in the amount that each person tuned into his oddball rhythm.
Some people’s pupils dilate greatly to the beat, others don’t, but how strongly they tuned in one day predicted how much they would tune in the next.
In a second study, 82 people completed a single oddball task and tracked the students’ responses while also listening to audio recordings of four emotional stories. The storyteller’s pupil dilation was previously recorded when reading the story.
The researchers calculated the pupillary synchrony between the narrator and the listener and compared this synchrony to how well the listener was synchronized to the rhythmic beats of the oddball task.
The results show that the more people tuned in to the rhythmic beat of the task, the more likely they were to synchronize their pupils with the storyteller’s pupils. Because these individuals could not see the narrator, pupillary entrainment could not be explained as a simple visual imitation. It was proof of that.
“It is very interesting to identify that the two synchronicities of simple metronome entrainment and complex shared attention are related. It raises big questions,” says lead author Thalia Wheatley. Lincoln Filleen Professor of Human Relations and Director of the Consortium for the Interacting Minds of Dartmouth.
“Do musicians more easily synchronize their attention with others? Why are some people super-synchronizers and others unable to fully synchronize? Is it easy to click with other people? These are all questions that we plan to explore further,” says Wheatley.
“This simple measure of being attuned to a beat may have clinical implications for autism and other disorders. We do,” adds Wheatley.
Research on beat synchrony previous jobfound that establishing and blocking eye contact is related to variations in pupillary entrainment between conversational partners, making conversation more engaging.
About this neuroscience research news
author: Amy Olson
sauce: Dartmouth College
contact: Amy Olson – Dartmouth College
image: image is public domain
See also
Original research: open access.
“Synchronization to the beat predicts synchronization with other minds” Sophie Walchen et al. scientific report
overview
Synchronization to the beat predicts synchronization with other minds
Synchrony has been used to describe correlated mental processes between people, not just simple beat entrainment, and some have wondered if the term is confusing different phenomena.
Here we ask whether simple synchrony (beat entrainment) predicts more complex attentional synchrony, consistent with common mechanisms.
While tracking their gaze, participants listened to regularly spaced tones and indicated changes in volume. Reliable individual differences were found across multiple sessions. Some people tuned their attention more than others. This was reflected in the beat-matched pupil dilation that predicts performance.
In a second study, eye-tracking participants completed a beat task and listened to a previously recorded storyteller during eye-tracking. The individual’s propensity to tune to the beat was a result of predicting how strongly their pupils would synchronize with the storyteller’s pupils and sharing their attention.
Tendency to synchronize is a stable individual difference that predicts attentional synchronization across contexts and complexities.
