Skilled action as a complex system: affordances and social  (SAAA) Session 1

Abstract: In this talk I will make explicit how the concept of Skilled Intentionality (i.e. action-readiness for engaging with multiple relevant affordances simultaneously) we have developed in a series of publications (Rietveld, 2008, 2012; Bruineberg & Rietveld 2014; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2015) sheds light on social coordination in skilled action and everyday life. This builds upon the work on affordances for 'higher' cognition we published in a recent paper in Ecological Psychology (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). I will argue that this way of looking at social coordination implies taking material engagement seriously. Moreover, architecture is able to intervene in sociomaterial practices and in that way contribute to complex societal challenges, such as a better public domain and to environments that invite more active and healthy ways of living. Close

Abstract: Professional Volleyball receivers are highly skillful in collaborating when defending their court from the serve. In previous research, we found the Voronoi Generalized Diagram to describe the way the court is collaboratively defended by three receivers. They are at the same time interacting with the opposing server/ball. In the present study, four receivers acted on 182 serves to test if their Voronoi areas? were affected by their relative-positioning (left-side, middle, and right-side of the court) and by the type of serve (jump-float serve, power-jump). We also tested if they correlate with the serve?s initial position. We found an effect for receivers? position. The right-side receiver had the largest area, followed by the left-side receiver, and finally the middle receiver. There was a serve and receiver?s position interaction effect. The receivers? areas were only influenced by the serving technique when considering the receivers? on-court position. The left-side receiver area was smaller when facing the jump-float serves, than when facing the power-jump serve, but for the right-side and middle positions their areas were larger against the jump-float serves than against the power-jump serves. Only the Voronoi areas of the side-receivers were correlated with the ball?s initial position. The areas increased as the ball?s initial position was less laterally aligned with them. The side-receivers adjusted to the ball?s initial position, and the middle receiver adjusted accordingly, maintain his dominant court-region values. Their adjustment to each other in their relative-positioning expresses collaborative adaptation to task constraints allowing them to maintain performance levels. Close

Abstract: Human behavior emerges from the interconnection of physiological, cognitive and contextual processes operating at many levels and timescales. In the past decades it has become evident that behavior is not only inherently variable but temporally self-similar (i.e. fractal), which is an expression of this interconnectedness. In addition, it has recently been shown that two people who perform a task together tend to match the fractal patterns of their behavioral time series. In a way they become similar complex dynamical systems due to coupling. This effect called ?complexity matching? reveals global coordination at multiple timescales, which is related to optimal information exchange between two systems. In recent years complexity matching has been demonstrated in varies areas of interpersonal interaction. In this paper several empirical studies will be discussed, including those on synchronized rowing and a Wiimote controlled coordination task. Issues arising from complexity matching concern the nature of information exchange and social affordances, which might not be limited to a single scale but should be considered as extending across multiple timescales. Close

Abstract: Many daily activities require the coordination of actions with others, including navigating a crowded sidewalk, dancing with a partner, and participating in musical groups. Like everyday social behavior, musical joint action emerges from the complex interaction of environmental and informational constraints, including those of the instruments and the performance context. Music improvisation in particular is more like everyday interaction in that dynamics emerge spontaneously without a rehearsed score or script. Here we examined how the structure of the musical context affords and shapes interactions between improvising musicians. Six pairs of professional piano players improvised with three different backing tracks while their movements were recorded using a wireless motion tracking system. Each backing track varied in rhythmic and harmonic information, ranging from a chord progression, to a single tone. Afterward, while viewing videos from the performance trials, musicians narrated how they decided what to play and when. Narratives were analyzed using grounded theory (a qualitative method) to identify themes. For backing tracks with more structure, themes included expertise and signaling; for backing tracks with less structure: personality, novelty, and freedom. Differences in movement coordination and playing behavior were evaluated using linear and non-linear time series methods, to provide an understanding of the multi-scale dynamics that create the potential for musical collaboration and creativity. Collectively, our findings indicate that each backing track afforded the emergence of different coordination dynamics with respect to how they played together, how they moved together, as well as their experience collaborating with each other. Musical improvisation therefore provides a way to understand how social interaction emerges from the structure of the behavioral context, and how this structure supports coordination and collaboration in everyday behavior. Close

Abstract: How is the patterning of social, multi-action behavior organized? Who or what decides what joint-action possibilities or behavioral modes are afforded within a given task context? Is there a complementary relationship between the low-level physical laws that constrain the mechanics of socially situated, perceptual-motor behavior and the higher-level cognitive decision processes that define ongoing multi-agent (social) activity? Using a selection of complex systems phenomena from physics, biology, cognitive science, and computational cognition, we explore whether symmetry principles and group theory can provide a way of answering these questions. In particular, we detail how the theory of symmetry-breaking can be employed to both describe and understand the interrelated physical, neural and cognitive structures that underlie joint-action and how symmetry breaking bifurcations give rise to the complex and complementary nature of everyday social activity. Close