Participatory Sense-Making in Dance Improvisation

Participatory sense-making (PSM) provides a rich theoretical framework for theories in social cognition, providing a base for hypotheses that remain to be experimentally tested. Particularly, we are interested in exploring when synchrony arises between participating agents in social interactions. Additionally, we aim to see if altering the perceptual experiences of agents influences their ability to coordinate their intentions and behaviours. We propose a behavioural experiment that makes use of an existing dance improvisation paradigm to obtain measures of spontaneously arising coordinated behaviour. Then, we propose analysis methods, including instantaneous phase synchrony, to translate the behavioural observations into meaningful measures of coordination. We then present our expected results and discuss how they may contribute to the existing knowledge in social cognition. Additionally, we explore the implications of results that do not support our hypothesis, providing suggestions for future directions in testing hypotheses proposed by PSM.