Emerging synchrony and synchrony transitions and their effects on development of affiliation in social interaction adaptivity: Comparative computational analysis of different synchrony and synchrony transition detection methods

Interpersonal synchrony often emerges during social interaction and in turn is linked to better interpersonal affiliation. In addition, transitions in synchrony – meaning switching between moving in and out of sync − also occur often. It might be assumed that transitions in synchrony, especially when the extent of synchrony decreases, negatively affect affiliation. Nevertheless, there is empirical evidence indicating that time periods with transitions in synchrony can have an even stronger positive effect on affiliation or liking in comparison to time periods without transitions in synchrony, possibly highlighting that timing of synchrony episodes is of equal importance for being considered as the extent of synchrony episodes is. This paper presents multiple systematic analyses of both phenomena based on an adaptive agent model simulating how persons’ affiliation might benefit both from emerging synchrony and transitions in synchrony. Both for detection of synchrony and detection of synchrony transitions, multiple methods have been proposed in the literature and applied (from an external observer viewpoint) to identify or detect forms of emerging synchrony or synchrony transitions in given pairs of time series. We systematically evaluate through simulations the performance of multiple combinations of synchrony detection methods that have been incorporated in our developed adaptive agent model. These methods model the agent’s subjective detection of synchrony and synchrony transitions. We explored and compared the synchrony scores from the following methods: complemental difference, Pearson correlation coefficient, signal matching and average mutual information. Regarding the transition detection of synchrony scores, we examined the following three methods: standard deviation based, average based, and maximum-minimum based. In a comparative manner we evaluated all 12 combinations of synchrony detection and transition detection methods in our adaptive agent model in simulation experiments for two agents with a setup in which a number of situations were encountered in different (time) episodes. Moreover, also the subjective synchrony and transition detection of each of the two agents were mutually compared and their subjective detections were compared to objective detections from an external observer viewpoint.