Coordinating complex movements with others – in sports or in everyday life – is challenging due to inherent sensory uncertainties. A functional mechanism to deal with these uncertainties is to use inputs from different sensory systems (visual, auditory, haptic) and integrate them according to their reliability (Beck et al., 2023). In Mathilde Truffer's doctoral project, we are thus investigating how sensory integration is used in this sense in the context of processes of interpersonal coordination. To this end, we are using an experimental task borrowed from Argentinean tango dancing, namely the coordination of walking forwards and backwards together to music, whereby the degree of uncertainty for the following person can be varied via the more or less known sequence of steps up to the reversal of the movement direction (see video). The specific use of sensory signals will be investigated by suppressing the visual (no sight), haptic (no touch) or acoustic (no music) inputs, and in a later stage of the project also through targeted manipulations of these inputs in the task variant of coordinated walking with a virtual-reality avatar presented online. The first results of the series of experiments are expected in 2025.
