Understanding everyday behavior relies heavily upon understanding our ability to improvise, how we are able to continuously anticipate and adapt in order to coordinate with our environment and others. Here we consider the ability of musicians to improvise, where they must spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers in order to produce novel musical expressions. Investigations of this behavior have traditionally focused on describing the organization of cognitive structures. The focus, here, however, is on the ability of the time-evolving patterns of (...) inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. We demonstrate this approach through the application of cross wavelet spectral analysis, which isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination that occurs between improvising musicians across a range of nested time-scales. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies. (shrink)

We investigated the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements. Some participants talked extemporaneously about a television show whose cast members they were viewing on a screen in front of them. Later, other participants listened to these monologues while viewing the same screen. Eye movements were recorded for all speakers and listeners. According to cross-recurrence analysis, a listener's eye movements most closely matched a speaker's eye movements at a delay of 2 sec. Indeed, the more closely a listener's (...) eye movements were coupled with a speaker's, the better the listener did on a comprehension test. In a second experiment, low-level visual cues were used to manipulate the listeners' eye movements, and these, in turn, influenced their latencies to comprehension questions. Just as eye movements reflect the mental state of an individual, the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements reflects the success of their communication. (shrink)