Social Interaction Metrics for Dyadic Motor Coordination: Collaborative vs. Cooperative Digital Balancing Task
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Understanding the social structure of dyadic motor coordination requires metrics that go beyond task performance to capture how partners genuinely couple to one another. This paper extends a prior kinematic analysis of collaborative versus cooperative interaction in a digital stick-balancing game by introducing four social interaction metrics grounded in established frameworks from motor control and time-series analysis: Force Channeling, Cooperation Index variance, Granger Causality, and Conditioned Inter-Player Correlation. Twenty pairs of university students (forty participants) were assigned to either a collaborative condition, where both players shared all four control axes, or a cooperative condition, where each player controlled a dedicated endpoint. Force channeling remained moderate in both conditions (approximately 0.5), suggesting persistent null-space forces that may serve a haptic communication function. Contribution variability decreased across rounds in both modes, with a steeper decline in the collaborative condition, indicating faster role stabilisation under shared control. Granger Causality revealed a strong unidirectional influence from Player 2 to Player 1 in the collaborative condition, an emergent leader-follower dynamic, absent in the cooperative condition; full Granger Causality details are reported in a companion paper. Conditioned correlation revealed weakly positive (synergistic) coupling in collaborative dyads and slightly negative (compensatory) coupling in cooperative dyads, a distinction not captured by unsigned correlation alone. These findings characterise fundamentally different social motor architectures across the two interaction modes.
Institutions: Ankara University, TED University, Qatar University
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7224781776