Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The quiet hum of interpersonal coordination that runs through-out social communication and interaction shows how individu-als can subtly influence one another’s behaviors, thoughts, andemotions over time. While the majority of research on co-ordination studies face-to-face interaction, recent advances incrowdsourcing afford the opportunity to conduct large-scale,real-time social interaction experiments. We take advantageof these tools to explore interpersonal coordination in a “min-imally interactive context,” distilling the richness of naturalcommunication into a tightly controlled setting to explore howpeople become coupled in their perceptual and memory sys-tems while performing a task together. Consistent with previ-ous work on postural sway and gaze, we found that individualsbecome coupled to one another’s cognitive processes withoutneeding to be co-located or fully interactive with their partner;interestingly, although participants had no information abouttheir partner and no means of direct communication, we alsofound hints that social forces can shape minimally interactivecontexts, similar to effects observed in face-to-face interaction.