Coordination Dynamics: A Foundation for Understanding Social Behavior

[In response to this week’s LinkedIn post, Liz Rykert https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7201116972317581312?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7201116972317581312%2C7201912539662749696%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287201912539662749696%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7201116972317581312%29 introduced the work of Scott Kelso (and collaborators) in the book The Complementary Nature. It appears this is another whole ‘chunk’ of stuff in the systems | complexity | cybernetics space – haven’t found one of them for quite a while! So this is by way of being a kind of promissory note for potentially more here – looks like lots of stuff with lots of overlaps]

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Hum. Neurosci., 14 August 2020
Sec. Motor Neuroscience
Volume 14 – 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00317

This article is part of the Research Topic

Sensorimotor Foundations of Social Cognition

View all 22 Articles

Coordination Dynamics: A Foundation for Understanding Social Behavior

Emmanuelle Tognoli^1,2* Mengsen Zhang^1,3 Armin Fuchs^1,4† Christopher Beetle⁴ J. A. Scott Kelso^1,5*

¹Human Brain and Behavior Laboratory, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, United States

²Department of Biological Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, United States

³Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States

⁴Department of Physics, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, United States

⁵Intelligent Systems Research Centre, Ulster University, Londonderry, United Kingdom

Humans’ interactions with each other or with socially competent machines exhibit lawful coordination patterns at multiple levels of description. According to Coordination Dynamics, such laws specify the flow of coordination states produced by functional synergies of elements (e.g., cells, body parts, brain areas, people…) that are temporarily organized as single, coherent units. These coordinative structures or synergies may be mathematically characterized as informationally coupled self-organizing dynamical systems (Coordination Dynamics). In this paper, we start from a simple foundation, an elemental model system for social interactions, whose behavior has been captured in the Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) model. We follow a tried and tested scientific method that tightly interweaves experimental neurobehavioral studies and mathematical models. We use this method to further develop a body of empirical research that advances the theory toward more generalized forms. In concordance with this interdisciplinary spirit, the present paper is written both as an overview of relevant advances and as an introduction to its mathematical underpinnings. We demonstrate HKB’s evolution in the context of social coordination along several directions, with its applicability growing to increasingly complex scenarios. In particular, we show that accommodating for symmetry breaking in intrinsic dynamics and coupling, multiscale generalization and adaptation are principal evolutions. We conclude that a general framework for social coordination dynamics is on the horizon, in which models support experiments with hypothesis generation and mechanistic insights.
Frontiers | Coordination Dynamics: A Foundation for Understanding Social Behavior