Examining the impact of attentional focus and partner gaze on interpersonal coordination

As a foundation of social interaction, interpersonal coordination is boosted in prosocial contexts but undermined by negative situations. Exactly how social factors shape coordination is, however, unknown. Previous literature demonstrates that for coordination to emerge people must attend to their interaction partners. This evidence, however, draws from sterile laboratory studies employing heavy-handed manipulations of little interpersonal relevance. By contrast, in more naturalistic contexts subtle differences in how people attend to themselves and others (e.g., a lingering glance vs. a suspicious side glance) can profoundly change the course of interaction. Understanding how social factors shape interpersonal coordination therefore requires consideration of aspects of attentional behaviour that better characterise everyday interaction. To this end, the current research employed virtual reality (VR) to explore how two core features of social attention, focus (self vs. other) and partner gaze (direct vs. averted), influence the spontaneous coordination of arm and head movements. The results indicated that: (i) coordination was enhanced in the other (cf. self) focus condition; and (ii) coordination was diminished in the averted (cf. direct) gaze condition. These findings provide novel evidence to indicate that the emergence of interpersonal coordination varies as a function of the everyday attentional behaviours that punctuate naturalistic social exchange. Of broad theoretical note, here we demonstrate that the among the factors constraining interpersonal coordination, the distribution of attention between self and other plays a meaningful role.