Temporal coordination in performance

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Our capacity to coordinate our behaviour with incoming sensory information is extraordinary; from visual systems to language and motor skills, people display an exceptional ability to adapt their actions when sensory cues change. In particular, temporal coordination during auditory-motor behaviours such as speaking, singing, and performing music, is fast and effortless: people coordinate their actions quickly in response to a wide range of acoustic changes that characterize music and speech. Group interactions in music performance and conversational speech must adhere to temporal constraints, or else coordination breaks down. Yet individuals vary considerably in their temporal coordination abilities; from simple tapping to conversational speech or performing music, individuals and groups exhibit large differences in temporal coordination that remain unexplained. We have recently uncovered constraints on individuals' auditory-motor coupling that indicate the first markers of temporal coordination among individuals, in music and conversational speech. We use these findings to build computational models of both superior temporal coordination and of deficits.     One important theoretical aim of my research program is to determine how temporal coordination in group behaviours arises from individual adaptation abilities and from specific interactions that arise among group members. A complementary aim is to determine when an individual's sensory-motor integration abilities enable him/her to perform a task more accurately in isolation or in a group. We propose tests of temporal coordination in music and tapping tasks, from which we test formal (quantitative) models of timekeeping processes and of coupling between individuals' sensory and motor systems. My goal is to uncover the mechanisms of temporal coordination that best predict group performance.     My research program combines three complementary approaches to the study of temporal coordination between individuals: a) impact of multiple sensory cues and group roles; b) application of computational models (linear error correction; nonlinear dynamical systems); and c) neural measurements of coordination (electroencephalography). We contrast temporal coordination in group performance with measures of individual performance with a computer. Understanding how temporal coordination arises offers significant advances to theoretical foundations of auditory-motor integration. Music and speech engage virtually all cognitive functions, including perception, action, attention, social behaviour, emotion, learning, and memory. How these functions interact between individuals who engage in joint behaviours is largely unknown. These discoveries can inform understanding of sensorimotor disorders such as stroke recovery, focal dystonia, and Parkinson’s disease.