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the quality of their communication: they synchronise if they managed to exchange and
share information; synchronisation is directly linked to their friendship, affiliation and
mutual satisfaction of expectations.
- In developmental psychology, generations of protocols have been created, from the
“still face” [26] to the “double video” [16,18], in order to stress the crucial role of syn-
chronisation during mother-infant interactions.
- Behavioural and cerebral imaging studies show that oblivious synchrony and mimics
of facial expressions [2,5] are involved in the emergence of a shared emotion as in emo-
tion contagion [11].
- In social psychology, in teacher-student interaction or in group interactions, synchrony
between behaviours occurring during verbal communication has been shown to reflect
the rapports (relationship and intersubjectivity) within the groups or the dyads [8,13].
- The very same results have been found for human-machine interactions: on one hand
synchrony of non-verbal behaviour improves the comfort of the human and her/his feel-
ing of sharing with the machine (either a robot or a virtual agent) [22] and on the other
hand, the human spontaneously synchronises during interaction with a machine when
her/his expectations are satisfied by the machine [24].
In the case of non-verbal interactions, the phenomenon of synchronisation between
two partners has recently been investigated as a phenomenon emerging from the dy-
namical coupling of interactants: that is to say a phenomenon whose description and
dynamics are not explicited in each of the partners but appear when the interactants are
put together and when the new dynamical system they form is more complex and richer
than the simple sum of partners dynamics.
In mother-infant interactions via the “double-video” design cited above, synchrony
is shown to emerge from the mutual engagement of mother and infant in the interaction
[15,18]. In adult-adult interactions mediated by a technological device, synchrony and
coupling between partners has been shown to emerge from the mutual attempt to inter-
act with the other in both behavioral studies [1] and cerebral activity studies [7].
These descriptions of synchrony as emerging from the coupling between interactants,
are consistent with the fact cited before, that synchrony reflects the quality of the inter-
action. Given interactants, both the quality of their interaction and the degree of their
coupling are tightly linked to the amount of information they exchange and share: high
coupling involves both synchrony and good quality interaction; synchrony and quality
of the interaction are covarying indices of the interaction. That makes the synchrony pa-
rameter particularly crucial: on one hand it carries dyadic information, concerning the
quality of the ongoing interaction; on the other hand it can be retrieved by each partner
of the interaction, comparing its own actions to its perceptions of the other [24].
The emergence of synchrony during non-verbal interaction has been modelled by
both robotics implementation [23] and virtual agent coupling [19].
- In the robotic experiment, two robots controlled by neural oscillators are coupled to-
gether by the way of their mutual influence: turn-taking and synchrony emerge [23].
- In the virtual agent experiment, Evolutionary Robotics was used to design a dyad of
agents able to favour cross-perception situation; the result obtained is a dyad of agents
with oscillatory behaviours which share a stable state of both cross perception and
synchrony [19].
