Strong Anticipation: Complexity Matching in Interpersonal Coordination

Vivien Marmelat^*,†, Didier Delignières^* and Peter Beek^†

^(*) EA 2991 Movement to Health, Montpellier-1 University, France
^(†) MOVE, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: vivien.marmelat@univ-montp1.fr

Abstract

Anticipation in sensori-motor synchronization tasks is often attributed to the presence of internal model based on situation regularities. However this interpretation seems unable to explain the synchronization of an organism with a complex environment. Instead the notion of “strong anticipation” provides a new point of view about synchronization between complex systems. It implies a global coordination on non-local time scales between an organism and its environment. The matching between the long-range correlations of the organism and the long-range correlations of the environment could attest for the presence of such a strong anticipatory process. We propose here to test the presence of strong anticipation in interpersonal coordination task. Results show a close matching of fractal exponents of participants within a dyad. Moreover this matching cannot be attributed to only short-term adaptations as revealed by the low percentage of local cross-correlations.