More is Better When Coordinating with Others: Study

When it comes to physical coordination, it works out better with a larger group. A new study finds that performance was improving with every extra group member.

New study finds that physical coordination is more helpful in larger groups. The findings of the study are published in the journal eLife.

The researchers used robotic interfaces to test coordination in groups of two, three and four partners and found that performance was improving with every additional group member.

Child Behavior Disorders - Signs Types
Behavioral problems occur in children for various reasons including stress, abuse or inconsistent parenting. They must not be mistaken for misbehavior which children are prone to from time to time.

‘When it comes to physical coordination, it works out better with a large group. A new study finds that performance was improving with every extra group member.’

The researchers believe the findings can clarify how a group of people can work together, for example, to move and maneuver a large table together. This may also lead to improving the outcomes of physical rehabilitation by training patients in groups.

Scientists from Imperial College London, CNRS in France and ATR in Japan previously revealed the haptic communication in pairs in a task similar to partner dancing and showed how performance at a physical task is improved and learned better when practicing with a partner.

The new study extends this finding to trios and quartets by clarifying haptic communication in groups critical to society.

Parents' Traumatic Childhood can Cause Behavioral Issues in Their Children
Parents who suffered traumatic childhood experiences are more likely to have children with behavioral problems or mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, addiction and sleep problems.

Dr. Atsushi Takagi, the lead author of the study who resides at the Institute of Innovative Research at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), said: "We were shocked by how well and fast partners learned to coordinate as a group through touch. Imagine trying to move a banquet table at a crowded wedding venue. With verbal communication, it's immensely challenging to coordinate with others to ensure the table doesn't bump against something, and the more people there are, the longer it takes to reach verbal consensus. With touch, coordination emerges in a matter of seconds, and the time taken to reach consensus is the same, irrespective of group size."

Professor Etienne Burdet of Imperial College, the senior author of this study, added: "We expected that the performance would deteriorate with the noisy force of each additional group member. However, the performance improved with each group member, as each connects to a virtual collective hand which is the average of all partners' hands, so that the noise decreases with the number of partners".

Advertisements

Cancer Drug Reduces Anti-social Behavior in Autism
Romidepsin, a Food and Drug Administration-approved anti-cancer drug, restores social deficits in autism in a sustained fashion. Three-day treatment with romidepsin reversed social deficits in mice deficient in a gene called Shank 3, an important risk factor for autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

The researchers found that the key to physical coordination was the ability to infer the group's goal through touch. The same coordination mechanism was used in a previous study by Takagi and colleagues to design a "human-like" robot partner that coordinated with a human partner.

In the new study, the researchers conducted computer simulations of the task to test what information was shared within the group through touch. Takagi believes that a deeper understanding of the coordination mechanism will yield an algorithm for a group of robots to carry out physical tasks together.