ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1619710
The sensorimotor basis of subjective experience in social synchronization behavior
Provisionally accepted
- Dept. of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The sensorimotor contingency (SMC) theory addresses action and perception as constitutive factors to one another – what is being perceived depends on what we do and vice versa. Accordingly, perception is seen as an active process of probing the environment and receiving feedback from it. These action-effect patterns may also be a predominant factor in social interactions. They can manifest in the phenomenon of synchronization, for example, when applause, gait, or posture in conversations synchronize unintentionally and form the basis of the concept of socially deployed sensorimotor contingencies (socSMCs). In this study, we introduce and compare measures used to study complex systems in order to quantify the information-theoretic basis of socSMCs. Two human participants had to synchronize arm movements in a full body virtual reality (VR) environment with each other. We aimed to evaluate the information-theoretic measures transfer entropy and mutual information in this complex motion synchronization task. Furthermore, in our experiment participants shared a mutual sensation of synchronicity and creativity for their interaction solely based on their movements. These subjective ratings of synchronicity and creativity can be predicted using transfer entropy and mutual information, showing that informational coupling between agents is relevant to subjective experience of interaction as described by the concept of socSMCs.
Keywords: sensory motor contingency, full body virtual reality, Information Theoretic (IT) metrics, mutual information (MI), transfer entropy (TE), motion synchronization, social interaction
Received: 28 Apr 2025; Accepted: 17 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bremer, Knorr, Göschl, Maÿe, Engel and Schneider. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Till R Schneider, t.schneider@uke.de
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.