Papers by Merle Fairhurst
Musicians' minds as a model: training effects of musical expertise, brain plasticity and clues to evolutionary development
Neural underpinnings of musical ensemble skills
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate ... more From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to gaze coordination. But are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointe...
Scientific Reports
In marching bands, sports, dance and virtually all human group behaviour, we coordinate our actio... more In marching bands, sports, dance and virtually all human group behaviour, we coordinate our actions with others. Coordinating actions in time and space can act as a social glue, facilitating bonding among people. However, much of our understanding about coordination dynamics is based on research into dyadic interactions. Little is known about the nature of the sensorimotor underpinnings and social bonding outcomes of coordination in medium-sized groups—the type of groups, in which most everyday teamwork takes place. In this study, we explored how the presence of a leader and an unexpected perturbation influence coordination and cohesion in a naturalistic setting. In groups of seven, participants were instructed to walk in time to an auditory pacing signal. We found that the presence of a reliable leader enhanced coordination with the target tempo, which was disrupted when the leader abruptly changed their movement tempo. This effect was not observed on coordination with the group me...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Many group-living animals, humans included, occasionally synchronize their behavior with that of ... more Many group-living animals, humans included, occasionally synchronize their behavior with that of conspecifics. Social psychology and neuroscience has attempted to explain this phenomenon. Here we sought to integrate results around three themes: the stimuli, the mechanisms, and the benefits of interactional synchrony. As regards stimuli, we asked what characteristics, apart from temporal regularity, prompt synchronization and found that stimulus modality and complexity are important. The high temporal resolution of the auditory system and the relevance of socio-emotional information endow auditory, multi-modal, emotional and somewhat variable and adaptive sequences with particular synchronizing power. Looking at the mechanisms revealed that traditional perspectives emphasizing beat-based representations of others’ signals conflict with more recent work investigating the perception of temporal regularity. Timing processes supported by striato-cortical loops represent any kind of repet...
Scientific Reports
The inclination to touch objects that we can see is a surprising behaviour, given that vision oft... more The inclination to touch objects that we can see is a surprising behaviour, given that vision often supplies relevant and sufficiently accurate sensory evidence. Here we suggest that this 'fact-checking' phenomenon could be explained if touch provides a higher level of perceptual certainty than vision. Testing this hypothesis, observers explored inverted T-shaped stimuli eliciting the Vertical-horizontal illusion in vision and touch, which included clear-cut and ambiguous cases. In separate blocks, observers judged whether the vertical bar was shorter or longer than the horizontal bar and rated the confidence in their judgments. Decisions reached by vision were objectively more accurate than those reached by touch with higher overall confidence ratings. However, while confidence was higher for vision rather than for touch in clear-cut cases, observers were more confident in touch when the stimuli were ambiguous. This relative bias as a function of ambiguity qualifies the view that confidence tracks objective accuracy and uses a comparable mapping across sensory modalities. Employing a perceptual illusion, our method disentangles objective and subjective accuracy showing how the latter is tracked by confidence and point towards possible origins for 'fact checking' by touch. From museum visitors feeling compelled to touch statues that they can see, to the biblical account of the incredulous Thomas who would not accept that Jesus was alive unless he could touch him, tactile 'fact-checking' is frequent. Similarly, in the clinical domain, the empirical literature shows that individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder are prone to check things by touch rather than sight 1,2. Among other factors underlying these complex behaviours, we suggest that the privilege of touch might come from it carrying more evidential weight than seeing particularly when there is ambiguity 3. To test this hypothesis, we compared the confidence that observers put in their perceptual decisions after either seeing or touching stimuli that gave rise to a geometric illusion known as the Vertical-Horizontal (VH) illusion (Figs 1, 2a,b). This illusion is known to produce similar perceptual effects in the visual and in the tactile domains 4-6. The belief that touch provides more certainty than other senses, especially vision, has a solid historical background, but to our knowledge has not been directly tested, except with affordances 7. Descartes, a sceptic toward all sensory evidence, highlighted that "Of all our senses, touch is the one considered least deceptive and the most secure" 8 while Johnson, in response to Berkeley's immaterialism 9 , considered that touch demonstrated the existence of an external world in a way that no other sense would (see also de Condillac for a similar claim 10). The idea is that touch, more than vision, provides evidence for the reality of external objects 11,12 and conveys a higher sense of directness and certainty 13,14. When it comes to providing evidence about certain features rather than the existence of objects, however, it is implausible that touch provides more objective or more accurate information than vision, since the relative accuracy of the two modalities depends critically on the task and on the context. There is a more sensible way of understanding the superiority of touch in this context: For equal accuracy, people might place more confidence in a decision reached by touch rather than vision. This hypothesis is congruent with evidence that people are more likely to purchase an item if they can touch it rather than if they simply look at it 15,16 , that some people are anxious when interacting with graphical user interfaces that display objects that cannot be touched 17,18 .
For precise interpersonal coordination, some degree of merging a sense of self with other is requ... more For precise interpersonal coordination, some degree of merging a sense of self with other is required. In group music making, one may want to be in “sync” with one’s ensemble and, if playing a similar instrument, one can assume a degree of temporal and acoustic overlap. However, to what extent is self-other merging optimal? An incorrect balance of segregation and integration of self and other information would result in a lack of interpersonal cohesion or a disruption of self-agency. Using an interactive finger-tapping task with a virtual partner and functional MRI, we explored neural differences between self-other merging and distinction. Varying both the level of adaptivity of a virtual partner and the quality of self-related auditory feedback, we show that the predictability of the other and availability of distinguishable, self-related information improve performance and demonstrate how dynamic interactions vary one’s sense of agency. From neuroimaging data, we identify regions ...
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Papers by Merle Fairhurst