Children’s perception of interpersonal coordination during joint painting

Interpersonal coordination is important for many joint activities. A special case of interpersonal coordination is synchronization, which is required for the performance of many activities, but is also associated with diverse positive social and emotional attributes. The extent to which these effects are due to the reliance on synchrony for task performance or to its specific rhythmic characteristics, is not clear. To address these questions, we considered a more general form of interpersonal coordination, implemented during joint artmaking. This is a non-typical context for interpersonal coordination, not required for task success, and smoother and more loosely-structured than more standard forms of synchronous coordination. Therefore, comparing interpersonal coordination with non-coordination during shared painting, could help reveal general social-emotional reactions to coordination. To gain a more ‘naïve’ perspective we focused on children, and staged coordinated and non-coordinated art interactions between an adult and a child, asking child observers to judge various variables reflecting the perceived bond between the painters. We found an overall stronger perceived bond for the coordination condition. These results demonstrate that even a non-typical form of interpersonal coordination could be attributed with positive social and emotional qualities, a capacity revealed already in childhood, with possible implications for development.