Abstract
Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Human social interaction has largely been addressed in dyadic paradigms and it is yet to be determined whether the ensuing conclusions generalize to larger groups. Studied more extensively in nonhuman animal behaviour, the presence of multiple agents engaged in the same task space creates different constraints and possibilities than in simpler dyadic interactions. We addressed whether collective dynamics play a role in human circle drumming. The task was to synchronize in a group with an initial reference pattern and then maintain synchronization after it was muted. We varied the number of drummers, from solo to dyad, quartet, and octet. The observed lower variability, lack of speeding up, smoother individual dynamics, and leader-less inter-personal coordination indicated that stability increased as group size increased, a sort of temporal wisdom of crowds. We propose a hybrid continuous-discrete Kuramoto model for emergent group synchronization with pulse-based coupling that exhibits a mean field positive feedback loop. This research suggests that collective phenomena are among the factors that play a role in social cognition.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Changes include additional information, figures, analyses, simulations, and discussion where necessary. A common theme concerns the generalizability of the theory and the need for additional control conditions in the task. We agree that the isochronous task is not challenging as a pattern. We inserted an additional section with the heading 'Beyond the group average' at the end of the Discussion. We included a discussion of alternative mechanisms and scenarios. We consider the mean field approach to be the most likely for the present scenario because the task makes it hard to pay selective attention to individual participants. We discussed the role of individual heterogeneity and spatial separation in breaking symmetry and creating affordances for more interesting forms of coordination. An additional argument is provided by comparing different versions of the model. We included a neighbour-only coupling (ring topology) version of the model which does not correspond well to the empirical data. We showed this as Supplementary Figure 8B. For the full list of revisions and their motivation, look up the eLife paper and review process.