Impairments of social motor coordination in schizophrenia

Manuel Varlet, Ludovic Marin, Stephane Raffard, R. C. Schmidt, Delphine Capdevielle, Jean-Philippe Boulenger, Jonathan Del-Monte, Benoit G. Bardy

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    103 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    It has been demonstrated that motor coordination of interacting people plays a crucial role in the success of social exchanges. Abnormal movements have been reported during interpersonal interactions of patients suffering from schizophrenia and a motor coordination breakdown could explain this social interaction deficit, which is one of the main and earliest features of the illness. Using the dynamical systems framework, the goal of the current study was (i) to investigate whether social motor coordination is impaired in schizophrenia and (ii) to determine the underlying perceptual or cognitive processes that may be affected. We examined intentional and unintentional social motor coordination in participants oscillating hand-held pendulums from the wrist. The control group consisted of twenty healthy participant pairs while the experimental group consisted of twenty participant pairs that included one participant suffering from schizophrenia. The results showed that unintentional social motor coordination was preserved while intentional social motor coordination was impaired. In intentional coordination, the schizophrenia group displayed coordination patterns that had lower stability and in which the patient never led the coordination. A coupled oscillator model suggests that the schizophrenia group coordination pattern was due to a decrease in the amount of available information together with a delay in information transmission. Our study thus identified relational motor signatures of schizophrenia and opens new perspectives for detecting the illness and improving social interactions of patients.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article numbere29772
    Pages (from-to)1-8
    Number of pages8
    JournalPLoS One
    Volume7
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2012

    Open Access - Access Right Statement

    Copyright: 2012 Varlet et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Impairments of social motor coordination in schizophrenia'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this