Synchronizing Movement: From Disorders to Expertise

Abstract

Auditory-motor and interpersonal synchrony are core human abilities that support both everyday activities and artistic performance. This dissertation investigated synchrony across two ends of a spectrum: children at risk for developmental coordination disorder (DCD), where auditory-motor synchrony is challenged, and expert dancers, where interpersonal synchrony is refined through extensive training. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examined children with and without risk for DCD. Using both a simple tapping task and a full-body step-clap task, I showed that children at risk for DCD exhibited impairments in auditory timing perception and in synchronizing movements to auditory stimuli. Importantly, their performance improved when provided with rhythmic cues, suggesting that auditory rhythms may provide a valuable framework for motor interventions. Chapters 4 and 5 turned to expert hip hop dancers. Motion capture analysis of live competition performances demonstrated that interpersonal synchrony was a significant predictor of judges’ and audiences’ evaluations, highlighting its role in dance expertise. Individual differences in auditory-motor synchronization and timing perception were then found to predict dancers’ ability to synchronize movements with others in performance. Together, these studies provide new insights into the important role movement synchrony plays across contexts of developmental impairment and expert performance. The findings demonstrate that synchrony difficulties in DCD extend beyond motor deficits to include auditory timing and auditory-motor synchronization deficits, and highlight the potential of intervention with rhythmic auditory cueing. Conversely, in expert dancers, interpersonal synchrony is both a determinant of performance quality and associated with basic auditory-motor skills. By bridging experimental tasks with ecologically valid settings, this dissertation advances understanding of how the ability to move in synchrony shapes development, motor skills, and artistic expression.