Interpersonally shared physiological dynamics are increasingly argued to underlie rapport, empathy, and even team performance. Inspired by the model of interpersonal synergy, we critically investigate the presence, temporal development, possible mechanisms and impact of shared interpersonal heart rate (HR) dynamics during individual and collective creative LEGO® construction tasks. In Study 1 we show how shared HR dynamics are driven by a plurality of sources, including task constraints and behavioral coordination. Generally, shared HR dynamics are more prevalent in individual trials (involving participants doing the same things) than in collective ones (involving participants taking turns and performing complementary actions). However, when contrasted against virtual pairs, collective trials display more stable shared HR dynamics suggesting that online social interaction plays an important role. Furthermore, in contrast to individual trials, shared HR dynamics are found to increase across collective trials. Study 2 investigates which aspects of social interaction might drive these effects. We show that shared HR dynamics are statistically predicted by interpersonal speech and building coordination. In Study 3, we explore the relation between HR dynamics, behavioral coordination, and self-reported measures of rapport and group competence. Although behavioral coordination predicts rapport and group competence, shared HR dynamics do not. Although shared physiological dynamics were reliably observed in our study, our results warrant not to consider HR dynamics a general driving mechanism of social coordination. Behavioral coordination-on the other hand-seems to be more informative of both shared physiological dynamics and collective experience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Collaborative interaction pervades many everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding. We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunication are just as critical to challenge, negotiate and integrate individual contributions in collaborative creative activities. Through qualitative microanalysis of spontaneous coordination in collective creative LEGO constructions, we individuate three interactional styles:inclusive, characterized by acknowledgment and praise;instructional, characterized by self-repair; andintegrative, characterized by widespread self- and other-repair. We then investigate how different interaction styles leave distinct material traces in the resulting LEGO models. The inclusive interaction style generally results in concatenations of individual contributions with little coherence and core narrative. The instructional style produces coherent, but largely individually driven models. Finally, the integrative style generates more innovative models, synthesizing individual contributions in shared narratives or schemas.

Many types of everyday and specialized reasoning depend on diagrams: we use maps to find our way, we draw graphs and sketches to communicate concepts and prove geometrical theorems, and we manipulate diagrams to explore new creative solutions to problems. The active involvement and manipulation of representational artifacts for purposes of thinking and communicating is discussed in relation to C.S. Peirce’s notion ofdiagrammatical reasoning. We propose to extend Peirce’s original ideas and sketch a conceptual framework that delineates different kinds of diagram manipulation: Sometimes diagrams are manipulated in order to profile known information in an optimal fashion. At other times diagrams are explored in order to gain new insights, solve problems or discover hidden meaning potentials. The latter cases often entail manipulations that either generate additional information or extract information by means of abstraction. Ideas are substantiated by reference to ethnographic, experimental and historical examples.

How do material representations such as models, diagrams, and drawings come to shape and aid collective, epistemic processes? This study investigated how groups of participants spontaneously recruited material objects (in this case, LEGO blocks) to support collective creative processes in the context of an experiment. Qualitative microanalyses of the group interactions motivate a taxonomy of different roles that the material representations play in the joint epistemic processes: illustration, elaboration, and exploration. Firstly, the LEGO blocks were used to illustrate already well-formed ideas in support of communication and epistemic alignment. Furthermore, the material concretization of otherwise abstract ideas in LEGO blocks gave rise to elaboration: discussions, requests for clarification, and discovery of unnoticed conceptual disagreements. Lastly, the LEGO blocks were used for exploration. That is, the material representations were experimented on and physical attributes were explored resulting in discoveries of new meaning potentials and creative solutions. We discuss these different ways in which material representations do their work in collective reasoning processes in relation to ideas about top-down and bottom-up cognitive processes and division of cognitive labor.