Klara Łucznik presents her paper 'Sync To The Others Not To The Movement – The Investigation Into Shared Physiological Dynamics In Dance Improvisation' at 3rd Avant Conference 2017, Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies: Understanding Social Cognition at Lublin, Poland. The conference addresses social cognition topics, ranging from the elementary social-cognitive skills that allow people to think and act together, through embodied behavioral coupling and joint intentionality, mechanisms of mind reading and mutual understanding, all the way to group cognition.
In her paper, Klara explores the effect of group task on physiological entrainment among the dancers improvising together. Klara has shown that group improvisation task facilitates spontaneous synchronisation of dancers' heart and breathing rate, and that this effect is unrelated to synchronised movement. She argues that dancers align their physiological states due to 'empathic projection' that allows them to smoothly create together the improvised dance without verbal communication. Moreover, the study explored the physiological bases of group flow experience, but no significant linkage were found.