On becoming in sync with yourself and others: An adaptive agent model for how persons connect by detecting intra- and interpersonal synchrony

Research indicates that interpersonal synchronisation leads to more closeness, mutual coordination, alliance, or affiliation between the synchronized persons. There is a pathway leading from interpersonal interaction to interpersonal synchronisation, and then to interpersonal affiliation. If persons act on temporal patterns of synchrony, this suggests that they possess a facility to detect such patterns. Therefore, we assume here that persons indeed detect when temporal patterns of synchrony occur and that a stronger affiliation or connection may grow from this detection. We developed a multi-adaptive agent model that contains detector states for both intrapersonal and interpersonal synchrony, which in turn dynamically affect interpersonal affiliation. We evaluated the behaviour of two agents in multiple simulation experiments in which stochastic stimuli were manipulated. Several expected types of patterns were reproduced computationally, and our multi-adaptive agent model may serve as base for the development of virtual agents that can synchronise with their users. By multiple simulation experiments for stochastic stimuli from the environment, it was found that indeed several expected types of patterns are reproduced computationally.