Abstract

Past research has explored the psychological mechanisms of social cognition and how forms of joint action are the key to understanding the processes whereby individuals exchange and integrate information. Coordinating our actions in time and space with others may act as a social glue that holds interacting groups together. For example, we regularly hear and integrate the sounds and proprioceptive information of our footsteps along with the sounds of others, which often leads to a sense of being part of a group and of personal enlargement. Here we are interested in understanding whether temporal coupling with the sounds of others during in-group and out-group interactions can affect one’s mental body representation and other bodily feelings, perception of interpersonal distance and peripersonal space, but also synchronization in joint action. We designed a study where participants are instructed as to a walking task within immersive virtual reality. Participants are told they will walk with virtual others while listening to and synchronising their steps with an auditory pacing signal (metronome). We hypothesize that participants will synchronize faster and more accurately when surrounded by members of the in-group, while we also expect these differences to be modulated by the group size.