Overcoming methodological individualism: dyadic interdependence in the perceptual crossing experiment emerges beyond trial-by-trial interaction

Sensitivity to social contingency refers to an individual’s capacity to recognize when changes in sensory stimulation depend on another person’s movement. Developmental and interactive approaches to social cognition propose that this capacity is not only an individual achievement but is also shaped by social interaction. The perceptual crossing experiment (PCE) of haptically mediated interaction in a minimalist environment has provided evidence for this proposal by demonstrating that pairs of participants can interactively distinguish each other’s avatar from distractor objects. In this study we replicate previously reported dyadic effects with a new PCE set-up and examine their time course. Using dyadic analysis on 32 adult pairs, we demonstrate a significant dyadic effect on recognition. Moreover, the dyadic effects strengthened across trial blocks, suggesting that interdependence of recognition increases with experience. Furthermore, no predictive effects for recognition were found from one trial to the next, indicating that aggregating a shorter time frame to the within-trial dyadic effect did not suffice for a cross-trial dyadic effect. To test these hypotheses, we systematically fitted models of increasing complexity, thereby highlighting the value of a model-based approach. Our findings underscore the need to consider dyadic effects when explaining performance variability during social interaction across timescales.