We have recently found robust evidence of motor entrainment to auditory stimuli in multiple species of non-human animal, all of which were capable of vocal mimicry. In contrast, the ability remained markedly absent in many closely related species incapable of vocal mimicry. This suggests that vocal mimicry may be a necessary precondition for entrainment. However, within the vocal mimicking spec...

Theories of entrainment assume that spontaneous entrainment emerges from dynamic laws that operate via mediators on interactions, whereby entrainment is facilitated if certain conditions are fulfilled. In this study, we show that mediators can be built that affect the entrainment of human locomotion to music. More specifically, we built D-Jogger, a music player that functions as a mediator betw...

In addition to being endogenous, a circadian system must be able to communicate with the outside world and align its rhythmicity to the environment. As a result of such alignment, external Zeitgebers can entrain the circadian system. Entrainment expresses itself in coinciding periods of the circadian oscillator and the Zeitgeber and a stationary phase difference between them. The range of perio...

This study investigates the relationships between student entrainment to a tutoring dialogue system and learning. By finding the features of prosodic entrainment which correlate with learning, we hope to inform educational dialogue systems aiming to leverage entrainment. We propose a novel method to measure prosodic entrainment and find specific features which correlate with user learning. We a...

Entrainment is the phenomenon of the speech of conversational partners becoming more similar to each other. This thesis proposal presents a comprehensive look at entrainment in human conversations and how entrainment may be incorporated into the design of spoken dialogue systems in order to improve system performance and user satisfaction. We compare different kinds of entrainment in both class...

Entrainment theory focuses on processes in which interacting (i.e., coupled) rhythmic systems stabilize, producing synchronization in the ideal sense, and forms of phase related rhythmic coordination in complex cases. In human action, entrainment involves spatiotemporal and social aspects, characterizing the meaningful activities of music, dance, and communication. How can the phenomenon of hum...

Perceiving and synchronizing to a piece of dance is a remarkable skill in humans. Research in this area is very recent and has been focused mainly on entrainment produced by regular rhythms. Here, we investigated entrainment effects on spectators perceiving a non-rhythmic and extremely slow performance issued from contemporary dance. More specifically, we studied the relationship between subjec...

The endogenous circadian timing system has evolved to synchronize an organism to periodically recurring environmental conditions. Those external time cues are called Zeitgebers. When entrained by a Zeitgeber, the intrinsic oscillator adopts a fixed phase relation ψ to the Zeitgeber. Here, we systematically study how the phase of entrainment depends on clock and Zeitgeber properties. We combine ...

Entrainment of air by turbulent mixing plays a central role in the dynamics of eruption clouds; the amount of entrained air controls eruption styles and heights of eruption columns. The efficiency of entrainment is quantified by the entrainment coefficient: the ratio between mean inward radial velocity at the edge and the mean vertical velocity. We directly determined the entrainment coefficien...

UNLABELLED The entrainment of slow rhythmic auditory cortical activity to the temporal regularities in speech is considered to be a central mechanism underlying auditory perception. Previous work has shown that entrainment is reduced when the quality of the acoustic input is degraded, but has also linked rhythmic activity at similar time scales to the encoding of temporal expectations. To under...