Synchrony and Task Engagement in Virtual Reality: Temporal Dynamics, Predictors, and Psychological Outcomes of Collaborative Behaviors.

Collaborative behaviors provide useful signals for understanding how minds align through perception and actions. Virtual reality (VR) is a useful tool for studying these behaviors, as it enables fine-grained measurements of coordination in virtual social settings. In this work, we investigate collaborative behaviors in a large-scale classroom VR dataset of space-building activities (N = 146), focusing on dyadic synchrony and individual task engagement during the collaborative group activity. An analysis of collaborative behaviors over time revealed a U-shaped pattern in head and hand synchrony, with a turning point occurring approximately two-thirds into the activity. We found that the likelihood of dyads temporally aligning their object editing behaviors (i.e., nonzero vs. zero synchrony scores) and whether they actively created, edited, or deleted objects all followed an inverted-U shape over time, peaking around midway through the activity. We further analyzed synchrony and task engagement both as possible indicators of individual dispositions (i.e., previous extended reality [XR] and design experiences) and social context (i.e., group size), and also as behavioral signals for how individuals perceive their group members and collaborative outcomes. The findings revealed that collaborative behaviors such as object edit synchrony are shaped by previous XR experience, group size negatively predicted the frequency of object creation, and that the frequency of object deletion is positively associated with perception of group closeness. Taken together, this work advances the understanding of collaborative behavior by modeling its temporal dynamics, identifying predictors and psychological outcomes, thereby demonstrating how VR enables large-scale examination of its cognitive underpinnings.