A favorite childhood pastime — swinging on the playground swing set — also may be teaching kids how to get along.

The measured, synchronous movement of children on the swings can encourage preschoolers to cooperate on subsequent activities, 91̽�� researchers have found.

A study by the UW’s (I-LABS) shows the potential of synchronized movement in helping young children develop collaborative skills. The is published online in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

“Synchrony enhances cooperation, because your attention is directed at engaging with another person, at the same time,” explained , a postdoctoral researcher at I-LABS. “We think that being ‘in time’ together enhances social interaction in positive ways.”

Previous studies, including others by Rabinowitch, have linked music and being in sync with other pro-social behaviors, such as helping, sharing and empathizing, among young children: Marching together to a song, for example, might prompt one child to share with another. In this study, Rabinowitch, along with I-LABS co-director and psychology professor��, sought to focus on movement alone, without music, and examined how children cooperated with one another afterward.

Cooperation — adapting to a situation, compromising with someone else, working toward a common goal — is considered a life skill, one that parents and teachers try to develop in a child’s early years.

For the I-LABS study, researchers built a swing set that enabled two children to swing in unison, in controlled cycles of time. Pairs of 4-year-olds — who were unfamiliar to one another — were randomly assigned to groups that either swung together in precise time, swung out of sync with each other, or didn’t swing at all. The pairs in all three groups then participated in a series of tasks designed to evaluate their cooperation. In one activity, the children played a computer game that required them to push buttons at the same time in order to see a cartoon figure appear. Another, called the “give and take” activity, involved passing objects back and forth through a puzzle-like device.

Researchers found that the children who swung in unison completed the tasks faster, indicating better cooperation than those who swung out of sync, or not at all. On the button-push task, for instance, the pairs who had been swinging together showed a greater tendency to strategically raise their hands before they pushed the button so as to signal their intent to the other child, which proved to be a successful tactic for the task.

For 4-year-olds, moving in sync can create a feeling of “being like” another child that, consequently, may encourage them to communicate more and try to work together, Rabinowitch said.

“Cooperation has both a social and cognitive side, because people can solve problems they couldn’t solve alone,” Meltzoff said. “We didn’t know before we started the study that cooperation between 4-year-olds could be enhanced through the simple experience of moving together. It’s provocative that kids’ cooperation can be profoundly changed by their experiences.”

Rabinowitch believes the results of this study can have implications outside the lab. Teachers and parents can provide “in sync” opportunities for groups of children, whether through music, dance or play.

The study was funded by a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship, along with grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation and the Robert L Richmond Foundation.

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For more information, contact Rabinowitch at talchenr@uw.edu or 206-685-2045.

Children who played the same game but not in a synchronous way did not report the same increase in connection.

The , published April 8 by PLOS ONE, give an example of how a physical activity performed in unison helps children feel more positively toward each other and could perhaps increase their empathy.

“Synchrony is like a glue that brings people together — it’s a magical connector for people,” said lead author , a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the 91̽��.

Synchrony occurs when people interact together in time. It’s a fundamental prerequisite for activities such as playing music, singing, dancing and rowing.

But the impact of synchrony goes beyond the ability to coordinate activities with other individuals. In adults, synchrony has been linked to increased cooperation and teamwork, making work more efficient and productive.

Few studies have examined whether the same is true among children.

“We wanted to see if a synchronous, rhythmic interaction could influence the attitudes of children toward peers they had never met before,” Rabinowitch said.

She conducted the study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, where co-author Ariel Knafo is a professor of psychology. The European Research Council funded the project.

In the experiment, Rabinowitch tested 74 8-year-old children in pairs of two boys and two girls. Seated in a quiet laboratory room, the experimenter introduced herself and asked the children to introduce themselves to each other by name only.

After the experimenter explained the task, the children sat side by side in front of a video screen. An animated soccer ball bounced on both halves of the screen, and the children pressed a button whenever the ball on their side of the screen hit the floor.

For some pairs of children, the balls bounced in sync, so their fingers tapped the buttons simultaneously. Other pairs of children had out-of-sync bouncing, so they had asynchronous finger tapping.

A shortened sample of the task is shown in this video:

They did two 90-second trials of the game, with a short break in between. After the game, the children filled out questionnaires about how similar and close they felt to the child they had been paired with. A control group of pairs of children answered the same questions, but did not perform the game.

Children in the synchronous group reported a greater sense of similarity and closeness.

The findings suggest that time-based synchronized activities, including in music, dance and sports, could be useful tools in bringing children closer together.

“The important ingredient is joint synchronized activity — it is a form of collaboration where individuals perform the same movements at the same time,” Rabinowitch said.

Now at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, Rabinowitch is studying in detail the underlying cognitive mechanisms that enable synchronous interaction in children to shift social attitudes and enhance cooperation.

, co-director of I-LABS, said: “This study gives important clues about how to promote pro-social behavior in children. There may be a deep truth in saying that children care about being ‘in tune’ with others or that two people are in sync with each other.”

In her studies with Meltzoff, Rabinowitch hopes to reveal how music, and specifically synchrony, is able to guide and improve social and emotional interactions between humans.

“The findings might be applied to formulate new strategies for education in our effort to build a more collaborative and empathic future society,” she said.

And studying this phenomenon in children is especially important, Rabinowitch added, since the connection between music and social and emotional attitudes manifests itself so early in life.