Communicative modulations of early action components support the prediction of distal goals.

The successful unfolding of many social interactions relies on our capacity to predict other people's action goals, whether these are proximal (i.e., immediate) or distal (i.

A practical guide to EEG hyperscanning in joint action research: from motivation to implementation.

Developments in cognitive neuroscience have led to the emergence of hyperscanning, the simultaneous measurement of brain activity from multiple people. Hyperscanning is useful for investigating social cognition, including joint action, because of its ability to capture neural processes that occur within and between people as they coordinate actions toward a shared goal. Here, we provide a practical guide for researchers considering using hyperscanning to study joint action and seeking to avoid frequently raised concerns from hyperscanning skeptics.

Understanding others' distal goals from proximal communicative actions.

Many social interactions require individuals to coordinate their actions and to inform each other about their goals. Often these goals concern an immediate (i.e.

Beyond Single-Mindedness: A Figure-Ground Reversal for the Cognitive Sciences.

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition.

Digital joint action: Avatar-mediated social interaction in digital spaces.

This article proposes a framework to characterize joint action in digital spaces. "Digital joint action" maintains many known elements from physical, real-world joint action including representations relating to joint goals and individual subgoals, processes such as predicting and monitoring own and others' actions, and supporting coordination through signaling and direct communication. In contrast to social interaction in the real world, joint action performed online comes with a unique additional feature: Digital joint action is mediated through (more or less vividly visualized) avatars that are controlled by the individual users but also imply particular personas that come with their own skills and acting abilities.

Sharing Perspectives: Inviting Playful Curiosity Into Museum Spaces Through a Performative Score.

We report on the performative score "Sharing Perspectives" from the art/science research collaboration, Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting. Sharing Perspectives (SP) is developed as a score, inspired by choreography and the postmodern dance form Contact Improvisation, to stage exploration and improvisation, exploring uncertainty, creativity, togetherness, and the relationship between bodies and between bodies and space and artworks. The SP score acts as an experiment in how a brief intervention may affect the way art exhibitions are experienced, exploring how deeper and more sensorial engagement with art may be facilitated, for the benefit of visitors, galleries and artists.

Crossmodal correspondences as common ground for joint action.

When performing joint actions, people rely on common ground - shared information that provides the required basis for mutual understanding. Common ground can be based on people's interaction history or on knowledge and expectations people share, e.g.

How does a partner's motor variability affect joint action?

Motor learning studies demonstrate that an individual's natural motor variability predicts the rate at which she learns a motor task. Individuals exhibiting higher variability learn motor tasks faster, presumably because variability fosters exploration of a wider space of motor parameters. However, it is unclear how individuals regulate variability while learning a motor task together with a partner who perturbs their movements.

Motor constraints influence cultural evolution of rhythm.

While widely acknowledged in the cultural evolution literature, ecological factors-aspects of the physical environment that affect the way in which cultural productions evolve-have not been investigated experimentally. Here, we present an experimental investigation of this type of factor by using a transmission chain (iterated learning) experiment. We predicted that differences in the distance between identical tools (drums) and in the order in which they are to be used would cause the evolution of different rhythms.

Informing, Coordinating, and Performing: A Perspective on Functions of Sensorimotor Communication.

Sensorimotor communication is a form of communication instantiated through body movements that are guided by both instrumental, goal-directed intentions and communicative, social intentions. Depending on the social interaction context, sensorimotor communication can serve different functions. This article aims to disentangle three of these functions: (a) an informing function of body movements, to highlight action intentions for an observer; (b) a coordinating function of body movements, to facilitate real-time action prediction in joint action; and (c) a performing function of body movements, to elicit emotional or aesthetic experiences in an audience.

This is for you: Social modulations of proximal vs. distal space in collaborative interaction.

Human spatial representations are shaped by affordances for action offered by the environment. A prototypical example is the organization of space into peripersonal (within reach) and extrapersonal (outside reach) regions, mirrored by proximal (this/here) and distal (that/there) linguistic expressions. The peri-/extrapersonal distinction has been widely investigated in individual contexts, but little is known about how spatial representations are modulated by interaction with other people.

Combining Phase Advancement and Period Correction Explains Rushing during Joint Rhythmic Activities.

When people engage in rhythmic joint actions, from simple clapping games to elaborate joint music making, they tend to increase their tempo unconsciously. Despite the rich literature on rhythmic performance in humans, the mechanisms underlying joint rushing are still unknown. We propose that joint rushing arises from the concurrent activity of two separate mechanisms.

Reciprocal information flow and role distribution support joint action coordination.

Many joint actions require task partners to temporally coordinate actions that follow different spatial patterns. This creates the need to find trade-offs between temporal coordination and spatial alignment. To study coordination under incongruent spatial and temporal demands, we devised a novel coordination task that required task partners to synchronize their actions while tracing different shapes that implied conflicting velocity profiles.

Co-actors represent the order of each other's actions.

Previous research has shown that people represent each other's tasks and actions when acting together. However, less is known about how co-actors represent each other's action sequences. Here, we asked whether co-actors represent the order of each other's actions within an action sequence, or whether they merely represent the intended end state of a joint action together with their own contribution.

When Height Carries Weight: Communicating Hidden Object Properties for Joint Action.

In the absence of pre-established communicative conventions, people create novel communication systems to successfully coordinate their actions toward a joint goal. In this study, we address two types of such novel communication systems: sensorimotor communication, where the kinematics of instrumental actions are systematically modulated, versus symbolic communication. We ask which of the two systems co-actors preferentially create when aiming to communicate about hidden object properties such as weight.

Modulating action duration to establish nonconventional communication.

In many joint actions, knowledge about the precise task to be performed is distributed asymmetrically such that one person has information that another person lacks. In such situations, interpersonal coordination can be achieved if the knowledgeable person modulates basic parameters of her goal-directed actions in a way that provides relevant information to the co-actor with incomplete task knowledge. Whereas such sensorimotor communication has frequently been shown for spatial parameters like movement amplitude, little is known about how co-actors use temporal parameters of their actions to establish communication.

Let's decide together: Differences between individual and joint delay discounting.

This study addressed the question whether or not social collaboration has an effect on delay discounting, the tendency to prefer sooner but smaller over later but larger delivered rewards. We applied a novel paradigm in which participants executed choices between two gains in an individual and in a dyadic decision-making condition. We observed how participants reached mutual consent via joystick movement coordination and found lower discounting and a higher decisions' efficiency.

Co-representation of others' task constraints in joint action.

Previous research has demonstrated that humans tend to represent each other's tasks even if no interpersonal coordination is required. The present study asked whether coactors in a joint action rely on task co-representation to achieve temporal coordination even if this implies increased movement effort for an unconstrained actor. Pairs of participants performed reaching movements back and forth between two targets, with the aim of synchronizing their landing times.

How You Move Is What I See: Planning an Action Biases a Partner's Visual Search.

Activating action representations can modulate perceptual processing of action-relevant dimensions, indicative of a common-coding of perception and action. When two or more agents work together in joint action, individual agents often need to consider not only their own actions and their effects on the world, but also predict the actions of a co-acting partner. If in these situations the action of a partner is represented in a functionally equivalent way to the agent's own actions, one may also expect interaction effects between action and perception across jointly acting individuals.

Joint Action: Mental Representations, Shared Information and General Mechanisms for Coordinating with Others.

In joint action, multiple people coordinate their actions to perform a task together. This often requires precise temporal and spatial coordination. How do co-actors achieve this? How do they coordinate their actions toward a shared task goal? Here, we provide an overview of the mental representations involved in joint action, discuss how co-actors share sensorimotor information and what general mechanisms support coordination with others.

Minimalist Social-Affective Value for Use in Joint Action: A Neural-Computational Hypothesis.

Joint Action is typically described as social interaction that requires coordination among two or more co-actors in order to achieve a common goal. In this article, we put forward a hypothesis for the existence of a neural-computational mechanism of affective valuation that may be critically exploited in Joint Action. Such a mechanism would serve to facilitate coordination between co-actors permitting a reduction of required information.

The role of shared visual information for joint action coordination.

Previous research has identified a number of coordination processes that enable people to perform joint actions. But what determines which coordination processes joint action partners rely on in a given situation? The present study tested whether varying the shared visual information available to co-actors can trigger a shift in coordination processes. Pairs of participants performed a movement task that required them to synchronously arrive at a target from separate starting locations.

The sound of you and me: Novices represent shared goals in joint action.

People performing joint actions coordinate their individual actions with each other to achieve a shared goal. The current study investigated the mental representations that are formed when people learn a new skill as part of a joint action. In a musical transfer-of-learning paradigm, piano novices first learned to perform simple melodies in the joint action context of coordinating with an accompanist to produce musical duets.

Strategic communication and behavioral coupling in asymmetric joint action.

How is coordination achieved in asymmetric joint actions where co-actors have unequal access to task information? Pairs of participants performed a non-verbal tapping task with the goal of synchronizing taps to different targets. We tested whether 'Leaders' knowing the target locations would support 'Followers' without this information. Experiment 1 showed that Leaders tapped with higher amplitude that also scaled with specific target distance, thereby emphasizing differences between correct targets and possible alternatives.

Our actions in my mind: motor imagery of joint action.

How do people imagine performing actions together? The present study investigated motor imagery of joint actions that requires integrating one's own and another's part of an action. In two experiments, individual participants imagined jumping alone or jointly next to an imagined partner. The joint condition required coordinating one's own imagined actions with an imagined partner's actions to synchronize landing times.