Synchrony Influences Estimates of Cooperation in a Public-Goods Game.

Benefiting from a cooperative interaction requires people to estimate how cooperatively other members of a group will act so that they can calibrate their own behavior accordingly. We investigated whether the synchrony of a group's actions influences observers' estimates of cooperation. Participants (recruited through Prolific) watched animations of actors deciding how much to donate in a public-goods game and using a mouse to drag donations to a public pot.

Depersonalization affects self-prioritization of bodily, but not abstract self-related information.

Depersonalization is a common and distressing experience characterized by a feeling of estrangement from one's self, body, and the world. In order to examine the relationship between depersonalization and selfhood we conducted an experimental study comparing processing of three types of self-related information between nonclinical groups of people experiencing high and low levels of depersonalization. Using a sequential matching task, we compared three types of biases for processing of self-related information: prioritization of one's name, of self-associated abstract stimuli (geometrical shapes), and of self-associated bodily stimuli (avatar faces).

Action planning and execution cues influence economic partner choice.

Prudently choosing who to interact with and who to avoid is an important ability to ensure that we benefit from a cooperative interaction. While the role of others' preferences, attributes, and values in partner choice have been established (Rossetti, Hilbe & Hauser, 2022), much less is known about whether the manner in which a potential partner plans and implements a decision provides helpful cues for partner choice. We used a partner choice paradigm in which participants chose who to interact with in the Prisoners' Dilemma.

Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination.

The cultural transmission of technical know-how has proven vital to the success of our species. The broad diversity of learning contexts and social configurations, as well as the various kinds of coordinated interactions they involve, speaks to our capacity to flexibly adapt to and succeed in transmitting vital knowledge in various learning contexts. Although often recognized by ethnographers, the flexibility of cultural learning has so far received little attention in terms of cognitive mechanisms.

Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or 'estranged' from one's self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities, distal social interactions and peoples' sense of self during the lockdown as contrasted with before the pandemic.

Sensorimotor communication fosters trust and generosity: The role of effort and signal utility.

Previous research has shown that a co-actor's willingness to bear the monetary costs of prior cooperative activities influences our cooperative behaviour towards them. But what about when such information is lacking? In addition to monetary costs, people routinely engage in joint actions in which they incur effort costs in order to help each other achieve their goals, for example by adapting their goal-directed actions in order to send informative signals. We aimed to investigate whether people act more cooperatively towards those who are willing to bear the effort costs of an interaction by adapting their movements to send informative signals.

The fruits of our labour: Interpersonal coordination generates commitment by signalling a willingness to adapt.

Countless everyday activities require us to coordinate our actions and decisions with others. Coordination not only enables us to achieve instrumental goals, but has also been shown to boost , leading people to persevere with an interaction even when their motivation wavers. So far, little is known about the mechanism by which coordination generates commitment.

Web-based sensitivity training for interacting with facial paralysis.

Previous research has shown that observers tend to form inaccurate and negatively biased first impressions of people with facial paralysis (FP). It has been hypothesised that this may be ameliorated by encouraging people to focus on channels of expression other than the face. This was tested in a web-based study of 466 participants.

Synchronicities that shape the perception of joint action.

In joint performances spanning from jazz improvisation to soccer, expert performers synchronize their movements in ways that novices cannot. Particularly, experts can align the velocity profiles of their movements in order to achieve synchrony on a fine-grained time scale, compared to novices who can only synchronize the duration of their movement intervals. This study investigated how experts' ability to engage in velocity-based synchrony affects observers' perception of coordination and their aesthetic experience of joint performances.

Prosocial effects of coordination - What, how and why?

A wealth of research in recent decades has investigated the effects of various forms of coordination upon prosocial attitudes and behavior. To structure and constrain this research, we provide a framework within which to distinguish and interrelate different hypotheses about the psychological mechanisms underpinning various prosocial effects of various forms of coordination. To this end, we introduce a set of definitions and distinctions that can be used to tease apart various forms of prosociality and coordination.

Joint action goals reduce visuomotor interference effects from a partner's incongruent actions.

Joint actions often require agents to track others' actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner's movements need not be represented in relation to distinct, incongruent proximal goals.

Identifying others' informative intentions from movement kinematics.

Previous research has demonstrated that people can reliably distinguish between actions with different instrumental intentions on the basis of the kinematic signatures of these actions (Cavallo, Koul, Ansuini, Capozzi, & Becchio, 2016). It has also been demonstrated that different informative intentions result in distinct action kinematics (McEllin, Knoblich, & Sebanz, 2017). However, it is unknown whether people can discriminate between instrumental actions and actions performed with an informative intention, and between actions performed with different informative intentions, on the basis of kinematic cues produced in these actions.

Distinct kinematic markers of demonstration and joint action coordination? Evidence from virtual xylophone playing.

When performing joint actions, people modulate instrumental actions to provide additional information for a coactor (Pezzulo, Donnarumma, & Dindo, 2013). Similarly, demonstrators adjust instrumental actions to make them more informative for novice learners (Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). It is unknown whether the kinematic modulations performed to facilitate prediction in joint action coordination and the modulations performed to transmit information about the structure of novel actions are unique, or whether a general type of modulation can take on multiple functions.

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.