The present study investigated to what extent group membership affects an actor's representation of their partner's task in cooperative joint action. Participants performed a joint pick-and-place task in a naturalistic, breakfast-table-like paradigm which allowed the demonstration of varying degrees of cooperation. Participants transported a wooden cup from one end of a table to the other, with one actor moving it to an intermediate position from where their partner transported it to a goal position. Hand and finger movements were recorded via 3D motion tracking to assess actors' cooperative behavior. Before the joint action task was performed, participants were categorized as belonging to the same or to different groups, supposedly based on an assessment of their cognitive processing styles. Results showed that the orientation of the actors' fingers when picking up the cup was affected by its required angle at the goal position. When placing the cup at the intermediate position, most actors adapted the rotation of the cup's handle to the joint action goal, thereby facilitating the partner's subsequent movement. Male actors demonstrated such cooperative behavior only when performing the task together with an ingroup partner, while female actors demonstrated cooperative behavior irrespective of social categorization. These results suggest that actors tend to represent a partner's end-state comfort and integrate it into their own movement planning in cooperative joint action. However, social factors like group membership may modulate this tendency.
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. The present study investigated whether the action of a co-acting partner may modulate an agent’s perception. The “performer” prepared a grasping or pointing movement toward a physical target while the “searcher” performed a visual search task. The performer’s planned action impaired the searcher’s perceptual performance when the search target dimension was relevant to the performer’s movement execution. These results demonstrate an action-induced modulation of perceptual processes across participants and indicate that agents represent their partner’s action by employing the same perceptual system they use to represent an own action. We suggest that task representations in joint action operate along multiple levels of a cross-brain predictive coding system, which provides agents with information about a partner’s actions when they coordinate to reach a common goal.
In joint action, agents are assumed to represent their partner's task to optimize joint performance. However, the neurophysiological processes underlying the processing of the partner's task have not been widely investigated. Pairs of participants were asked to perform a joint version of a visual search task in either a cooperative or a competitive social context. During the task, one agent's neural activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). The alpha-lateralization index was calculated as [(contralateral À ipsilateral)/ (contralateral + ipsilateral)] Â 100 to examine attentional selection or suppression of the laterally presented stimulus. A negative alpha-lateralization indicates lower alpha-band power over the contralateral sites compared with the ipsilateral sites and was related to attentional selection. A positive alphalateralization indicates higher alpha-band power over the contralateral sites compared with the ipsilateral sites and was related to attentional suppression.Behavioural results showed impeded search performance when the partner target was present. Furthermore, EEG time-frequency results showed that the partner target induced a negative parieto-occipital alpha-lateralization, indicating that it captured attention, when the agent target was absent. When the agent target was present, the parieto-occipital alpha-lateralization index was negative for laterally presented partner target in the cooperative and positive in the competitive social context, indicative of attentional capture in the cooperative condition and suppression of the partner target in the competitive condition. In sum, our study showed that humans tune their attentional processing towards a partner target in a joint action task. This attentional tuning was shown to be affected by social context and the presence of the agent's own target.
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