Contrasting Approaches to Perceiving and Acting With Others

Abstract

How and why the presence of a person directly affects the perception and action of another person is a phenomenon that has been approached in a limited and piecemeal fashion within psychology. This kind of diffuse strategy has failed to capture the jointness of perception and action within and between people. In contradistinction, the authors offer a perspective that retains both integrally social features (e.g., involves interaction) and yet adequately exploits the current state of knowledge regarding the ecological properties of perception-action, while at the same time drawing on aspects of dynamic systems theory. In this article the authors review the best attempts to examine how one individual affects another's perceptions and actions in the emergence of a social unit of action. Two important approaches, the individual-level and cognitive dynamics approaches, have yielded insights that derive in significant degree from principles of ecological psychology and/or dynamical systems theory. Prototypic of the individual-level approach is a focus on what can be perceived by coactors with the aim of uncovering how the dispositional qualities (affordances) of another person are informationally specified during social interaction. In contrast, the cognitive dynamics approach simulates dynamical characteristics of cognition and psychological influence with the aim of uncovering how cooperative interaction emerges out of its component parts. The authors argue that these approaches involve, respectively, insufficient mutuality and insufficient embodiment. Consequently, a social synergy perspective is discussed that approaches the problem of socially cooperative interaction at the relational, nonreductive level, using novel methods to examine how social perception and action emerge through self-organizing processes.

Territorial gain dynamics regulates success in attacking sub-phases of team sports

“…This study advanced understanding by investigating interactions of multi-player sub-phases in field invasion team games. The findings supported previous research (e.g., Marsh et al, 2006;Bourbousson et al, 2010b) showing how two or more individuals may function as one entity. For instance Marsh et al (2006) defined a "collective" as an emergent "social unit of action in which individual actors become part of a larger social entity, a collective, because it characterises social interactions in their most abstract and basic form" (p.4).…”

“…The findings supported previous research (e.g., Marsh et al, 2006;Bourbousson et al, 2010b) showing how two or more individuals may function as one entity. For instance Marsh et al (2006) defined a "collective" as an emergent "social unit of action in which individual actors become part of a larger social entity, a collective, because it characterises social interactions in their most abstract and basic form" (p.4). Our findings considered that players in a team interact with each other while cooperating in a goal-directed manner and that a team may be assumed a single entity or collective.…”

“…Instead, the data presented in this paper showed the evolution over time (dynamics) of a variable that captured the collective actions, i.e., the synergies or functional groupings of players functioning as a social entity (cf. Bourbousson et al, 2010b;Kelso, 2009;Marsh, Richardson, Baron, & Schmidt, 2006). Our data demonstrated that distance gained was a variable capable of distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful attacks.…”

Competitive Interaction Leads to Perceptual Distancing Between Actors

“…In fact, in face-to-face interactions, when given a choice between cooperative and competitive behaviors, people opt for cooperation approximately 90% of the time (e.g., Insko et al, 1993;Wildschut et al, 2003). Furthermore, cooperative tasks prompt observers to form a social synergy (Marsh et al, 2009) in which environments and actions are perceived in terms of joint, rather than individual, actions and abilities (e.g., Davis et al, 2010). Hence, under this view, cooperation should have a substantially smaller, and perhaps negligible, effect on perception.…”

Dyadic drumming across the lifespan reveals a zone of proximal development in children.

“…Collective play, everyday communication, and various bonding behaviors also rely on implicit or intentional forms of coordinated behavior. Even in antagonistic activities, such as boxing or soccer, individuals need to coordinate with each other to compete effectively (Marsh, Richardson, Baron, & Schmidt, 2006). A fundamental dimension of socially coordinated behavior is the ability to intentionally adapt the timing of one's own behavior to the timing of others' actions.…”