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

Abstract

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. By deliberately extending the review to aspects such as the cultural context in which a joint action takes place, we pay tribute to the complex and variable nature of this social phenomenon.

Social play as joint action: A framework to study the evolution of shared intentionality as an interactional achievement

“…Economics and biology have explored its game-theoretical structure (Henrich et al, 2004). Converging evidence from all these fields has led to the establishment of a sophisticated understanding of the phenomena that human interaction produces as well as the cognitive underpinnings entailed by it (Vesper et al, 2016). Increasingly, proposals are emerging for integrative approaches to bridge methodological and epistemological divides (De Ruiter & Albert, 2017;Galantucci & Sebanz, 2009;H.…”

“…This is achieved by exchanging signals in real time that help partners to adapt to 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 (Grice, 1975) and facilitate their interpretation, whereas adressees display evidence of how they have interpreted those intentions (H. Clark & Schaefer, 1989). In joint actions involving physical actions (e.g., assembling a Lego model), participants design those actions to be visible and informative to their partners (H. Clark & Krych, 2004) while observing their partners' actions to extract information from them (Vesper et al, 2016). This process is called grounding, and is achieved by the exchange of signals that often are produced incidentally or implicitly, in parallel to the main track of conversation (H. Clark & Schaefer, 1989).…”

Visual attention and action: How cueing, direct mapping, and social interactions drive orienting

“…In these contexts, an actor represents not just their own action plans during a shared activity but also those of their partner. Corepresentation between actors can be supported by direct perceptual-motor experience of another's actions, by communicative behaviours, or by inference and prediction of another's actions based upon knowledge of the goals of their activity or goal-relevant stimuli (see Knoblich, Butterfill, & Sebanz, 2011;Vesper et al, 2016, for reviews).…”

The social situation affects how we process feedback about our actions

“…Moreover, we found a significant difference between feedbacks with and without monetary outcomes, suggesting that the FRN is sensitive to both monetary rewards and task performance. Earlier behavioral findings support the idea that humans corepresent co-actors actions even if they are irrelevant to one's own goals (36), for a recent general review, see: (37). Such representations may also influence how humans process feedback about actions and associated monetary rewards while performing joint actions with another person.…”