Neural correlates of observing joint actions with shared intentions

Eskenazi, Terry; Rueschemeyer, Shirley‐Ann; Lange, Floris P. de; Knoblich, Günther; Sebanz, Natalie

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.027

Cited by 26 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 76 publications

(99 reference statements)

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“…Past research has demonstrated that subtle social cues, such as whether two actors share a joint intention or not, influence how subsequent actions are processed by onlookers [16, 21]. Eskenazi and colleagues [16] found activation in brain regions associated with organizing sequential movements towards a final goal, but only when participants observed two actors with a joint goal and not when they observed actors with parallel goals. Interestingly, activation in these regions only differed between Joint and Parallel conditions when participants were explicitly attending to the intention itself, and not during a working memory task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the adults who were more proficient at learning statistical regularities, knowing that two people were acting together with a joint goal helped them to learn the regularities across their actions. If observing joint goals engages additional top-down neural processes [16, 40, 41], this might facilitate the detection of lower-level perceptual features of the action sequence such as statistical structure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further, we expected that action-effects would generally facilitate learning but that observers would benefit most from this cue in a joint action context. Based on prior evidence from Eskenazi et al [16] and Fawcett and Gredebäck [21], we hypothesized that both adults and 18-month-old toddlers would demonstrate a similar pattern. We measured predictive gaze fixations during an action observation phase, followed by an action performance phase in which participants performed their own action sequences both alone and together with an experimenter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a recent study, Eskenazi and colleagues [16] compared neural responses during observation of two perceptually identical scenes in which two actors engaged together in a task. The scenes were preceded by a social cue that established whether the actors in the video had joint or parallel goals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Statistical learning in social action contexts

et al. 2017

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Sensitivity to the regularities and structure contained within sequential, goal-directed actions is an important building block for generating expectations about the actions we observe. Until now, research on statistical learning for actions has solely focused on individual action sequences, but many actions in daily life involve multiple actors in various interaction contexts. The current study is the first to investigate the role of statistical learning in tracking regularities between actions performed by different actors, and whether the social context characterizing their interaction influences learning. That is, are observers more likely to track regularities across actors if they are perceived as acting jointly as opposed to in parallel? We tested adults and toddlers to explore whether social context guides statistical learning and—if so—whether it does so from early in development. In a between-subjects eye-tracking experiment, participants were primed with a social context cue between two actors who either shared a goal of playing together (‘Joint’ condition) or stated the intention to act alone (‘Parallel’ condition). In subsequent videos, the actors performed sequential actions in which, for certain action pairs, the first actor’s action reliably predicted the second actor’s action. We analyzed predictive eye movements to upcoming actions as a measure of learning, and found that both adults and toddlers learned the statistical regularities across actors when their actions caused an effect. Further, adults with high statistical learning performance were sensitive to social context: those who observed actors with a shared goal were more likely to correctly predict upcoming actions. In contrast, there was no effect of social context in the toddler group, regardless of learning performance. These findings shed light on how adults and toddlers perceive statistical regularities across actors depending on the nature of the observed social situation and the resulting effects.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Statistical learning in social action contexts

et al. 2017

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“…First, although the number of participants is high, the design may seem underpowered for between-subject comparison, since there are just 16 people per group. However, other studies on joint-action, which is the most relevant comparable field, have used similar group sizes (Obhi and Hall, 2011a; van der Wel et al, 2012; Stenzel et al, 2014; Eskenazi et al, 2015). Another limitation is the position of response pads.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Transmission of Experience of Agency: An Experimental Study

et al. 2016

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The sense of controlling one’s own actions is fundamental to normal human mental function, and also underlies concepts of social responsibility for action. However, it remains unclear how the wider social context of human action influences sense of agency. Using a simple experimental design, we investigated, for the first time, how observing the action of another person or a robot could potentially influence one’s own sense of agency. We assessed how observing another’s action might change the perceived temporal relationship between one’s own voluntary actions and their outcomes, which has been proposed as an implicit measure of sense of agency. Working in pairs, participants chose between two action alternatives, one rewarded more frequently than the other, while watching a rotating clock hand. They judged, in separate blocks, either the time of their own action, or the time of a tone that followed the action. These were compared to baseline judgements of actions alone, or tones alone, to calculate the perceptual shift of action toward outcome and vice versa. Our design focused on how these two dependent variables, which jointly provide an implicit measure of sense of agency, might be influenced by observing another’s action. In the observational group, each participant could see the other’s actions. Multivariate analysis showed that the perceived time of action and tone shifted progressively toward the actual time of outcome with repeated experience of this social situation. No such progressive change occurred in other groups for whom a barrier hid participants’ actions from each other. However, a similar effect was observed in the group that viewed movements of a human-like robotic hand, rather than actions of another person. This finding suggests that observing the actions of others increases the salience of the external outcomes of action and this effect is not unique to observing human agents. Social contexts in which we see others controlling external events may play an important role in mentally representing the impact of our own actions on the external world.

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