Relationship Closeness and Joint Action Coordination

Abstract

The Problem and its Background Perception and action comprise two fundamental phenomena within cognitive psychology. Perception may be construed as the process of obtaining information about one's environment. Action, on the other hand, may be construed as the process of engaging one's environment. Thus, perception-action theories concern how a cognitive system's contact with the world constrains the expression of behavior (and vice versa) or, more simply, how perception relates to action. Multiple frameworks have been developed to address this perception-action relation. For example, Prinz (1990) describes what he terms the "standard model" in which perception and action are incommensurable, so cognitive work is required to translate perception into action. However, other frameworks have been devised in which there is a greater degree of continuity or overlap between perception and action. For example, in the Theory of Event Coding (TEC; Hommel et al., 2001), perception and action planning share common representational codes and, therefore, require minimal (or no) translational work to get from perception to action planning. In the ecological approach to perception-action (Gibson, 1979), information obtained through perception directly specifies opportunities for action (i.e., affordances). Like TEC, the ecological perspective assumes minimal (or no) translational work to get from perception to action planning, but unlike TEC, the ecological approach often does not incorporate neural events or representations in its account of the perception-action relationship. While researchers operating from these various perspectives greatly differ in their fundamental assumptions about the perception-action relationship, what is common across all theories is that they have historically focused on the individual, emphasizing the contextual factors that constrain the expression of individual behavior. Such research has investigated the