What is Shared in Joint Action? Issues of Co-representation, Response Conflict, and Agent Identification

Abstract

When sharing a task with another person that requires turn taking, as in doubles games of table tennis, performance on the shared task is similar to performing the whole task alone. This has been taken to indicate that humans corepresent their partner's task share, as if it were their own. Task co-representation allows prediction of the other's responses when it is the other's turn, and leads to response conflict in joint interference tasks. However, data from our lab cast doubt on the view that task co-representation and resulting response conflict are the only or even primary source of effects observed in task sharing. Recent findings furthermore suggest another potential source of interference in joint task performance that has been neglected so far: Self-other discrimination and conflict related to agent identification (i.e., determining whether it is "my" or the other's turn). Based on these findings we propose that participants might not always co-represent what their partner is supposed to do, but instead co-represent that another agent is responsible for part of the task, and when it is his turn. We call this account the actor corepresentation account.

How do speakers coordinate? Evidence for prediction in a joint word-replacement task

“…It has been argued that such similarity in performance can be explained, in part, by the assumption that self-and other-generated actions share the same representational format (though additional mechanisms might be necessary; see Sebanz, Bekkering, Knoblich, 2006). Interestingly, it has also been suggested that one mechanism operating in joint tasks could involve keeping track of whose turn it is to respond (Wenke et al, 2011).…”

“…While general-purpose mechanisms would not be able to support prediction of specific linguistic content (i.e., what somebody is about to say), they could in principle support prediction of whether another is about to speak (or, indeed, act in some other way). Such mechanisms could, for example, help speakers to predict whether another conversational participant is about to take the floor (Wenke et al, 2011), either by producing a linguistic utterance or by producing a non-verbal utterance (e.g., pointing gesture; Clark, 1996).…”

Moving together: toward understanding the mechanisms of joint action

“…Recent work on co-representation has focused on two questions. First, what exactly about the co-actor's task is represented and what are the cognitive processes underlying co-representation (Wenke et al 2011)? Second, to what extent does the social relation between co-actors affect co-representation (Hommel et al 2009;Ruys and Aarts 2010)?…”

“…A relatively recent but quickly growing line of research deals with the question of how and when co-actors form representations of each other's actions and tasks, and how such ''co-representation'' affects individual task performance (Wenke et al 2011). Studies on co-representation have consistently shown that people have a strong tendency to keep in mind what their co-actors need to be doing and monitor others' performance, even when this impairs their own task performance.…”

Interference in joint picture naming.

“…Here we are particularly interested in an alternative account put forward by Wenke et al (2011), the agent-conflict account. According to this account, representing that one's partner is (potentially) about to respond on the current trial interferes with one's own response.…”