The Emergence of Specialized Roles Within Groups.

Humans routinely form groups to achieve goals that no individual can accomplish alone. Group coordination often brings to mind synchrony and alignment, where all individuals do the same thing (e.g., driving on the right side of the road, marching in lockstep, or playing musical instruments on a regular beat). Yet, effective coordination also typically involves differentiation, where specialized roles emerge for different members (e.g., prep stations in a kitchen or positions on an athletic team). Role specialization poses a challenge for computational models of group coordination, which have largely focused on achieving synchrony. Here, we present the CARMI framework, which characterizes role specialization processes in terms of five core features that we hope will help guide future model development: Communication, Adaptation to feedback, Repulsion, Multi-level planning, and Intention modeling. Although there are many paths to role formation, we suggest that roles emerge when each agent in a group dynamically allocates their behavior toward a shared goal to complement what they expect others to do. In other words, coordination concerns beliefs (who will do what) rather than simple actions. We describe three related experimental paradigms-"Group Binary Search," "Battles of the Exes," and "Find the Unicorn"-that we have used to study differentiation processes in the lab, each emphasizing different aspects of the CARMI framework.

The division of linguistic labour for offloading conceptual understanding.

The division of linguistic labour (DLL), initially theorized by philosophers, has gained the attention of cognitive scientists in the last decade. Contrary to some controversial philosophical accounts of DLL, we propose that it is an extended mind strategy of offloading conceptual understanding onto other people. In this article, we empirically explore this proposal by providing an exploratory experimental paradigm to search for the mechanisms underwriting DLL and how they may work in practice. We developed a between-subjects experiment in which participants had to categorize two pairs of highly confusable dog breeds after receiving categorization training on just one pair of breeds. In the treatment group, participants were grouped in dyads and were allowed to interact with each other by means of the labels of these four dog breeds. In their queries to trained 'experts', novices frequently used labels to refer to breeds that they could not identify themselves. Experts were highly responsive to their paired novices' queries, and the rates of querying for the two members within a dyad were positively correlated. Independent categorization failure and offloading categorization success lead to subsequent increases in querying by novices, indicating adaptive use of offloading. Self-reports of breed knowledge were higher for experts within a dyad compared to isolated experts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.