Synchrony Influences Estimates of Cooperation in a Public-Goods Game.

Benefiting from a cooperative interaction requires people to estimate how cooperatively other members of a group will act so that they can calibrate their own behavior accordingly. We investigated whether the synchrony of a group's actions influences observers' estimates of cooperation. Participants (recruited through Prolific) watched animations of actors deciding how much to donate in a public-goods game and using a mouse to drag donations to a public pot. Participants then estimated how much was in the pot in total (as an index of how cooperative they thought the group members were). Experiment 1 (N = 136 adults) manipulated the synchrony between players' decision-making time, and Experiment 2 (N = 136 adults) manipulated the synchrony between players' decision-implementing movements. For both experiments, estimates of how much was in the pot were higher for synchronous than asynchronous groups, demonstrating that the temporal dynamics of an interaction contain signals of a group's level of cooperativity.

Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination.

The cultural transmission of technical know-how has proven vital to the success of our species. The broad diversity of learning contexts and social configurations, as well as the various kinds of coordinated interactions they involve, speaks to our capacity to flexibly adapt to and succeed in transmitting vital knowledge in various learning contexts. Although often recognized by ethnographers, the flexibility of cultural learning has so far received little attention in terms of cognitive mechanisms. We argue that a key feature of the flexibility of cultural learning is that both the models and learners recruit cognitive mechanisms of action coordination to modulate their behavior contingently on the behavior of their partner, generating a process of mutual adaptation supporting the successful transmission of technical skills in diverse and fluctuating learning environments. We propose that the study of cultural learning would benefit from the experimental methods, results, and insights of joint-action research and, complementarily, that the field of joint-action research could expand its scope by integrating a learning and cultural dimension. Bringing these two fields of research together promises to enrich our understanding of cultural learning, its contextual flexibility, and joint action coordination.

Depersonalization affects self-prioritization of bodily, but not abstract self-related information.

Depersonalization is a common and distressing experience characterized by a feeling of estrangement from one's self, body, and the world. In order to examine the relationship between depersonalization and selfhood we conducted an experimental study comparing processing of three types of self-related information between nonclinical groups of people experiencing high and low levels of depersonalization. Using a sequential matching task, we compared three types of biases for processing of self-related information: prioritization of one's name, of self-associated abstract stimuli (geometrical shapes), and of self-associated bodily stimuli (avatar faces). We found that both groups demonstrated the standard pattern of results for self-prioritization of one's name and geometrical shapes, but they differed with regard to avatar faces. While people with low depersonalization showed the standard prioritization of avatar faces, people with high depersonalization showed overall better response accuracy with avatar faces, and faster response times for stranger-associated avatar faces. These results were complemented by the additional finding that people with high depersonalization reported being more likely to use avatars of a different gender to their own outside of the experimental context. Finally, in this large sample (N = 180) we investigated the relationships between different measures of self-related processing and self-identification, finding no correlation between explicit reports of self-identification with self-associated avatar faces and geometrical shapes, self-prioritization of these stimuli, and prioritization of one's name. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Action planning and execution cues influence economic partner choice.

Prudently choosing who to interact with and who to avoid is an important ability to ensure that we benefit from a cooperative interaction. While the role of others' preferences, attributes, and values in partner choice have been established (Rossetti, Hilbe & Hauser, 2022), much less is known about whether the manner in which a potential partner plans and implements a decision provides helpful cues for partner choice. We used a partner choice paradigm in which participants chose who to interact with in the Prisoners' Dilemma. Before choosing a cooperation partner, participants were presented with information about the potential partners' decision-related actions in another round of the Prisoners' Dilemma. They received either information about the potential partners' planning during decision making (i.e., decision-time; Experiment 1) or action execution during decision implementation (i.e., movement directness; Experiment 2). Across both games, participants preferred to interact with those who planned actions quickly or executed actions with direct and smooth movements, indicating that they were cooperating confidently and without deliberation. This demonstrates that action cues present in either the planning or implementation of economic decisions influence partner choice. We discuss implications of this finding for human decision-making and perception-action coupling in action understanding.

The fruits of our labour: Interpersonal coordination generates commitment by signalling a willingness to adapt.

Countless everyday activities require us to coordinate our actions and decisions with others. Coordination not only enables us to achieve instrumental goals, but has also been shown to boost commitment, leading people to persevere with an interaction even when their motivation wavers. So far, little is known about the mechanism by which coordination generates commitment. To investigate this, we conducted two experiments that represented very different coordination problems: coordination of movement timing on a joint drumming task (Experiment 1) and coordination of decision-making on a joint object matching task (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the similarity of the participant and partner was manipulated by varying whether or not they had perceptual access to the participant's workspace, and the participants' attribution of (un)willingness to invest effort into the joint action by adapting was manipulated by varying whether or not the participant believed their partner had perceptual access. As a measure of commitment, we registered how much participants' persisted on a boring and effortful task to earn points for their partners. Participants were significantly less committed to earning points for unadaptive partners than for adaptive partners, but only when they believed that their partner was unwilling to adapt rather than unable to adapt. This demonstrates that coordination can generate commitment insofar as it provides a cue that one's partner is willing to invest effort to adapt for the good of the interaction. Moreover, we demonstrate that this effect generalises across different kinds of coordination.

Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or 'estranged' from one's self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities, distal social interactions and peoples' sense of self during the lockdown as contrasted with before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that the participants reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation, also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Finally, participants who reported that lockdown influenced their life to a greater extent had higher occurrences of depersonalisation experiences. Our findings may help to address key questions regarding well-being during a lockdown, in the general population. Our study points to potential risks related to overly sedentary, and hyper-digitalised lifestyle habits that may induce feelings of living in one's 'head' (mind), disconnected from one's body, self and the world.

Sensorimotor communication fosters trust and generosity: The role of effort and signal utility.

Previous research has shown that a co-actor's willingness to bear the monetary costs of prior cooperative activities influences our cooperative behaviour towards them. But what about when such information is lacking? In addition to monetary costs, people routinely engage in joint actions in which they incur effort costs in order to help each other achieve their goals, for example by adapting their goal-directed actions in order to send informative signals. We aimed to investigate whether people act more cooperatively towards those who are willing to bear the effort costs of an interaction by adapting their movements to send informative signals. We find that the effort that a co-actor invests in order to produce informative movement adaptations increases a participant's trust towards that co-actor, and that both the effort and utility of these informative movement adaptations increase generosity towards that co-actor. This demonstrates that we may base decisions about cooperation with a person on their willingness to bear the effort costs of interaction. These findings are discussed with respect to the role that effort investment plays in sustained cooperation.

Web-based sensitivity training for interacting with facial paralysis.

Previous research has shown that observers tend to form inaccurate and negatively biased first impressions of people with facial paralysis (FP). It has been hypothesised that this may be ameliorated by encouraging people to focus on channels of expression other than the face. This was tested in a web-based study of 466 participants. Participants in the Trained Condition received tips for perceiving expressiveness in individuals with FP, while those in the Untrained Condition received general medical information about FP. We observed no significant differences between groups for accuracy of emotion recognition, but a significant effect of the training upon perception of emotional intensity. These results show that attending to non-facial cues may improve social perception and reduce bias.

Synchronicities that shape the perception of joint action.

In joint performances spanning from jazz improvisation to soccer, expert performers synchronize their movements in ways that novices cannot. Particularly, experts can align the velocity profiles of their movements in order to achieve synchrony on a fine-grained time scale, compared to novices who can only synchronize the duration of their movement intervals. This study investigated how experts' ability to engage in velocity-based synchrony affects observers' perception of coordination and their aesthetic experience of joint performances. Participants observed two moving dots on a screen and were told that these reflect the hand movements of two performers engaging in joint improvisation. The dots were animated to reflect the velocity-based synchrony characteristic of expert performance (in terms of jitter of the velocity profile: Experiment 1, or through aligning sharpness of the velocity profile: Experiment 2) or contained only interval-based synchrony. Performances containing velocity-based synchrony were judged as more coordinated with performers rated as liking each other more, and were rated as more beautiful, providing observers with a stronger aesthetic experience. These findings demonstrate that subtle timing cues fundamentally shape the experience of watching joint actions, directly influencing how beautiful and enjoyable we find these interactions, as well as our perception of the relationship between co-actors.

Prosocial effects of coordination - What, how and why?

A wealth of research in recent decades has investigated the effects of various forms of coordination upon prosocial attitudes and behavior. To structure and constrain this research, we provide a framework within which to distinguish and interrelate different hypotheses about the psychological mechanisms underpinning various prosocial effects of various forms of coordination. To this end, we introduce a set of definitions and distinctions that can be used to tease apart various forms of prosociality and coordination. We then identify a range of psychological mechanisms that may underpin the effects of coordination upon prosociality. We show that different hypotheses about the underlying psychological mechanisms motivate different predictions about the effects of various forms of coordination in different circumstances.

Joint action goals reduce visuomotor interference effects from a partner's incongruent actions.

Joint actions often require agents to track others' actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner's movements need not be represented in relation to distinct, incongruent proximal goals. Instead they can be represented in relation to a single proximal goal - especially if the movements are, or appear to be, mechanically linked to a more distal joint action goal. To test this, we implemented a paradigm in which participants produced finger movements that were either congruent or incongruent with those of a virtual partner, and either with or without a joint action goal (the joint flipping of a switch, which turned on two light bulbs). Our findings provide partial support for the hypothesis that visuomotor interference effects can be reduced when two physically incongruent actions are represented as mechanically interdependent contributions to a joint action goal.

Identifying others' informative intentions from movement kinematics.

Previous research has demonstrated that people can reliably distinguish between actions with different instrumental intentions on the basis of the kinematic signatures of these actions (Cavallo, Koul, Ansuini, Capozzi, & Becchio, 2016). It has also been demonstrated that different informative intentions result in distinct action kinematics (McEllin, Knoblich, & Sebanz, 2017). However, it is unknown whether people can discriminate between instrumental actions and actions performed with an informative intention, and between actions performed with different informative intentions, on the basis of kinematic cues produced in these actions. We addressed these questions using a visual discrimination paradigm in which participants were presented with point light animations of an actor playing a virtual xylophone. We systematically manipulated and amplified kinematic parameters that have been shown to reflect different informative intentions. We found that participants reliably used both spatial and temporal cues in order to discriminate between instrumental actions and actions performed with an informative intention, and between actions performed with different informative intentions. Our findings indicate that the informative cues produced in joint action and teaching go beyond serving a general informative purpose and can be used to infer specific informative intentions.

Distinct kinematic markers of demonstration and joint action coordination? Evidence from virtual xylophone playing.

When performing joint actions, people modulate instrumental actions to provide additional information for a coactor (Pezzulo, Donnarumma, & Dindo, 2013). Similarly, demonstrators adjust instrumental actions to make them more informative for novice learners (Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). It is unknown whether the kinematic modulations performed to facilitate prediction in joint action coordination and the modulations performed to transmit information about the structure of novel actions are unique, or whether a general type of modulation can take on multiple functions. The present study therefore investigated whether there are unique kinematic markers for demonstration and for different types of joint action. In three experiments participants performed a virtual xylophone task, where they played simple xylophone melodies either alone, for a learner watching them, or together with another participant, while their movements were recorded. Participants increased movement amplitude during joint action and during demonstration. However, during joint action, participants modulated specific velocity parameters depending on whether their joint action partner knew or did not know the action sequence to be performed. The results demonstrate that there are specific kinematic cues to communicate the time and location of upcoming actions to a joint action partner but that there are no unique kinematic cues expressing the "pedagogical" intentions of a demonstrator. (PsycINFO Database Record

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

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.