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

  • Joint Action: What is Shared?
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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 co-represent 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 co-representation account.

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Notes

  1. Here and in the following we use the term single response go/nogo task to refer to tasks in which participants have only one response “alternative”, and are either required to respond (go) or to withhold the response (nogo), depending on the task rules, and hence the stimulus presented on a given trial. In contrast, we use the term binary choice task when participants respond on each trial by choosing the appropriate response from two response alternatives. Finally, the term binary choice go/nogo task refers to tasks in which participants respond to some stimuli by choosing between two response alternatives assigned to certain stimuli (go), but have to refrain from responding to other stimuli (nogo).

  2. We thank Andrea Philipp for providing the data of this experiment.

  3. We also analyzed the CNV because previous findings suggests that the late part of the CNV also reflect anticipatory motor preparation when preparing to act oneself as well as when expecting another person’s action (e.g., Kilner et al. 2004; Kourtis et al. 2010). However, in our Exp. 3 there was no significant difference between the CNV found in NoGo trials in the joint and individual task settings. Therefore our results cannot distinguish between the CNV portion that is related to the predictable imperative stimulus and the portion related to action prediction.

  4. Note that neutral flankers in the Atmaca et al. (2011) study cannot distinguish between the two accounts either. This is because neutral flankers (that were not assigned to either agent/response) never occurred in the target position, and hence were not associated with “not my turn” or “withhold response”. Such a condition would be interesting because the actor co-representation account predicts that flanker stimuli assigned to the other agent should lead to more conflict/interference than neutral flankers (also assigned to nogo/withhold responses) in the joint, but not the individual condition. In contrast, the task co-representation account would not predict differences between joint and individual settings for neutral flanker trials because neutral letters are not assigned to the other’s response.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Dorit Wenke, Silke Atmaca, Antje Holländer, Roman Liepelt, Pamela Baess & Wolfgang Prinz

  2. Department of Psychology, Humboldt University at Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Dorit Wenke

  3. Junior Group “Neurocognition of Joint Action”, Department of Psychology, Westfalian Wilhelms-University, Münster, Germany

    Roman Liepelt

  4. Low Temperature Lab, Brain Research Unit, Aalto University School of Research and Technology, Espoo, Finland

    Pamela Baess

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  1. Dorit Wenke
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  2. Silke Atmaca
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  4. Roman Liepelt
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Correspondence to Antje Holländer.

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Silke Atmaca and Antje Holländer contributed equally to this paper.

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Wenke, D., Atmaca, S., Holländer, A. et al. What is Shared in Joint Action? Issues of Co-representation, Response Conflict, and Agent Identification. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 147–172 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0057-0

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