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Strategic Task Decomposition in Joint Action
Title / Series / Name
Cognitive Science
Publication Volume
47
Publication Issue
7
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Joint action
Cooperation strategies
Joint planning
Task decomposition
Cooperation strategies
Joint planning
Task decomposition
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/14192
Abstract
The core of human cooperation is people's ability to perform joint actions. Frequently, this requires effectively decomposing a joint task into individual subtasks, for example, when jointly shopping at the market to buy food. Surprisingly, little is known about how collaborators balance the costs of establishing a joint strategy for such decompositions and its expected benefits for a joint goal. We created a new online task that required pairs of randomly matched participants to jointly collect colored items. We then systematically varied the cognitive costs and benefits of applying a color-splitting strategy. The results showed that pairs adopted a color-splitting strategy more often when necessary to lower cognitive costs. However, once the strategy was jointly adopted, it continued to be used even when the cost–benefits changed. Our results provide first insights on how people decompose joint tasks into individual components and how decomposition strategies may evolve into conventions.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2023
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1111/cogs.13316