Loading...
Me or we? Action-outcome learning in synchronous joint action
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Action representations
Action-outcome learning
Ideomotor theory
Joint action
Shared goals
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Language and Linguistics
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Linguistics and Language
Cognitive Neuroscience
Action-outcome learning
Ideomotor theory
Joint action
Shared goals
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Language and Linguistics
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Linguistics and Language
Cognitive Neuroscience
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/26857
Abstract
Goal-directed behaviour requires mental representations that encode instrumental relationships between actions and their outcomes. The present study investigated how people acquire representations of joint actions where co-actors perform synchronized action contributions to produce joint outcomes in the environment. Adapting an experimental procedure to assess individual action-outcome learning, we tested whether co-acting individuals link jointly produced action outcomes to individual-level features of their own action contributions or to group-level features of their joint action instead. In a learning phase, pairs of participants produced musical chords by synchronizing individual key press responses. In a subsequent test phase, the previously produced chords were presented as imperative stimuli requiring forced-choice responses by both pair members. Stimulus-response mappings were systematically manipulated to be either compatible or incompatible with the individual and joint action-outcome mappings of the preceding learning phase. Only joint but not individual compatibility was found to modulate participants' performance in the test phase. Yet, opposite to predictions of associative accounts of action-outcome learning, jointly incompatible mappings between learning and test phase resulted in better performance. We discuss a possible explanation of this finding, proposing that pairs' group-level learning experience modulated how participants encoded ambiguous task instructions in the test phase. Our findings inform current debates about mechanistic explanations of action-outcome learning effects and provide novel evidence that joint action is supported by dedicated mental representations encoding own and others' actions on a group level.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2024-06-01
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105785