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Using Violations of Fitts’ Law to Communicate during Joint Action
When people perform joint actions together, task knowledge
is sometimes distributed asymmetrically such that one person
has information that another person lacks. In such situations,
interpersonal action coordination can be achieved if the
knowledgeable person modulates basic parameters of her
goal-directed actions in a way that provides relevant infor-
mation to the less knowledgeable partner. We investigated
whether systematic violations of predicted movement
duration provide a sufficient basis for such communication.
Results of a joint movement task show that knowledgeable
partners spontaneously and systematically violated the pre-
dictions of Fitts’ law in order to communicate if their partners
could not see their movements. Unknowing partners had a
benefit from these violations and more so if the violations
provided a good signal-to-noise ratio. Together, our findings
suggest that generating and perceiving systematic deviations
from the predicted duration of a goal-directed action can
enable non-conventionalized forms of communication during
joint action