Om samarbejde i efterårsferien

Flere af de computerbaserede aktiviteter i efterårsferien var udviklet af Cordula Vesper, som er adjunkt i kognitionsvidenskab og kognitiv semiotik ved Aarhus Universitet. Her fortæller hun om sine samarbejdsstudier på Steno Museet

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

Crossmodal correspondences as common ground for joint action

When performing joint actions, people rely on common ground - shared information that provides the required basis for mutual understanding. Common ground can be based on people's interaction history or on knowledge and expectations people share, e.g., because they belong to the same culture or social class. Here, we suggest that people rely on yet another form of common ground, one that originates in their similarities in multisensory processing. Specifically, we focus on 'crossmodal correspondences' - nonarbitrary associations that people make between stimulus features in different sensory modalities, e.g., between stimuli in the auditory and the visual modality such as high-pitched sounds and small objects. Going beyond previous research that focused on investigating crossmodal correspondences in individuals, we propose that people can use these correspondences for communicating and coordinating with others. Initial support for our proposal comes from a communication game played in a public space (an art gallery) by pairs of visitors. We observed that pairs created nonverbal communication systems by spontaneously relying on 'crossmodal common ground'. Based on these results, we conclude that crossmodal correspondences not only occur within individuals but that they can also be actively used in joint action to facilitate the coordination between individuals. Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Your Obstacle on My Mind: Task Co-representation in Coordination is Modulatedby External Timing Cues

When acting in a social context, people have an automatic tendency to represent another person’s task – to theextent that another’s task constraints may influence one’s own movement performance. Task co-representation will also affectco-actors’ performance in joint action coordination; however, how exactly movement parameters are influenced is unclear. Weinvestigated this question in four experiments. Pairs of participants performed arm movements back and forth between twotargets, instructed to synchronize their landing times while external metronome tones provided timing cues. We predicted thatactors would represent their co-actors’ task constraints such that when the co-actor moved over an obstacle the actor withoutobstacle would move higher as well. Results confirmed this prediction, suggesting that joint action partners co-representedeach other’s task constraints. Moreover, this obstacle effect increased significantly when timing cues were removed, indicatinga stronger need for co-representing the partner when demands on interpersonal coordination are amplified

Abstraction and Cognitive Flexibility in Collective Problem Solving: The Role of Diversity

Groups of interacting individuals are often found to have an advantage over individuals in contexts of complex problem solving. We suggest that social interaction allows group members to share diverse introspections, perspectives and strategies, promoting the formation of more abstract problem representations, which – in turn – apply more flexibly to new problem contexts. In a reinforcement learning task inspired by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), participants categorized aliens as friendly or dangerous based on an underlying rule specifying feature combinations. After a number of correctly categorized trials, the rule would change (without explicit notification). Participants could solve the task by learning every new rule, but could also discover an underlying abstract rule, which would facilitate faster recovery from local rule changes. We compared pairs of participants individually trained on different rules (diversity pairs), with pairs trained on the same rule (non-diversity pairs), and individuals. We found that diversity pairs outperformed non- diverse pairs and individuals. Our findings suggest that diversity in prior experience benefits groups, likely due to processes of abstraction and cognitive flexibility

Making oneself predictable: reduced temporal variability facilitates joint action coordination

Performing joint actions often requires precise temporal coordination of individual actions. The present study investigated how people coordinate their actions at discrete points in time when continuous or rhythmic information about others’ actions is not available. In particular, we tested the hypothesis that making oneself predictable is used as a coordination strategy. Pairs of participants were instructed to coordinate key presses in a two-choice reaction time task, either responding in synchrony (Experiments 1 and 2) or in close temporal succession (Experiment 3). Across all experiments, we found that coactors reduced the variability of their actions in the joint context compared with the same task performed individually. Correlation analyses indicated that the less variable the actions were, the better was interpersonal coordination. The relation between reduced variability and improved coordination performance was not observed when pairs of participants performed independent tasks next to each other without intending to coordinate. These findings support the claim that reducing variability is used as a coordination strategy to achieve predictability. Identifying coordination strategies contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms involved in real-time coordination

Data reported in Digital Joint Action: Avatar-Mediated Social Interaction in Digital Spaces

This data set contains the raw rating and sentence choice data reported in "Digital joint action: Avatar-mediated social interaction in digital spaces" by M. Pugliese and C. Vesper

Data reported in Modulating Action Duration to Establish Non-conventional Communication

This data set contains the aggregated raw data reported in "Modulating action duration to establish non-conventional communication" by C. Vesper, L. Schmitz and G. Knoblich