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

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

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

This and that back in context: Grounding demonstrative reference in manual and social affordances

Spatial demonstratives, i.e. words like this and that, serve asimportant tools to establish joint attention, allowinginterlocutors to flexibly share spatial reference schemes.However, little experimental work has investigated whichperceptual and social factors drive speakers’ choices ofdemonstrative forms. We used a novel experimental paradigmto explore 1) the role of relative placement of competingreferents on the sagittal and lateral planes, 2) whether and howthe presence of an addressee modulates the speaker’s choice ofdemonstrative forms. We found that the choice ofdemonstratives is affected by the relative position ofcompeting referents both on the sagittal and lateral plane.Furthermore, we found that the presence of an interlocutorshifts attraction for proximal demonstratives towards theshared space of reference, but only in collaborative contexts.Together, these results suggest that spatial deixis is groundedin a contrastive organization of space tightly coupled to manualand social affordances

Co-actors represent the order of each other’s actions

Previous research has shown that people represent each other’s tasks and actions when acting together. However, less is known about how co-actors represent each other’s action sequences. Here, we asked whether co-actors represent the order of each other’s actions within an action sequence, or whether they merely represent the intended end state of a joint action together with their own contribution. In the present study, two co-actors concurrently performed action sequences composed of two actions. We predicted that if co-actors represent the order of each other’s actions, they should experience interference when the order of their actions differs. Supporting this prediction, the results of six experiments consistently showed that co-actors moved more slowly when performing the same actions in a different order compared to performing the same actions in the same order. In line with findings from bimanual movement tasks, our results indicate that interference can arise due to differences in movement parameters and due to differences in the perceptual characteristics of movement goals. The present findings extend previous research on co-representation, providing evidence that people represent not only the elements of another’s task, but also their temporal structure.Published versio

Understanding distal goals from proximal communicative actions

Can people interpret communicative action modulations in terms of the actor’s distal goal? We investigated situations in which the proximal goal of an action (i.e., the movement endpoint) does not overlap with its distal goal (i.e., a final location beyond the movement endpoint). Participants were presented with animations of an object being moved at different velocities towards a designated endpoint. The distal goal, however, was for the object to be moved past this endpoint, to one of two occluded final locations. Participants were asked to select the location which they considered the likely distal goal of the action. As predicted, participants detected differences in movement velocity and, based on these differences, systematically mapped the movements to the two distal goal locations. These findings extend previous research on sensorimotor communication by demonstrating that communicative action modulations are not restricted to proximal goals but can also contain information about distal goals