Are you ready to jump? Predictive mechanisms in interpersonal coordination.

Abstract

When two or more individuals intend to achieve a joint outcome, they often need to time their own actions carefully with respect to those of their coactors. Online perceptual feedback supports coordination by allowing coactors to entrain with and predict each other's actions. However, joint actions are still possible when no or little online feedback is available. The current study investigated the interplay between higher-level planning processes and motor simulation in a joint action task where online feedback was not available. Pairs of participants performed forward jumps (hops) next to each other with the instruction to land at the same time. They could neither see nor hear each other, but were informed about their own and the partner's jumping distance beforehand. The analysis of basic movement parameters showed that participants adjusted the temporal and spatial properties of the movement preparation and execution phase of their jumps to the specific difference in distance between themselves and their partner. However, this adaptation was made exclusively by the person with the shorter distance to jump, indicating a distribution of coactors' efforts based on task characteristics. A comparison with an individual bipedal coordination condition suggests that joint coordination might rely on similar principles as interlimb coordination. These findings are interpreted within a framework of motor simulation.

Frontal alpha oscillations distinguish leaders from followers: Multivariate decoding of mutually interacting brains

“…This suggests that mentally anticipating an interactive task may set the system in an enhanced readiness state that enables the participant to quickly gain dominance over his/her partner. This is in line with previous work showing that top-down predictive mechanisms play a crucial role in facilitating successful joint coordination (Knoblich and Jordan, 2003, Pecenka and Keller, 2011, Kourtis et al, 2012, Vesper et al, 2013.…”

Interactional leader–follower sensorimotor communication strategies during repetitive joint actions

“…The second result of this analysis is that various signalling strategies perform similarly, but M5 is the best predictor of pairs' performance. Interestingly, our previous analyses (figure 8) have shown that most leaders use a signalling strategy that is well captured by M5, suggesting that they implicitly select an adaptive (if not optimal) way to convey information to their co-actors.…”

“…Ideomotor theories [2][3][4] propose the idea that ( predictive) simulative-like sensorimotor mechanisms such as internal forward models [5][6][7] support action perception. By extension, the motor coding of observed actions plays a major role in our ability to interact with others and to obtain efficient joint coordination [8]. The proposal is that we are able to predict, monitor and adapt to the behaviour of others by simulating their actions in our sensorimotor system.…”

“…During motor interactions, we tend to build a representation of what we think our partner will do based on the information we have and those we are able to infer from his behaviour [34]. Along the interaction, in case information concerning the structure of the sequences of interactions is available to only one member of the pair, people may align their representation of the task and use this cognitive framework to strategically change their behaviour even when the representation is outside conscious control ( [8,[34][35][36][37]; see also [38]). Here, we expand this notion by showing that the modulation of our kinematic features is influenced by what we expect the other knows based on the efficacy of past interactions we had with him and on his online behaviour.…”

The effect of model uncertainty on cooperation in sensorimotor interactions

“…Several recent rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org J R Soc Interface 10: 20130554 studies have investigated how humans mutually adjust and synchronize their behaviour during online joint actions, revealing the role of several mechanisms that range from automatic entrainment to action prediction [22,[57][58][59]]. An open research question is if and how sensorimotor interactions are influenced by the co-actors' goals and attitudes.…”