Evidence for we-representations during joint action planning

Abstract

Do people engaged in joint action form action plans that specify joint outcomes at the group level? EEG was recorded from pairs of participants who performed coordinated actions that could result in different postural configurations. To isolate individual and joint action planning processes, a pre-cue specified in advance the individual actions and/or the joint configuration. Participants had 1200 ms to prepare their actions. Then a Go cue specified all action parameters and participants performed a synchronized action as quickly as possible. Action onsets were shorter when the pre-cue specified the joint configuration, regardless of whether individual action was also specified. EEG analyses showed that specifying joint action parameters in advance reduced ambiguity in a structured joint action plan (reflected in the decrease of the amplitude of the P600) and helped with representing action goals and interpersonal coordination patterns in sensorimotor brain areas (reflected in increased alpha/mu suppression and CNV amplitudes). These results provide clear evidence that joint action is driven not only by action plans that specify individual contributions, but also by action plans that specify joint action outcomes at the group level.

Mechanisms for mutual support in motor interactions

“…This interpretation would be in line with our and others' suggestion that one's and the partner's actions are integrated within a dyadic motor plan (DMP 15,16 , Fig. 1b), resembling what happens for left-and right-hand movements during bimanual coordination [17][18][19][20] . The agents would then apply similar sensorimotor control processes to both their own and their partner's actions 12,13 .…”

How Task Interactivity Shapes Action Observation

“…Nevertheless, these findings are not difficult to reconcile. Altogether, they even more strongly suggest that the whole point about interactions is that they entail predictions on motor acts and outcomes Kourtis et al 2013) directly derived from the presence of shared goals (Candidi et al 2015, see also Pesquita et al 2018, Kourtis et al 2019: the latter guide individual motor planning and modulate the activity in frontoparietal areas allowing for the anticipation of the partner's contribution, in terms of outcomes in the environment. The specific area coding such outcomes depends on the nature of the outcome itself, e.g., hand-configuration or target-object in parietal areas (Newman-Norlund et al 2008;Kokal et al 2009;Sacheli et al 2015Sacheli et al , 2018bEra et al 2018, see Zapparoli et al 2018 vs. action effects in premotor ones (Hadley et al 2015).…”

How can we master the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic? The role of planning at social levels

“…In this regard, the neurophysiological basis of cII effects seems particularly interesting. The neurophysiological processes underlying if-then planning in individuals (Wieber et al, 2015b;Wolff et al, 2018) and spontaneous action planning at the dyadic level (Kourtis et al, 2019) are quite well understood. Linking both steams of research as well as using neuro-physiological measures during performance tasks (Wolff et al, 2019) would help understand the processes underlying cII effects.…”