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Abstract:
Humans are social beings and they often act jointly together with other humans (joint actions) rather than alone. Successful joint action requires the understanding and the coordination of ones own actions with another persons actions. The research attempts to advance our
knowledge about joint action coordination by extending existing research in two novel and important ways. First, prominent theories of joint action agree on visual information being critical for successful joint action coordination but are vague about the exact source of visual
information being used during a joint action. However, in a real life interaction several sources of visual information exist which inform an interaction partner about the ongoing course of the interaction (e.g. visual information about objects, tools, other persons). Knowing which sources of visual information are used, however, is important for a more detailed characterization of the functioning of action coordination in joint actions. Second, previous studies
investigating the role of visual information in social settings often constrain the experimental tasks to artificial laboratory settings. To examine joint action mechanisms under realistic conditions I devised experimental tasks that allowed a close-to-natural joint action. As a result the perceptual and motor components of the experimental tasks were less constrained allowing for a more natural interaction compared to previous studies. The current research examines the importance of different sources of visual information on joint action coordination
under realistic settings. In three studies I examined the influence of different sources of visual information (Study 1), the functional role of different sources of visual information (Study 2), and the effect of social context on the use of visual information (Study 3) in a table tennis game. The results of these studies revealed that (1) visual anticipation of the interaction partner and the interaction object is critical in natural joint actions, (2) different
sources of visual information are critical at different temporal phases during the joint action, and (3) the social context modulates the importance of different sources of visual information. In sum, this work provides important and new empirical evidence about the importance of
different sources of visual information in close-to-natural joint actions.
