Abstract
The present study investigated to what extent group membership affects an actor’s representation of their partner’s task in cooperative joint action. Participants performed a joint pick-and-place task in a naturalistic, breakfast-table-like paradigm which allowed the demonstration of varying degrees of cooperation. Participants transported a wooden cup from one end of a table to the other, with one actor moving it to an intermediate position from where their partner transported it to a goal position. Hand and finger movements were recorded via 3D motion tracking to assess actors’ cooperative behavior. Before the joint action task was performed, participants were categorized as belonging to the same or to different groups, supposedly based on an assessment of their cognitive processing styles. Results showed that the orientation of the actors’ fingers when picking up the cup was affected by its required angle at the goal position. When placing the cup at the intermediate position, most actors adapted the rotation of the cup’s handle to the joint action goal, thereby facilitating the partner’s subsequent movement. Male actors demonstrated such cooperative behavior only when performing the task together with an ingroup partner, while female actors demonstrated cooperative behavior irrespective of social categorization. These results suggest that actors tend to represent a partner’s end-state comfort and integrate it into their own movement planning in cooperative joint action. However, social factors like group membership may modulate this tendency.
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Notes
One pair of participants was excluded because the actor was ambidextrous [laterality quotient (LQ) of 25 in the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, Oldfield 1971], while all other participants were right-handed (LQs of 36 or higher, mean LQ was 75). Another pair was excluded because the actor stated knowing the partner well in the posttest questionnaire (corresponding to 3 on a scale of 0–4, mean acquaintance was 0.24).
The following subtests were used: Vorsilben (prefixes; VS), Zeichen-Fortsetzen (figure continuation; ZF), Wortanalogien (word analogies; WA), Figuren-Auswahl (figure selection; FA), Wortschatz (vocabulary; WS) and Wege-Erinnern (memorize paths; WE). Tasks alternately required verbal abilities (VS, WA, WS) or figural and spatial abilities (ZF, FA, WE) commonly associated with left and right cerebral hemispheres. In a posttest questionnaire, none of the participants expressed disbelief at the legitimacy of the assessment.
Further results concerning the movement onset as well as means and standard deviations of the main dependent variables over the different goal angles in the ingroup and outgroup condition of male and female actors (as depicted in Fig. 2) are reported in Online Resource 1.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by a scholarship grant to Dominik Dötsch by the Faculty of Psychology, Philipps-Universität Marburg.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Dötsch, D., Schubö, A. Social categorization and cooperation in motor joint action: evidence for a joint end-state comfort. Exp Brain Res 233, 2323–2334 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4301-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4301-1