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Abstract:
It has recently been shown that when people are engaged in real-time interaction they represent, to some extent, the task of a co-acting partner and that this co-representation leads to impairment of their own action performance. We divided a bimanual reaching task between two participants in such way that they jointly performed the task using one hand each. The relation of concurrently executed reaching movements could either be symmetric or asymmetric.
Results indicated that participants aligned their actions in the time domain on a global (mean RT and MT) as well as on a local level (cross-correlation of RT). The results also showed interference in movement preparation processes emerging when dyads had to perform asymmetric movements. Additionally, the size of the cross-correlations was closely coupled to the size of the symmetry effect for each dyad.
By performing secondary analyses and conducting a follow-up study we tried to gain insight into the mechanisms that might drive these alignment processes. The results suggest that people tend to synchronize the timing of their movements in a low frequency range. We conclude that only the dyads being “on the same wavelength with each other” do automatically represent the other’s task as well.
