Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 HR, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome, Italy.
Psychol Res. 2019 Jul;83(5):863-877. doi: 10.1007/s00426-017-0929-8. Epub 2017 Oct 24.
We investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying turn-taking joint action in 42-month-old children (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) using a behavioral task of dressing a virtual bear together. We aimed to investigate how participants represent a partners' behavior, i.e., in terms of specific action kinematics or of action effects. The bear was dressed by pressing a smaller and a bigger button. In the Action-response task, instructions asked participants to respond to the partner by pressing the same or opposite button; in the Action-effect task they had to respond to the partner's action effect by dressing the bear with the lacking part of the clothing, which in some cases implied pressing the same button and in other cases implied pressing the opposite button. In 50% of the trials, the partner's association between each button and the ensuing effect (dressing the bear with t-shirt or pants) was reversed, while it never changed for participants. Both children and adults showed no effect of physical congruency of actions, but showed impaired performance in the Action-effect task if their partner achieved her effect through a different action-effect association than their own. These results suggest that, when encoding their partner's actions, agents are influenced by action-effect associations that they learnt through their own experience. While interference led to overt errors in children, it caused longer reaction times in adults, suggesting that a flexible cognitive control (that is still in development in young children) is required to take on the partner's perspective.
我们使用一起给虚拟熊穿衣的行为任务，研究了 42 个月大的儿童（实验 1）和成人（实验 2）在轮流进行联合行动时的认知机制。我们旨在调查参与者如何表示伙伴的行为，即具体动作的运动学或动作效果。穿衣熊需要按小按钮和大按钮。在动作-反应任务中，指令要求参与者通过按下相同或相反的按钮来回应伙伴；在动作-效果任务中，他们必须通过用缺失的衣服部分来给熊穿衣来回应伙伴的动作效果，在某些情况下，这意味着按下相同的按钮，而在其他情况下，则意味着按下相反的按钮。在 50%的试验中，伙伴之间每个按钮和随后的效果（用 T 恤或裤子给熊穿衣）之间的联系被颠倒了，而参与者的联系从未改变。儿童和成人都没有表现出动作物理一致性的影响，但如果他们的伙伴通过与自己不同的动作-效果联系来实现自己的效果，他们在动作-效果任务中的表现就会受损。这些结果表明，当编码伙伴的动作时，代理人会受到他们通过自己的经验学到的动作-效果联系的影响。虽然干扰导致儿童出现明显的错误，但它导致成人的反应时间延长，这表明需要灵活的认知控制（这在幼儿中仍在发展）来承担伙伴的视角。
