Marschner Maximilian, Dignath David, Knoblich Günther
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
Department of Psychology, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Cognition. 2024 Jun;247:105785. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105785. Epub 2024 Apr 6.
Goal-directed behaviour requires mental representations that encode instrumental relationships between actions and their outcomes. The present study investigated how people acquire representations of joint actions where co-actors perform synchronized action contributions to produce joint outcomes in the environment. Adapting an experimental procedure to assess individual action-outcome learning, we tested whether co-acting individuals link jointly produced action outcomes to individual-level features of their own action contributions or to group-level features of their joint action instead. In a learning phase, pairs of participants produced musical chords by synchronizing individual key press responses. In a subsequent test phase, the previously produced chords were presented as imperative stimuli requiring forced-choice responses by both pair members. Stimulus-response mappings were systematically manipulated to be either compatible or incompatible with the individual and joint action-outcome mappings of the preceding learning phase. Only joint but not individual compatibility was found to modulate participants' performance in the test phase. Yet, opposite to predictions of associative accounts of action-outcome learning, jointly incompatible mappings between learning and test phase resulted in better performance. We discuss a possible explanation of this finding, proposing that pairs' group-level learning experience modulated how participants encoded ambiguous task instructions in the test phase. Our findings inform current debates about mechanistic explanations of action-outcome learning effects and provide novel evidence that joint action is supported by dedicated mental representations encoding own and others' actions on a group level.
目标导向行为需要心理表征来编码动作与其结果之间的工具性关系。本研究调查了人们如何获取联合动作的表征,即共同行动者通过同步动作贡献在环境中产生联合结果。我们采用一种实验程序来评估个体动作-结果学习,测试共同行动的个体是将联合产生的动作结果与自己动作贡献的个体层面特征联系起来,还是与他们联合动作的群体层面特征联系起来。在学习阶段,参与者两两通过同步各自的按键反应来弹奏和弦。在随后的测试阶段,之前弹奏的和弦作为指令性刺激呈现,要求两名参与者都做出强制选择反应。刺激-反应映射被系统地操纵,使其与之前学习阶段的个体和联合动作-结果映射兼容或不兼容。结果发现,只有联合兼容性而非个体兼容性能够调节参与者在测试阶段的表现。然而,与动作-结果学习的联想理论预测相反,学习阶段和测试阶段之间的联合不兼容映射导致了更好的表现。我们讨论了这一发现的可能解释,提出两人的群体层面学习经验调节了参与者在测试阶段对模糊任务指令的编码方式。我们的研究结果为当前关于动作-结果学习效应的机制解释的争论提供了信息,并提供了新的证据,表明联合动作由在群体层面编码自己和他人动作的专门心理表征所支持。