Milward Sophie J, Whitehouse Jamie
University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom.
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2025 Feb 25;20(2):e0318545. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0318545. eCollection 2025.
Cooperation is so deeply embedded in human psychology that we spontaneously track a partner's task as well as our own when acting in a pair. This automatic 'co-representation' of a partner's mental representation of their task has been argued to be key to the sophisticated social coordination we see in human adults. However, our day-to-day encounters are not limited to one-to-one interactions. This is the first published study to investigate co-representation in groups, with results from a group Joint Simon task suggesting that co-representation may break down in groups larger than two. Exploratory analyses also suggested a complex interplay between spatial and social relationships between individual members within a group. We propose a novel hypothesis based on these findings: when we lack the capacity to track everyone in a group, we may be able to selectively track those who are the most salient or relevant. This provides key information about the limits of our capacity to keep others in mind, and the psychological underpinnings of how we do so.
合作深深植根于人类心理，以至于当两人一起行动时，我们会自然而然地关注合作伙伴的任务以及我们自己的任务。有人认为，这种对合作伙伴任务心理表征的自动“共同表征”是我们在成年人类身上看到的复杂社会协调的关键。然而，我们的日常交往并不局限于一对一的互动。这是第一项发表的关于群体中共同表征的研究，一项群体联合西蒙任务的结果表明，在超过两人的群体中，共同表征可能会瓦解。探索性分析还表明，群体中个体成员之间的空间关系和社会关系之间存在复杂的相互作用。基于这些发现，我们提出了一个新的假设：当我们没有能力追踪群体中的每一个人时，我们或许能够有选择地追踪那些最突出或最相关的人。这提供了关于我们在心中记住他人能力的局限性以及我们如何做到这一点的心理基础的关键信息。
