Han Yizhen, Zhang Xinyuan
School of Psychology, Northeast Normal University, No.5268 Renmin Street, Changchun, 130024, China.
Jilin Provincial Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Brain Development, Changchun, China.
Cogn Process. 2025 Jul 17. doi: 10.1007/s10339-025-01292-7.
Co-representation refers to the phenomenon where individuals integrate others' behaviors into their own representations during joint actions. The impact of cooperation and competition on co-representation has long been controversial. This study employed the joint Simon task to explore the influence of social context (cooperative vs. competitive) on co-representation under varying cognitive loads. The findings reveal a significant Simon effect in the solo Simon task group, cooperative group and competition group (Experiment 1), regardless of the presence of additional cognitive load, but not in the solo go-nogo task group (Experiment 2). However, Experiments 1 and 2 both showed that there was no significant interaction between social context and compatibility on RT. Moreover, there was no significant change in Simon effect under different cognitive loads in both cooperative group and competition group in Experiment 1 and 2. Our findings demonstrate that individuals maintain co-representation of co-actors' behaviors in both cooperative and competitive contexts. However, despite the additional cognitive load, individuals continue to co-represent others in both cooperation and competition, suggesting that the cognitive load introduced in current study is not sufficient to disrupt the co-representation. We discuss these findings in the context of the JSE's task co-representation theory and integrated social-cognitive accounts.
共同表征是指个体在联合行动中将他人的行为整合到自己的表征中的现象。合作与竞争对共同表征的影响长期以来一直存在争议。本研究采用联合西蒙任务来探究社会情境（合作与竞争）在不同认知负荷下对共同表征的影响。研究结果显示，在单独西蒙任务组、合作组和竞争组中（实验1），无论是否存在额外的认知负荷，都存在显著的西蒙效应，但在单独的停止信号任务组中（实验2）不存在。然而，实验1和实验2均表明，社会情境与兼容性在反应时上不存在显著交互作用。此外，在实验1和实验2中，合作组和竞争组在不同认知负荷下的西蒙效应均无显著变化。我们的研究结果表明，个体在合作和竞争情境中均保持对共同行动者行为的共同表征。然而，尽管存在额外的认知负荷，个体在合作和竞争中仍继续对他人进行共同表征，这表明本研究中引入的认知负荷不足以扰乱共同表征。我们将在联合行动选择的任务共同表征理论和综合社会认知解释的背景下讨论这些发现。
