Acting Together, Acting Stronger? Interference between Participants during Face-to-face Cooperative Interception Task

Abstract

People generally coordinate their action to be more effective. However, in some cases, interference between them occur, resulting in an inefficient collaboration. The main goal of this study is to explore the way two persons regulate their actions when performing a cooperative task of ball interception, and how interference between them may occur. Starting face to face, twenty-four participants (twelve teams of two) had to physically intercept balls moving down from the roof to the floor in a virtual room. To this end, they controlled a virtual paddle attached to their hand moving along the anterior-posterior axis, and were not allowed to communicate. Results globally showed participants were often able to intercept balls without collision by dividing the interception space in two equivalent parts. However, an area of uncertainty (where many trials were not intercepted) appeared in the center of the scene highlighting the presence of interference between participants. The width of this area increased when situation became more complex and when less information was available. Moreover, participants often interpreted balls starting above them as balls they should intercept, even when these balls were in fine intercepted by their partner. Overall, results showed that team coordination emerges from between-participants interactions in this ball interception task and that interference between them depends on task complexity (uncertainty on partner's action and visual information available).