Abstract
Prediction of “when” a partner will act and “what” he is going to do is crucial in joint-action contexts. However, studies on face-to-face interactions in which two people have to mutually adjust their movements in time and space are lacking. Moreover, while studies on passive observation have shown that somato-motor simulative processes are disrupted when the observed actor is perceived as an out-group or unfair individual, the impact of interpersonal perception on joint-actions has never been directly addressed. Here we explored this issue by comparing the ability of pairs of participants who did or did not undergo an interpersonal perception manipulation procedure to synchronise their reach-to-grasp movements during: i) a guided interaction, requiring pure temporal reciprocal coordination, and ii) a free interaction, requiring both time and space adjustments. Behavioural results demonstrate that while in neutral situations free and guided interactions are equally challenging for participants, a negative interpersonal relationship improves performance in guided interactions at the expense of the free interactive ones. This was paralleled at the kinematic level by the absence of movement corrections and by low movement variability in these participants, indicating that partners cooperating within a negative interpersonal bond executed the cooperative task on their own, without reciprocally adapting to the partner's motor behaviour. Crucially, participants' performance in the free interaction improved in the manipulated group during the second experimental session while partners became interdependent as suggested by higher movement variability and by the appearance of interference between the self-executed actions and those observed in the partner. Our study expands current knowledge about on-line motor interactions by showing that visuo-motor interference effects, mutual motor adjustments and motor-learning mechanisms are influenced by social perception.
Highlights
Contradicting the adagio ‘‘if you want something done right, do it yourself’’, we continuously perform everyday life tasks with other people as we live dipped into an interactive social environment where we act in concert with others and where we are influenced by the impression others give us at first-sight
As kinematic measures we focused on the pre-shaping components of the reach-to-grasp [61,62] and analysed: 1. the index-thumb maximum 3-D Euclidean distance; 2. its variance (Var_MaxAp), as an index of variability in following the typical pre-shaping pathway of each individual
The comparison between the quality of the expected cooperation with the partner provided by Manipulated group’’ (MG) participants before and after the ‘‘false-feedback exchange’’ (VAS1–2) showed a significant decrease in expected cooperation (paired t-test, t(11) = 23.65, p = .003; mPre = 71.768.4 mm, mPost = 46.9618.1 mm), which indicates the participants in the MG developed a negative disposition towards their mate as consequence of the negative feedback provided by him
Summary
Contradicting the adagio ‘‘if you want something done right, do it yourself’’, we continuously perform everyday life tasks with other people as we live dipped into an interactive social environment where we act in concert with others and where we are influenced by the impression others give us at first-sight. These joint-actions imply fine-tuned and smooth coordination that humans highly refine with expertise, as in the case of tangoing couples or duet playing pianists. Ecological psychologists have applied a dynamic system approach to demonstrate that people end up spontaneously synchronizing even when they are not explicitly planning to act in concert [7,8,9,10,11,12] due to ‘‘entrainment processes’’ [13,14] or to the fact agents are sharing the same environment and follow the same environmental motor cues (affordances) and/or are influenced by similar actionperception coupling mechanisms [15]
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