Joint Task Performance Research Articles

Influence of a Playful, Child-Directed Context on Preschool Children’s Peer Cooperation

Empirical and theoretical literature on cooperative problem solving in preschool children suggests that integrating features of play into structured, experimental settings should increase the benefits of joint peer interactions and task performance. Four- and five-year-old peer dyads completed a playful, flexible, and child-driven building task or a more structured, adult-driven building task. As predicted, children in the playful condition built more complex structures, used more observational learning, and engaged in greater positive joint communication than did children in the structured condition. Condition differences carried over into a subsequent joint building task. Results suggest that cooperative problem-solving activities that allow children greater control of the task goals and interaction, similar to play contexts, can promote higher levels of cooperation and more effective learning and performance in young children.

What is Shared in Joint Action? Issues of Co-representation, Response Conflict, and Agent Identification

When sharing a task with another person that requires turn taking, as in doubles games of table tennis, performance on the shared task is similar to performing the whole task alone. This has been taken to indicate that humans co-represent their partner’s task share, as if it were their own. Task co-representation allows prediction of the other’s responses when it is the other’s turn, and leads to response conflict in joint interference tasks. However, data from our lab cast doubt on the view that task co-representation and resulting response conflict are the only or even primary source of effects observed in task sharing. Recent findings furthermore suggest another potential source of interference in joint task performance that has been neglected so far: Self-other discrimination and conflict related to agent identification (i.e., determining whether it is “my” or the other’s turn). Based on these findings we propose that participants might not always co-represent what their partner is supposed to do, but instead co-represent that another agent is responsible for part of the task, and when it is his turn. We call this account the actor co-representation account.

Self/other organization in human psychological development

Evidence from the evolution of human cultural behavior and learning, embryology and genetics of the brain, and the behavior of human infants indicates that the critical and uniquely human motives for cooperative imagination and joint interest in objects and tasks are determined by expression of genes and epigenetic neural systems elaboration long before birth, along with essential peripheral organs of perception and motor expression that will serve in communication by rhythmic facial, vocal, gestural, and body movement signals. These cerebral motives continue to exercise their influence on neural development and behavior throughout life, transforming the behaviors of the developing individual through a succession of phases to which other individuals and cultural institutions are constrained to adapt. We discuss the theory of innate intersubjectivity and relate it to the hypothesis of an Innate Motive Formation that emerges in brain development as regulator of morphogenesis in neural systems, and that continues to function, postnatally, as generator of motives and emotions by which human contacts and relationships are regulated. We suggest that differentiates of the primary motive formation in the embryo brain later serve to generate intelligent exploration of the objective environment and the emergence of an additional dialogic mechanism that represents the self-subject as a partner for an other-subject, intersubjectively. Intersubjective communication in infancy leads, through systematic age-related transformations of the brain and behavior, to preverbal mimetic negotiation of cooperative awareness and joint task performance. Finally we discuss, in relation to this theory, interpretations of faulty communication and development at different stages of the life cycle that result from maternal postnatal depression, autism, premature birth and schizophrenia.

Utility of Secondary Task as a Workload Assessment Technique

Recently Navon (1984) suggests that much of the dual task data that lend support to resource theories are methodologically flawed and that there are non-resource related mechanisms such as outcome conflict that could explain dual task data equally well. If Navon's concerns can be validated, the current view of workload as a resource-related concept would have to be revamped. The present research examined performance tradeoff - demonstration of resource allocation - with the optimum-maximum method. The optimum-maximum method was a variation of the secondary task technique proposed by Navon to encourage maximum joint task performance without conveying to the subjects that task performances must tradeoff. A continuous tracking task and a Sternberg memory task were used; three priority levels were used to induce resource allocation. An absence of performance tradeoff with the optimum-maximum method would support Navon's claim that performance tradeoffs may not be true indications of resource competition or task demand and therefore not reliable reflection of mental workload. Performance tradeoff was observed when the tracking task was optimized. When the Sternberg task performance was optimized, Sternberg performance was sensitive to the priority manipulations but the concurrent tracking performance was not. Peripheral vision was proposed to have protected the tracking performance when subjects were visually focusing on the Sternberg stimuli. However, the peripheral vision hypothesis could not account for the graded performance changes across priority levels. The present data suggest that the resource view is still a useful concept and the secondary task technique still could provide informative disclosure about task demand and mental workload.