Dear All,
A kind reminder about the tomorrow defense of Max starting at 11:20 in room D002.
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The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Acting in the We-Mode: The Content and Structure of
Joint Task Representations
by
Maximilian Marschner
Tuesday, December 2, 11:20 a.M. CET
Room D002 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna)
Join Zoom Meeting
D002
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91311996297?pwd=hxHbAD3gAaur1hbUaXlShDsm91RrKZ.1&…
Meeting ID: 913 1199 6297 Passcode: 115661
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Günther Knoblich (CEU)
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Marcel Brass (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin)
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Eva Wittenberg, Chair, CEU
Lucia Maria Sacheli<https://en.unimib.it/lucia-maria-sacheli> External Reviewer,
Department of Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Roland
Pfister<https://www.uni-trier.de/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-i/faecher-und-institute/psychologie/professuren/allgemeine-psychologie/team/prof-dr-roland-pfister>
External Reviewer, Department of
Psychology<https://www.uni-trier.de/en/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-i/faecher-und-institute/psychologie/professorium>,
Trier University, Germany.
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP
here<https://forms.office.com/e/XV60pRz7us> to get access to the lecture hall.
ABSTRACT |The ability to coordinate our actions with others to reach shared goals is a
hallmark of human sociality. What are the cognitive foundations for this ability? In the
present dissertation, I addressed this question by investigating the content and structure
of joint task representations, i.e., of the mental representations that guide action
planning and control in joint action by specifying what co-actors need to do to reach
their goals.
Distinguishing different theoretical proposals of how joint task representations could be
structured, the present dissertation tested central assumptions of one of these proposals,
referred to as the relational structure of joint task representations. This proposal
posits that joint task representations encode group-level relations between co-actors'
individual task contributions, thereby capturing how joint actions are performed at the
level of the group rather than at the level of the separate interacting individuals.
The present dissertation comprises four empirical research projects testing this proposal
by investigating anticipated imitation effects in social interactions between groups
(Study I), action-outcome learning in synchronous joint action (Study II), and modulations
of imitative response tendencies in joint task settings (Study III and IV). Study I showed
that anticipated imitation effects can be shaped by group-level congruency relations, but
also pointed to limitations in how readily people integrate others' actions into their
own task representations. Study II showed that action-outcome learning is sensitive to
group-level relations between co-actors' individual task contributions. Yet, it also
indicated that the application of joint task representations embedding a relational
structure is cognitively costly and not necessarily the default in task contexts featuring
other co-actors. Finally, Study III and Study IV revealed that shared goals that specify
relations between the outcomes of own and others' individual task contributions are
limited in modulating imitative response tendencies in interactive task settings. This
indicates that the representations guiding action selection and control in interactive
task settings may often remain anchored at individual rather than group-level performance.
Taken together, the findings of the present dissertation provide novel support for the
proposal that joint task representations can encode group-level relations between
co-actors' individual task contributions. At the same time, they reveal important
limits on how readily these representations get employed in interactive task settings.
These findings indicate that joint task representations do not default to a fixed
structure, but become flexibly adapted to the coordination demands, temporal dynamics and
specific characteristics of the task at hand. These findings advance our understanding of
the cognitive architecture underlying joint action, indicating that the content and
structure of joint task representations is determined by construal processes balancing
costs and benefits of different representational structures.
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