Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When acting in a social context, people have an automatic tendency to represent another person’s task – to theextent that another’s task constraints may influence one’s own movement performance. Task co-representation will also affectco-actors’ performance in joint action coordination; however, how exactly movement parameters are influenced is unclear. Weinvestigated this question in four experiments. Pairs of participants performed arm movements back and forth between twotargets, instructed to synchronize their landing times while external metronome tones provided timing cues. We predicted thatactors would represent their co-actors’ task constraints such that when the co-actor moved over an obstacle the actor withoutobstacle would move higher as well. Results confirmed this prediction, suggesting that joint action partners co-representedeach other’s task constraints. Moreover, this obstacle effect increased significantly when timing cues were removed, indicatinga stronger need for co-representing the partner when demands on interpersonal coordination are amplified.