Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Joint improvisation is central to how we navigate the social world, engage and maintain social interactions, and perceive interactions between other people. This project investigates people’s ability to distinguish between joint and individual actions (contemporary joint vs. solo dance improvisation) and the information they use to make this determination. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to identify whether two people were improvising dance movements together or alone. Experiment 2 explored how much people’s decision-making relies on information about the dancers’ facial expressions and gaze direction. Overall, results showed we can accurately identify improvised joint actions, even when the actors’ faces and gaze direction are occluded.