Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When two individuals perform a task together, they combinetheir individual skills to achieve a joint goal. Previousresearch has shown that interindividual skill differencespredict a group’s collective benefit in joint perceptualdecision-making. In the present study, we tested whether thisrelationship also holds for other task domains, using adynamic object control task in which two participants eachcontrolled either the vertical or horizontal movement directionof an object. Our findings demonstrate that the difference inindividuals’ skill levels was highly predictive of the dyad’scollective benefit. Differences in individuals’ subjectiveratings of task difficulty reflected skill differences and thusalso turned out to be a predictor of collective benefit.Generally, collective benefit was modulated by spatial taskdemands. Overall, the present study shows that previousfindings in joint decision-making can be extended to dynamicmotor tasks such as joint object control.