Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Joint actions require successful coordination between two or more individuals toward shared goals. Successful motorperformance can be influenced by agency and anxiety; however, these factors could also serve as regulation mechanismsthat enhance coordination in joint action tasks. The current experiment assessed the influence of anxiety and sense ofagency on the dynamics of action coordination between two people during a car-braking task. Both individuals wererequired to contribute toward the braking task to avoid crashing into a stop sign. Using an actor partner interdependencemodel (APIM), results suggested that individuals seated to the right decreased their contribution to braking after individualsseated on the left increased their braking, but the reciprocal relation was not present. Visual feedback appears to influenceaction coordination, however no differences in reported anxiety or agency were found. This leader-follower effect suggeststhat a driver-passenger dynamic might have emerged.