Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social cognition research has focused almost exclusively on dyadic interactions or passive judgements of social stimuli. This study moves beyond this 'dyadic default' by investigating 'task co-representation' (mental representation of a partner's task) in groups and assessing the efficiency of this cognitive process when faced with multiple mental states in a single interaction. Groups of three participants took part in a Joint Simon task and an Individual Go No-go control. Compatibility effects were found in the Joint but not the Individual task (p = .034, _p2 = .214), suggesting participants were able to co-represent at least two co-actors, supporting views that this is a cognitively efficient mechanism. Further, there was no influence of spatial proximity between actors within each group, strengthening Co-representation over Referential Coding accounts. Testing participants in groups enables investigation of the limits of social cognition and provides a more ecologically valid model of real-world social interaction.