Co-Representing Other People’s Action Plans: A Binding Perspective on Mentalizing
Mon-Main hall - Z1-Poster 1-2306
Presented by: Viola Mocke
As exceptionally social beings, it is typically not sufficient for humans to represent only their own action plans. Through the lens of feature-based action control theories, we investigated how humans represent other people’s plans in addition to their own. Prior to executing intentional actions, actors create and maintain mental representations of their own plans. We draw on previous research demonstrating that planning an action involves the temporary binding of features that describe the action. For instance, when planning a keypress of a particular location (left vs. right) and duration (short vs. long), the respective action features (e.g., left and short) are bound. If other people’s action plans were represented similarly as own action plans, the same feature binding should happen when we know that another person is planning an action, as when we plan it ourselves. In a tablet-based laboratory experiment, two participants sat opposite each other, and carried out short or long presses (duration) of two different colored buttons (location). To make the other person’s actions relevant to the self, both participants had to perform well to gain a common reward. We tested the size of binding effects for location and duration features depending on the person planning the action (the self, the other person or no one). This allowed us to shed light on the integration of action features into representations of own and others’ action plans and hence understand how we store our own assumptions about relevant others’ future actions.
Keywords: action co-representation, joint action, event-file, action plan, action control, mentalizing