Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In daily life, people often have to coordinate their actions with others to achieve shared goals, referred to as joint action. Examples range from cooking dinner with a friend to playing hockey or performing in an orchestra. The long-term objective of my research program is to understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms that allow people to fluently coordinate joint actions together. The short-term objective is to develop a comprehensive model of the sense of agency for joint action. Sense of agency refers to the feeling of generating and controlling actions and their effects. In joint action, each person can have a sense of agency at the individual level ("I did my part") and also at the collective level ("We did it together," termed joint agency). Metacognitive assessments of individual and joint agency can affect the quality of joint performance, people's ability to learn from or adapt in light of errors, and people's motivation to engage in subsequent joint action, and they can even carry ethical or legal implications for certain types of joint action. The proposed research will achieve three specific aims through experiments in which partners rate their sense of joint agency after producing musical joint actions together (either by tapping in alternation to create a melody or by playing electronic music boxes to produce a duet) or engaging in joint drawing. Aim 1 studies will investigate cognitive contributions to joint agency, including mental representations of the joint action's collective goal and attention to partners' individual contributions. Aim 2 studies will examine potential neural markers of joint agency, including markers of attention and sensorimotor processing, by using electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain activity while partners produce joint actions. Aim 3 studies will examine external context cues that contribute to joint agency. Because a large number of context cues are predicted to impact joint agency, Aim 3 will first use surveys to identify context cues that strengthen joint agency and examine whether they differ across age, gender, and culture, and then bring identified cues into the lab to establish their causal effects. The proposed research will lay the groundwork for a comprehensive model of how cognitive, neural, and context cues combine to determine agency in different joint action contexts. Findings will inform theories of joint action, which have yet to fully account for how agency contributes to action control, monitoring, and error correction. Findings will also inform theories of social cognition, as agency contributes to motivation to cooperate and social bonding. Potential applications include interventions to enhance team performance and cooperation, and development of digital music technology that allows people to experience strong joint agency while playing music together and thereby elicits its social and emotional benefits.