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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 14, 2026

Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments

Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments

Published on: January 23, 2017

Entrainment and task co-representation effects for discrete and continuous action sequences.

Robrecht P R D van der Wel¹, En Fu²

¹Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, 08102, USA. r.vanderwel@rutgers.edu.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

|April 26, 2015

Summary

People automatically adjust their movements to others, a phenomenon studied through entrainment for continuous actions and co-representation for discrete actions. This study unified these concepts, revealing distinct mechanisms for each action type.

Keywords:

Co-representation Coordination Joint action Perception–action coupling

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Area of Science:

Social Psychology
Cognitive Neuroscience
Motor Control

Background:

Human actions are influenced by observing others, leading to movement entrainment in continuous tasks.
Automatic co-representation of a co-actor's task occurs in discrete action studies.
Understanding the interplay between entrainment and co-representation in a unified paradigm is lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how entrainment and co-representation operate within a single task.
To differentiate the mechanisms of social influence on discrete versus continuous movements.
To examine the role of visual information and spatial proximity in social motor tasks.

Main Methods:

Participants performed a hand-movement task alongside a confederate, varying movement type (discrete/continuous) and obstacle presence.
Visual information availability and actor proximity were manipulated.
Movement height was measured to assess social influence.

Main Results:

Participants' movement height increased when the confederate cleared an obstacle.
This effect for continuous movements depended on visual information (entrainment).
Discrete movements were modulated by the co-actor's task regardless of visual cues (co-representation), with no effect of spatial proximity.

Conclusions:

Entrainment and co-representation are distinct social influence mechanisms operating differently for continuous and discrete actions.
Visual cues are crucial for entrainment, while co-representation operates more automatically for discrete actions.
This research offers novel insights into the integration of social information in action execution.