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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 29, 2025

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task

Published on: June 1, 2015

Me or we? Action-outcome learning in synchronous joint action.

Maximilian Marschner¹, David Dignath², Günther Knoblich¹

¹Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.

|April 7, 2024

Summary

People learn from joint actions by focusing on group outcomes, not individual actions. Unexpectedly, learning was better when test actions were incompatible with previous joint actions.

Keywords:

Action representations Action-outcome learning Ideomotor theory Joint action Shared goals

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Social Psychology

Background:

Goal-directed behavior relies on understanding action-outcome relationships.
Joint actions involve synchronized contributions toward shared environmental outcomes.
Existing research often focuses on individual action-outcome learning.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how individuals acquire representations of joint actions.
To determine if learning links outcomes to individual or group-level action features.
To explore the mechanisms underlying joint action-outcome learning.

Main Methods:

Pairs of participants learned to produce musical chords through synchronized key presses.
A test phase assessed performance with manipulated stimulus-response mappings (compatible/incompatible).
Individual and joint action-outcome mappings from the learning phase were compared.

Main Results:

Joint action compatibility, not individual compatibility, influenced test phase performance.
Contrary to predictions, jointly incompatible mappings led to improved performance.
Group-level learning experience appeared to modulate the encoding of task instructions.

Conclusions:

Joint action learning is supported by representations encoding actions at a group level.
This suggests dedicated mental mechanisms for processing joint actions.
Findings challenge associative accounts and highlight the role of group experience in learning.