Playing for Us: The Influence of Joint Action on Planning in Three-year-olds

Playing for Us: The Influence of Joint Action on Planning in Three-year-olds Sarah A. Gerson (s.gerson@donders.ru.nl) Sabine Hunnius (s.hunnius@donders.ru.nl) Harold Bekkering (h.bekkering@donders.ru.nl) Radboud University Nijmegen Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Montessorilaan 3 Nijmegen, 6500HE, The Netherlands Abstract Learning to plan sequences of actions and appropriately adapt our actions during interactions with others are both critical skills upon which much of human society is built. We know that children’s joint action and planning skills are both undergoing development during the preschool years, but not much is known about how the joint action context influences young children’s planning. In this study, we examined the effect of playing alone or with a joint partner on sequence planning during a problem-solving game in three-year-old children. We found that children were better at planning ahead in the individual than the joint condition of the game despite the joint condition requiring fewer actions on the part of the child. In contrast, children were equally good at problem-solving (i.e., correcting an error) in both conditions. The possible reasons for this difference and directions of future research are discussed. Keywords: joint action; planning; cognitive development Working together with others is important across a variety of everyday tasks, ranging from simple, mundane actions to considerably complex plans and action sequences. When we interact with a partner in a work or athletic setting, the complexity of coordinating our actions with another’s is quite clear. In contrast, when we perform simple everyday actions such as passing a cup of milk to another person, we likely do this with ease and do not dwell on the coordination with the other or the expectations about the others’ action. When acting with another person, planning our own actions requires coordinating our actions with another individual, whether this coordination is conscious and complex or seemingly automatic. Planning our actions when interacting with another is a task that spans many domains and is critical for much of cognitive and social development. Examining the developmental emergence of this skill can shed light on how and when the factors necessary to working with others are integrated. When performing a task by ourselves, we can create a plan internally and carry out the task without interruption. When jointly acting with another, however, we need to take the other person’s actions into account. According to Sebanz and Knoblich (2009), intentional coordination of actions with another requires representing both one’s own and one’s partner’s roles in the task. They suggest that adults engaged in joint actions predict a partner’s actions in a joint action task by representing the action of a partner and one’s own actions in a functionally equivalent way. In fact, incorporating a partner’s task “affects one’s own action planning and performance even when there is no need to take the other’s part into account at all” (p. 357). One mechanism thought to underlie the representation and prediction of another’s actions is simulation (Gallese & Goldman, 1998). That is, when one perceives someone else acting in a goal-directed manner, one’s own motor system is activated as if one was performing the action oneself (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Simulating a partner’s action from a first-person perspective can then be used to make predictions about upcoming events (Wilson & Knoblich, 2005). Additionally, the motor system is preferentially activated for predictions of others’ actions within a joint action context (Kourtis, Sebanz, & Knoblich, 2010). What is simulated and how perceptual information available can be transferred into a motor simulation is still a topic of vivid discussion (see for example Uithol et al., The necessity of incorporating another agent’s actions in a similar way to one’s own actions when interacting with a joint partner suggests that the ability to represent other agents’ actions in a similar way to one’s own would be a developmental prerequisite for appropriately planning one’s actions within a joint context. One piece of behavioral evidence that young children seem to represent others’ actions in a similar way to their own actions is that infants’ ability to produce particular actions is directly related to their perception, prediction, and motor activation when viewing others perform the same actions (e.g., Cannon et al., 2012; Gerson & Woodward, in press, van Elk et al., 2008). Meyer and colleagues (2011) found neural evidence that this is especially so in joint action contexts. Greater activation in the motor system was found in three-year-old children watching a joint action partner than when these same children watched someone with whom they were not collaborating. Further, variation in performance on the joint game and in the amount of motor activation observed when the child watched the partner act were related, suggesting that the child’s motor system activation was likely related to the integration of their partner’s and their own actions. In addition to a representation of others’ actions, the incorporation of others’ actions into one’s own planning is critical to acting appropriately in joint contexts. In order to address how the presence of others affects planning, research must examine differences in planning one’s own actions during individual and joint tasks. A recent study