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

Robrecht P. R. D. van der Wel, En Fu

A large body of work has established an influence of other people's actions on our own actions. For example, actors entrain to the movements of others, in studies that typically employ continuous movements. Likewise, studies on co-representation have shown that people automatically co-represent a co-actor's task, in studies that typically employ discrete actions. Here we examined entrainment and co-representation within a single task paradigm. Participants sat next to a confederate while simultaneously moving their right hand back and forth between two targets. We crossed whether or not the participant and the confederate moved over an obstacle and manipulated whether participants generated discrete or continuous movement sequences, while varying the space between the actors and whether the actors could see each other's movements. Participants moved higher when the confederate cleared an obstacle than when he did not. For continuous movements, this effect depended on the availability of visual information, as would be expected on the basis of entrainment. In contrast, the co-actor's task modulated the height of discrete movements, regardless of the availability of visual information, which is consistent with co-representation. Space did not have an effect. These results provide new insights into the interplay between co-representation and entrainment for discrete- and continuous-action tasks.