TY - JOUR

T1 - Interpersonal coordination in joint multiple object tracking

AU - Wahn, Basil

AU - König, Peter

AU - Kingstone, Alan

N1 - Funding Information: We acknowledge the support of a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft research fellowship (WA 4153/2-1) awarded to Basil Wahn, and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant awarded to Alan Kingstone.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - People often perform visual tasks together, for example, when looking for a misplaced key. When per-forming such tasks jointly, people coordinate their actions to divide the labor, for example, by looking for the misplaced key in different rooms. This way, they tend to perform better together than individu-ally—they attain a group benefit. A crucial factor determining whether (and to what extent) individuals attain a group benefit is the amount of information they receive about each other’s actions and perform-ance. We systematically varied, across 8 conditions, the information participant pairs received while jointly performing a visual task. We find that participants can attain a group benefit without receiving any information (and thus cannot coordinate their actions). However, actions are coordinated and the group benefit is enhanced if participants receive information about each other’s actions or performance. If both types of information are received, participants are faster in creating efficient labor divisions. To create divisions, participants used the screen center as a reference to divide the labor into a left and right side. When participants cannot coordinate actions, they exhibit a bias toward choosing the same side, but they forgo this bias once action coordination is possible, thereby boosting group performance.

AB - People often perform visual tasks together, for example, when looking for a misplaced key. When per-forming such tasks jointly, people coordinate their actions to divide the labor, for example, by looking for the misplaced key in different rooms. This way, they tend to perform better together than individu-ally—they attain a group benefit. A crucial factor determining whether (and to what extent) individuals attain a group benefit is the amount of information they receive about each other’s actions and perform-ance. We systematically varied, across 8 conditions, the information participant pairs received while jointly performing a visual task. We find that participants can attain a group benefit without receiving any information (and thus cannot coordinate their actions). However, actions are coordinated and the group benefit is enhanced if participants receive information about each other’s actions or performance. If both types of information are received, participants are faster in creating efficient labor divisions. To create divisions, participants used the screen center as a reference to divide the labor into a left and right side. When participants cannot coordinate actions, they exhibit a bias toward choosing the same side, but they forgo this bias once action coordination is possible, thereby boosting group performance.

KW - collaboration

KW - joint action

KW - multiple object tracking

KW - social cognition

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119198814&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1037/xhp0000935

DO - 10.1037/xhp0000935

M3 - Article

VL - 47

SP - 1166

EP - 1181

JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

SN - 0096-1523

IS - 9

ER -