CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Dockendorff, Martin |
|---|---|
| Title | Sensorimotor communication in joint action: The role of distal goals |
| Summary | The present thesis aims at investigating a form of communication whereby people systematically modulate the kinematics of the movements they carry out as part of a joint action. These kinematic modulations have the effect of making the actor’s goals easier to predict, thereby facilitating interpersonal coordination. So far, this form of “sensorimotor communication” has mostly been studied in contexts in which co-actors modulate their actions to inform each other about their immediate, proximal goals (e.g., reaching for a cup). This thesis expands this focus by asking whether people can also rely on modulations that convey information about distal goals (e.g., reaching for a cup in order to pass it to a friend). Thus, while proximal goals are directly tied to the action leading to their achievement, distal goals are both spatially and temporally separated from the action by one or more intermediate actions, which together constitute an action sequence. The first study presented starts by looking at whether observers interpret communicative modulations of simple sliding movements to predict another person’s distal goal. The findings show that observers rely on modulations in movement velocity, enabling them to predict both proximal and distal goals. A second study further explores how observers make these predictions about distal goals, particularly when the communicative modulations occur in the first step of a two-step action sequence. The findings not only replicate those from the first study, but also indicate that observers can often make these predictions while only relying on modulations present in the first step of the sequence. The third study moves from the observation of communicative modulations to their production in an interactive context, and asks whether co-actors are able to solve a coordination problem by means of communicative modulations. The findings indicate that co-actors can rely on each other’s communicative modulations to solve this problem, leading them to establish a communication system based on these modulations. Overall, the findings presented in this thesis suggest that people can both interpret and actively inform others about goals that expand from the here-and-now towards the (predictable) future. |
| Supervisor | Knoblich, Günther; Vesper, Cordula |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/dockendorff_martin.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University