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Sociomotor action control

Subject Area General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term from 2016 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313711646
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

Contemporary theories of human action control typically focus on individual agents and their interactions with their physical environment. What these theories typically do not cover is the social dimension of human action. This dimension is highly relevant for everyday behavior, but has received only limited attention from empirical or theoretical work. This is the gap that the project Sociomotor action control has addressed. Our work is grounded in a theoretical framework that explicitly covers social actions, the framework of sociomotor action control. At the core of this framework are actions that aim at affecting the behavior of a social interaction partner. Their responses can, therefore, be construed as direct action effects. Building on ideomotor approaches to human action, the framework of sociomotor action control posits that actions can become represented and controlled in terms of their social effects. It further highlights three variables that are specific for the social context: (1) considerable variability of action-effect contingencies relative to non-social effects, (2) specific input-output modalities such as facial actions and corresponding facial expressions, (3) a unique impact of sociomotor and imitative compatibility between actions and their social effects. The two funding phases allowed us to gather substantial evidence in favor of the framework of sociomotor action control. This is particularly true for the framework’s central claim that predictable responses of social interaction partners would become represented in functional action-effect associations. Interestingly, however, these associations draw mainly on non-social properties such as spatio-temporal features of a partner action. Potential social moderators such as group affiliation did not interact with these basic mechanisms of human action control. Uniquely social impacts emerged, however, with regard to monitoring processes. That is, behavioral as well as electrophysiological markers of action-effect monitoring showed pronounced differences between social and non-social action effects. Together these findings highlight that cognitive action representations are remarkably tailored to the social nature of human behavior.

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