Sociomotor action control

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Roland Pfister
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313711646

The first funding period of this project has resulted in a theoretical framework of how to conceptualize effect-based action control in social contexts, i.e., when one’s own actions aim at triggering responses from a social interaction partner. This framework of sociomotor action control is rooted in ideomotor theorizing and suggests that agents can represent their actions in terms of the behavioral changes that these actions evoke in the social environment. The experiments of the first funding period provided a thorough proof-of-principle for this hypothesis. Furthermore, the findings of the previous funding period yielded evidence for profound downstream consequences of this representation also for monitoring and perceiving action effects in the social environment. Based on these findings, the sociomotor framework highlights three critical variables for sociomotor actions as compared to actions that aim at affecting the inanimate environment. These variables include (1) a considerable degree of variability which is inherent in social responses, limiting action-effect contingency in social as compared to non-social contexts, (2) the involvement of specific input-output modalities such as facial expressions, and (3) the unique aspect of sociomotor and imitative compatibility for actions and their social action effects. The second funding period will build on our previous findings to provide a comprehensive test of all three aspects to enable a rich understanding of how sociomotor actions are represented and controlled. This goal translates to two work packages that follow complementary research strategies: Work package 1 employs social and non-social effects that are closely mapped in terms of perceptual and statistical features to study the pure impact of the construal of an event as social, whereas Work package 2 targets a potential role of the perceptual uniqueness of many social action effects. Both work packages come with specific paradigms and measures that are tailored to the questions at hand; specifically: post-oddball slowing and observed error-related negativity in Work package 1 as compared to facial electromyography in Work package 2. Together with the findings of the first funding period, these two work packages will provide a comprehensive understanding of the peculiarities of actions that aim at changing the behavior of social interaction partners as viewed from the perspective of sociomotor action control.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants