How does this picture represent the shift taken in cognitive research over the past 15 years? In the foreground we see a young man walking on his own. Think of him as representing the earlier approach taken to investigate how humans process information. Typically, the participant is seated in front of a computer and instructed to complete a task. The task might test cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, memory, or executive function. There is undoubtedly value in understanding behaviour at the individual level. After all, we perform many acts for ourselves on a day-to-day basis. Consider your morning routine. Brushing your teeth. Getting dressed. Eating your breakfast. But what if someone is sitting at the breakfast table with you. They ask you to pass them the carton of milk. We now find ourselves acting with another person.

 

Looking again at the picture, in the background, we see two hands. These two hands belong to two separate individuals. This represents the more recent approach taken in cognitive research. Over the past 15 years, researchers are recognizing that humans are a social species. Thus, it seems a logical step to start exploring how social interactions modulate motor behaviour. So we must take in the whole picture rather than focusing on parts of it. Not only should we examine an individual's behaviour, but let’s also consider how that individual's behaviour changes in a social setting. This leads us to the study of joint action.

 

The long-term goal of this line of research is to expand our understanding of the underlying cognitive and neural processes that support action prediction, action planning, and action monitoring in joint action. The short-term goals we have are: 1) to identify whether desire is a necessary or sufficient factor to activate the co-representation system, 2) to examine how the degree of group cohesion modulates the joint Simon effect, and 3) to further examine mu rhythm suppression (an index of mirror neuron activation) during action observation and joint action performance.