Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 150, July 2014, Pages 85-93
Acta Psychologica

Is social inhibition of return due to action co-representation?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.04.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We test conditions when inhibition of return following the action of another is observed.

  • Inhibition depends upon the visual organization of the response environment.

  • Inhibition was unaffected by performing an identical action to another.

  • Inhibition was correlated with reaction time in an individual cueing task.

Abstract

When two individuals alternate reaching responses to visual targets presented on a shared workspace, one individual is slower to respond to targets occupying the same position as their partner’s previous response. This phenomenon is thought to be due to processes that inhibit the initiation of a movement to a location recently acted upon. However, two distinct forms of the inhibition account have been posited, one based on inhibition of an action, the other based on inhibition of an action and location. Furthermore, an additional recent explanation suggests the phenomenon is due to mechanisms that give rise to action congruency effects. Thus the three different theories differ in the degree to which action co-representation plays a role in the effect. The aim of the present work was to examine these competing accounts. Three experiments demonstrated that when identical actions are made, the effect is modulated by the configuration of the visual stimuli acted upon and the perceptual demands of the task. In addition, when the co-actors perform different actions to the same target, the effect is still observed. These findings support the hypothesis that this particular joint action phenomenon is generated via social cues that induce location-based inhibition of return rather than being due to shared motor co-representations.

Section snippets

General introduction

The past decade has seen increasing interest in the effect of interpersonal interaction on human cognition (Atmaca et al., 2011, Atmaca et al., 2008, Frischen et al., 2009, Schuch and Tipper, 2007, Tsai et al., 2011, Welsh et al., 2005). Such research has revealed novel insights concerning cognitive processes that have previously been studied with individuals, including visual attention and motor performance. Focusing upon the latter behaviors, recent interest in ‘joint action’ is in part due

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 tested the action co-representation accounts of social IOR by having participants make identical responses to one another. As set out above, no modulation of the basic effect should be observed under such conditions. Furthermore, whilst the action factor was kept constant we manipulated the visual factors known to influence IOR. Specifically, we examined whether the perceptual grouping of stimuli influenced the effect. It is well established that preattentive segmentation processes

Experiment 2

Experiment 1 showed that, contrary to the pure co-representation account of the phenomenon (Ondobaka et al., 2012), social IOR can be modulated by perceptual grouping processes. This occurred independently of the kind of action that participants performed. Nonetheless, it is still possible that the effect occurs as a result of shared perceptuo-motor representations, but these representations may be sensitive to action effects and stimuli, including the presence of objects (e.g., Johnson-Frey et

Experiment 3

In Experiments 1 and 2 the actions performed by participants were the same (i.e., same location or different location with respect to the previous response) with only the stimuli and/or task demands being different. In Experiment 3 this was reversed so that the stimuli were the same across all conditions but the actions performed were different. The congruency of observed and performed actions was manipulated such that on half of the trials the co-actors performed the same actions while on the

General discussion

A number of studies have now demonstrated that people are slower to respond to stimuli that have been previously responded to by another individual. Two related accounts have suggested that this ‘social IOR’ effect (Skarratt et al., 2010) is due to co-representing an observed action. The present work investigated whether any form of action co-representation is needed for social IOR to occur. In Experiment 1, participants alternated responses to target stimuli that differed in their perceptual

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      e.g., Welsh et al., 2005). IoR has been studied extensively in individuals acting alone (e.g., Posner & Cohen, 1984; for review see Klein, 2000 for a review), and more recently in social contexts (Atkinson, Simpson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2014; Doneva, Atkinson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2017; Skarratt, Cole, & Kingstone, 2010; Welsh et al., 2005; Welsh et al., 2007; Welsh, McDougall, & Weeks, 2009; for recent review see Cole, Skarratt, & Welsh, 2019). In the typical IoR paradigm, participants respond to targets presented at short (50–300 ms) or longer (300 + ms) intervals after the onset of non-predictive cue stimuli appearing at potential target locations.

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      Nonetheless future work could directly address and contrast these potential accounts. It should be noted that similar concerns regarding the mere presence of other visual stimuli have been raised by other researchers who have critically evaluated the accounts of other social phenomena like the joint Simon effect (Sebanz et al., 2003 vs. Dolk, Hommel, Prinz, & Liepelt, 2013) and the social inhibition of return effect (Welsh et al., 2005 vs. Atkinson, Simpson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2014). It is the case that an experimental design which can effectively distinguish between the mere effects of motion alone and movement of a limb remain elusive due to the overlapping nature of the characteristics of the two categories of stimuli and potential influence of top-down influences of belief in the animacy of the stimulus (see Chandler-Mather, Welsh, Sparks, & Kritikos, in press).

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      Note that in contrast to the co-representation account, according to this proposal, the response location is not important, just the motor action, and the mechanism that produces SIOR is facilitation of action (within an egocentric view), and it is not an inhibitory process. Alternatively, Cole and colleagues (Atkinson, Simpson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2014; Cole, Atkinson, D’Souza, Welsh, & Skarratt, 2012, 2018) claim that SIOR is IOR-like. That is the SIOR effect is not due to action representation process but may result from another mechanism: the attentional shift hypothesis, also being called the transient account (Atkinson, Millett, Doneva, Simpson, & Cole, 2018; Cole et al., 2012, 2019).

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