Non-verbal social interaction between humans requires accurate understanding of the others' actions. The cognitivist approach suggests that successful interaction depends on the creation of a shared representation of the task, where the pairing of perceptive and motor systems of partners allows inclusion of the other's goal into the overarching representation. Activity of the Mirror Neurons Sys...

Humans are frequently confronted with goal-directed tasks that can not be accomplished alone, or that benefit from co-operation with other agents. The relatively new field of social cognitive neuroscience seeks to characterize functional neuroanatomical systems either specifically or preferentially engaged during such joint-action tasks. Based on neuroimaging experiments conducted on critical c...

The concept of hierarchical motor control has been viewed as a means of progressively decreasing the number of variables manipulated by each higher control level. We tested the hypothesis that turning an individual bimanual force-production task into a joint (two-participant) force-production task would lead to positive correlation between forces produced by the two hands of the individual part...

It has been postulated that when people engage in joint actions they form internal representations not only of their part of the joint task but of their co-actors' parts of the task as well. However, empirical evidence for this claim is scarce. By means of high-density electroencephalography, this study investigated whether one represents and simulates the action of an interaction partner when ...

The alleged opposition between dialogue games and plans and goals as approaches to the study of natural language dialogue is false; the two approaches are complementary. On the one hand, plans and goals may function as a semantics to interaction patterns studied as dialogue games. On the other hand, dialogue games are ‘compiled-out’ recipes for joint action. This claim is illustrated by a dialo...

By extracting spatial and temporal characteristics in one network, the two-stream ConvNets can achieve the state-ofthe-art performance in action recognition. However, such a framework typically suffers from the separately processing of spatial and temporal information between the two standalone streams and is hard to capture long-term temporal dependence of an action. More importantly, it is in...

Participation in interpersonal competitions, such as fencing or Japanese martial arts, requires players to make instantaneous decisions and execute appropriate motor behaviors in response to various situations. Such actions can be understood as complex phenomena emerging from simple principles. We examined the intentional switching dynamics associated with continuous movement during interperson...

This thesis investigates the design of adaptive utility maximizing software agents for competitive multi-agent settings. The focus is on evaluating the theoretical and empirical performance of Joint Action Learners (JALs) in settings modeled as stochastic games. JALs extend the well-studied Q-learning algorithm. A previously introduced JAL optimizes with respect to stationary or convergent oppo...

Recent studies have shown that spatial and feature-based attention can contribute to inducing a spatial compatibility effect in both the standard Simon task and the joint Simon task. Less work generally has been devoted to investigating how attention modulates spatial compatibility effects. In the present study, we aimed to explore whether indirectly manipulating the degree of attention necessa...