This paper recommends extensive, human-like preparation for joint action. Given the substantive differences in the ways that people and robots perceive and reason, it argues that this knowledge be shared explicitly. Moreover, it assigns responsibilities to each agent based on their strengths and weaknesses. The approach detailed here deliberately explores to acquire knowledge about the specific...

Joint action, critical to human social interaction and communication, has garnered increasing scholarly attention in many areas of inquiry, yet its development remains little explored. This paper reviews research on the growth of joint action over the first 2 years of life to show how children become progressively more able to engage deliberately, autonomously, and flexibly in joint action with...

How do we map joint actions we participate in onto joint actions we observe others performing, such as when a couple dancing tango observes another couple dancing tango? We investigated this question using a task in which participants were instructed to perform individual or joint movements in synchrony with individual or joint movements observed on a computer screen. The observed movements sta...

Humans are experts in cooperating with each other when trying to accomplish tasks they cannot achieve alone. Recent studies of joint action have shown that when performing tasks together people strongly rely on the neurocognitive mechanisms that they also use when performing actions individually, that is, they predict the consequences of their co-actor's behavior through internal action simulat...

Joint action is central to countless aspects of human life. Here I examine the roots of joint action in infancy. First, I provide evidence that-contrary to popular belief-1-year-old infants do have the social-cognitive prerequisites needed to participate in joint action, even in a relatively strict sense: they can read others' goals and intentions, they have some basic understanding of common k...

We investigated whether people take into account an interaction partner's attentional focus and whether they represent in advance their partner's part of the task when planning to engage in a synchronous joint action. The experiment involved two participants planning and performing joint actions (i.e., synchronously lifting and clinking glasses), unimanual individual actions (i.e., lifting and ...

What kinds of processes and representations make joint action possible? In this paper, we suggest a minimal architecture for joint action that focuses on representations, action monitoring and action prediction processes, as well as ways of simplifying coordination. The architecture spells out minimal requirements for an individual agent to engage in a joint action. We discuss existing evidence...