title: Social constraints from an observer's perspective: Coordinated actions make an agent's position more predictable.
abstract: Action prediction, a crucial ability to support social activities, is sensitive to the individual goals of expected actions. This article reports a novel finding that the predictions of observed actions for a temporarily invisible agent are influenced, and even enhanced, when this agent has a joint/collective goal to implement coordinated actions with others (i.e., with coordination information). Specifically, we manipulated the coordination information by presenting two chasers and one common target to perform coordinated or individual chases, and subjects were required to predict the expected action (i.e., position) for one chaser after it became momentarily invisible. To control for possible low-level physical properties, we also established some intense paired controls for each type of chase, such as backward replay (Experiment 1), making the chasing target invisible (Experiment 2) and a direct manipulation of the goal-directedness of one chaser's movements to disrupt coordination information (Experiment 3). The results show that the prediction error for invisible chasers depends on whether the second chaser is coordinated with the first, and this effect vanishes when the chasers behaves with exactly the same motions, but without coordination information between them; furthermore, this influence results in enhancing the performance of action prediction. These findings extend the influential factors of action prediction to the level of observed coordination information, implying that the functional characteristic of mutual constraints of coordinated actions can be utilized by vision.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PR China; Department of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, PR China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yin
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PR China.
authors.forename: Haokui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PR China.
authors.forename: Xiaowei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.affiliation: School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PR China.
authors.forename: Junying
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PR China.
authors.forename: Rende
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Shui
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PR China. Electronic address: mwshen@zju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Mowei
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011897:Random Allocation; D012919:Social Behavior; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Action prediction; Coordinated chase; Coordination information; Individual chase; Social constraint