Joint Action: Current Perspectives

Abstract

In recent years researchers have begun to investigate how the perceptual, motor and cognitive activities of two or more individuals become organized into coordinated action. In the first part of this introduction we identify three common threads among the ten papers of this special issue that exemplify this new line of research. First, all of the papers are grounded in the experimental study of online interactions between two or more individuals. Second, albeit at different levels of analysis, the contributions focus on the mechanisms supporting joint action. Third, many of the papers investigate empirically the pre-requisites for the highly sophisticated forms of joint action that are typical of humans. In the second part of the introduction, we summarize each of the papers, highlighting more specific connections among them. © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.