Beyond the dyad: Task co-representation of multiple co-actors

Cooperation is so deeply embedded in human psychology that we spontaneously track a partner’s task as well as our own when acting in a pair. This automatic ‘co-representation’ of a partner’s mental representation of their task has been argued to be key to the sophisticated social coordination we see in human adults.

However, our day-to-day encounters are not limited to one-to-one interactions. This will be the first study to investigate co-representation in groups, and whether there are limits on the number of people we can track at once. Further, we will test two competing theoretical accounts – the Co-representation Account and the Referential Coding Account - which make different predictions regarding tracking of group members who are physically closer or more distant from us. This will provide key information about the limits of our capacity to keep others in mind, and the psychological underpinnings of how we do so.