The human brain is highly sensitive to social information and so is our language production system: people adjust not just what they say but also how they say it in response to the social context. For instance, we are sensitive to the presence of others, and our interactional expectations and goals affect how we individually choose to talk about and refer to things. This thesis is an investigation of the social factors that might lead speakers to adapt linguistically to others. The question of linguistic adaptation is conceived and addressed at two levels: as lexical convergence (i.e., interlocutors coordinating their lexical choices with each other), and as spatial perspective taking in language use (i.e., speakers abandoning their self perspective in favour of another's when verbally locating objects in space). What motivated my research was two-fold. First, I aimed to contribute to the understanding of the interplay between the automatic cognitive accounts and the strategic social accounts of linguistic convergence. At the same time, I wanted to explore new analytical tools for the investigation of interpersonal coordination in conversation (cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA)). Second, there are conflicting explanations as to why people often abandon their self spatial perspective when another person is present in the environment. I aimed to clarify this by bringing together insights from different research fields: spatial language production, spatial cognition, joint attention and joint action. A first set of experiments investigated the effects of speakers' deceptive goals on lexical convergence. Given the extensive evidence that one interlocutor's choices of words shapes another's during collaborative interaction, would we still observe this coordination of linguistic behaviour under conditions of no coordination of intents? In two novel interactive priming paradigms, half of the participants deceived their naïve partner in a detective game (Experiment 1) or a picture naming/matching task (Experiment 2-3) in order to jeopardise their partner's performance in resolving the crime or in a related memory task. Crucially, participants were primed by their partner with suitable-yet-unusual names for objects. I did not find any consistent evidence that deceiving led to a different degree of lexical convergence between deceivers and deceived than between truthful interlocutors. I then explored possibilities and challenges of the use of cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) (a new analytical tool borrowed from dynamical systems) for the study of lexical convergence in conversation. I applied CRQA in Experiment 4, where I focused on the strategic social accounts of linguistic convergence and investigated whether speakers' tendency to match their interlocutors' lexical choices depended on the social impression that they formed of each other in a previous interaction, and whether this tendency was further modulated by the interactional goal. I developed a novel two-stage paradigm: pairs of participants first experienced a collectivist or an individualistic co-player in an economic decision game (in reality, a pre-set computer programme) and then engaged in a discussion of a survival scenario (this time with the real other) divided in an open-ended vs. joint-goal driven part. I found no evidence that the social impression of their interlocutor affected speakers' degree of lexical convergence. Greater convergence was observed in the joint-goal dialogues, replicating previous findings at syntactic level. Experiments 5-7 left the interactive framework of the previous two sets of experiments and explored spatial perspective taking in a non-interactive language task. I investigated why the presence of a person in the environment can induce speakers to abandon their self perspective to locate objects: Do speakers adapt their spatial descriptions to the vantage point of the person out of intentionality-mediated simulation or of general attention-orienting mechanisms? In an online paradigm, participants located objects in photographs that sometimes contained a person or a plant in various positions with respect to the to-be-located object. Findings were consistent with the simulated intentional accounts and linked non-self spatial perspective in language to the apprehension of another person’s visual affordance. Experiments 8-9 investigated the role of shared experience on perspective taking in spatial language. Prior to any communicative and interactional demand, do speakers adapt their spatial descriptions to the presumed perspective of someone who is attending to the same environment at the same time as them? And is this tendency further affected by the number of co-attendees? I expanded the previous online paradigm and induced participants into thinking that someone else was doing the task at the same time as them. I found that shared experience reinforced self perspective (via shared perspective) rather than reinforcing non-self perspective (via unshared perspective). I did not find any crowd effect.

This study mainly focuses on the emergence and utilization of communication systems in the context of joint action where collective cognitive activity is required. Dyads are given an instant messaging medium of communication where only a limited number of characters and symbols can be used for information exchange in order to collaborate on common tasks of finding objects, in a network-based interactive virtual environment (ActiveWorlds), a 3D, multi-agent, virtual reality platform. The restrictions on communication and the requirement of collaboration facilitated the creation of a lexical inventory and a minimalistic communication system, a compressed version of dyads&rsquo / shared Natural Languages (NLs). Across eight experimental sessions, two manipulations are made in order to study their effects on parameters on 4 levels of analysis: (1) Quantitative, (2) Syntactic Complexity, (3) Lexical Category and (4) Speech Act Category. The two interventions are (1) increasing the number of targets from one to two after the first three experiments, and (2) administering a two months break between the 6th and 7th-8th experiments. Increased number of target objects influenced the quantitative parameters that are related to the amount of communication as well as the use scores of lexical, syntactic, and speech act categories / however, the use ratios of several parameters were resilient under this manipulation and rather showed different trends of change characterizing the development of the system towards a more mature state in accordance with the demands of the task structure. The opposing trends of increasing use ratio of Assertive and decreasing use ratio of Directive Speech Acts and decreasing use ratios of the Type/Token Number of Lexical Items in a session, the Number of New Lexical Items in a session and increasing ratio of Turn Success are also characteristics of this maturation. The break administered between the 6th and 7th experimental session did not cause any decay in the acquired skills of using the emerged communication system. The previously negotiated strategies and acquired skills of communication as well as the trends of the use ratios of parameters were resilient. The qualitative analysis of the developing communication system revealed several strategies, including compression of NL words into new lexical items, exploiting the redundancy of characters of written words, and iconicity and indexicality of given symbols. The main drivers of the development of the new communication system appeared to be the processes of integration of communicative with behavioral action. The cognitive capacities enabling this integration and the comprehension of the utterances in the new system is explained by the Cognitive and Communicative Principles of Relevance that are attributed to a comprehension sub-module of a mind-reading module of the human cognitive system.

The perception of an action and its production are inextricably linked. This entails that, during development, the skills that children are able to perform influence their perception of others\\\' actions. The present dissertation aimed to investigate the role of children’s experience on the perception of actions in three distinctive areas: manual actions performed by one person (individual action), manual actions performed by two people (joint action), and a conversation between two people. In order to succeed in each of the three areas, children have to acquire new skills and do so successively during their first three years of life. The methodological approach of this work was to measure the gaze behaviour of children, aged 6 months to 3 years, and adults during the observation of visually presented actions, which provided information on whether they were able to anticipate action goals. The findings obtained generally show an influence of experience on the anticipation of action goals in each of the three areas. First, a link between action and perception is not established as soon as an action emerges. There is at least some experience necessary for its development. Second, infants with no coordinated joint-action skills themselves anticipate the goals of joint action less well than those of individual action. Adults with considerable joint-action skills anticipate both equally well. And third, the course of a conversation can only be reliably anticipated by children aged 3 years and adults, whereas younger children shift their gaze between speakers randomly. Furthermore, only at the age of 3 years, did intonation support children’s anticipation of conversations.

Dans une tâche virtuelle d'interception, nous nous sommes intéressés à la façon dont deux individus, pouvant déplacer chacun une raquette le long d'un axe d'interception commun, coordonnaient leurs actions dans le but d'intercepter une balle qui s'approchait. En tant que contact entre les raquettes rendrait interception impossible, la tâche de double-pong demandait aux participants de décider à chaque essai qui allait être celui à réaliser l'interception. Sans possibilités pour communication orale, seules les informations visuelles sur l’écran pouvaient être utilisées lors processus décisionnel. A travers trois expériences, en manipulant les positions initiales des raquettes et les différences individuelles de niveaux au sein des équipes, nous avons examiné comment ces équipes organisaient leur comportement d'interception. Les résultats ont révélé que toutes les équipes établissaient spontanément une division du travail caractérisée par des domaines d'interception individuels séparés par des frontières floues. Bien que les positions des limites puissent varier d'une équipe à l'autre, celles-ci ont été systématiquement affectées par les positions initiales des raquettes. Les différences de niveaux ne semblaient pas avoir un tel effet. Une définition basée sur l'action de l'opportunité selon laquelle, à chaque instant, chaque joueur se déplace vers la future position d'interception, a permis de prédire qui finirait par intercepter la balle. Dans l'ensemble, nos études suggèrent que la prise de décision de qui va intercepter la balle émerge d'un couplage informationnel entre les membres de l'équipe, considérant que la division de l'espace est un résultat émergent. / We studied the way two individuals coordinate their actions in order to intercept an approaching ball by moving individually-controlled paddles along a common interception-axis in a video game-like doubles interception task. With contact between paddles leading to their immediate disintegration, the doubles-pong task required team members to decide on each trial who would be the one to actualize the interception. Because overt communication was precluded, these decisions were informed exclusively by vision of the on-screen movements of paddles and ball. In three experiments, manipulating initial conditions (i.e., initial paddle positions) and individual skill differences within teams, we examined how teams organized their joint interception behavior. Results revealed that all teams spontaneously demonstrated a division of labor, characterized by individual interception domains separated by fuzzy (i.e., overlapping) boundaries. While boundary locations could vary over teams within a given experimental condition, they were nevertheless systematically affected for each team by initial paddle positions. Skill differences between individual team members did not appear to have such an effect. An action-based definition of the (time-evolving) expediency with which each player moved towards the future interception position allowed predicting which of the two players would end up intercepting the ball and which would abandon the interception attempt. Overall, our studies suggest that the decision of who will intercept the ball emerges from an informational coupling between team members, with the division of space being an emergent result.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2017-05-22T14:55:51Z No. of bitstreams: 1 kriciahelenabarreto.pdf: 999212 bytes, checksum: 40cfbe9783d1f6e43607cb07c8402efe (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2017-05-22T17:38:32Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 kriciahelenabarreto.pdf: 999212 bytes, checksum: 40cfbe9783d1f6e43607cb07c8402efe (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-22T17:38:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 kriciahelenabarreto.pdf: 999212 bytes, checksum: 40cfbe9783d1f6e43607cb07c8402efe (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / FAPEMIG - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais / O presente trabalho busca investigar como o envolvimento, a solidariedade e o vínculo entre os participantes de um dado evento comunicativo são sustentados através do uso do humor na interação. À luz de uma perspectiva interacional da linguagem (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2001; Silveira, 2007), a partir da qual as expressões linguísticas são entendidas como coconstruídas pelos interlocutores, emergentes do uso, situadas, sensíveis ao contexto e adaptáveis às exigências interacionais (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992), analisou-se uma entrevista realizada no talk show “Programa do Jô”, comandado pelo humorista e apresentador Jô Soares, exibido pela Rede Globo. A produção do discurso humorístico foi entendida como uma co-construção conjunta (Clark, 1996) realizada de forma coordenada pelos interlocutores, tomando como base o modelo de geração do humor desenvolvido por Beeman (2000). Através das estratégias de envolvimento propostas por Tannen (1989), verificou-se que a natureza co-constitutiva do humor o faz funcionar, por si só, como uma macroestratégia de envolvimento, ajudando a estabelecer e desenvolver as relações interpessoais entre os participantes de uma dada interação, considerando-se as metas comunicativas de todos os seus membros. / The present work aims to investigate how involvement, solidarity and connection among participants of a given communicative encounter are sustained through the interactive use of humor. Building upon an interactional view of language (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2001; Silveira, 2007) through which linguistic expressions are seen as co-constructed by interactants, emergent from use, situated, context-bound and adaptable to interactional demands (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992), we analyzed an interview which took place in a Brazilian talk show called “Programa do Jô”, hosted by the comedian and presenter Jô Soares, aired by Rede Globo. Building upon Beeman‟s (2000) model of humor production, the production of humorous discourse was understood here as a joint co-construction (Clark, 1996) developed in coordination by interactants. Through the involvement strategies proposed by Tannen (1989), it was found that the co-constitutive nature of humor enables it to work as a macro-strategy for involvement, helping establish and develop interpersonal relations among participants of a given interaction, taking into account the communicative aims of all of its members.

The recent leaps in virtual reality (VR) technology have unleashed revolutionary potential for applications in a wide variety of areas, including education, training, psychological-therapy, etc. As part of the effort on understanding how users interact with VR, I focused on studying full-body joint action using a road crossing task which involves perception, decision-making, action, and joint action. I have been heavily involved in the design, implementation, and construction of two large-screen, room-like stereoscopic virtual environment (VE) simulators. Using this system, I developed a three-part research plan with a series of studies to examine how people engage in full-body joint-action with a partner under three scenarios: 1. two people who are physically present in a co-occupied virtual environment; 2. one person who shares a virtual environment with a computer-generated agent (CG agent); 3. two people who share the same virtual environment remotely in physically separate places where each person is motion tracked and presented in the environment as a graphic avatar. The behaviors of participants were recorded and processed through a customized pipeline that captures important performance metrics, such as how participants pick crossable gaps and time their movements. The VE system, user study designs, and findings are introduced in this dissertation.

The joint Simon task is a cognitive reaction time task used to assess shared representations and self-other integration when performing a collaborative task with a partner. However, it is unclear if the underlying mechanisms are specific to representing spatial information or are more general. The objective of the current study was to assess a nonspatial joint Simon compatibility effect. Participants completed the joint Simon task with a partner while seated side-by-side, face-to-face, back-to-back, or with their partner not in the room. They completed the task three times, once with horizontal stimuli (left/right of center), once with vertical stimuli (above/below center), and once with central stimuli (at center). In the central task, compatibility was in color where participant responses (assigned red or green response buttons and gloves) were compatible or incompatible to the stimuli (colored red or green). Results showed no significant compatibility effect for any task in any response orientation condition, indicating no evidence of a nonspatial compatibility effect. Results even failed to replicate the standard joint Simon effect of a spatial compatibility effect in the horizontal task when seated side-by-side. However, exploratory analyses showed a significant nonspatial color compatibility effect in the central task for those assigned green in the side-by-side condition only, indicating that the presence of color in the participants' response (i.e., colored responses button and gloves) may have interfered with representing spatial information. This finding has implications for both theory and application of the joint Simon task, indicating it is sensitive to small changes, occurs for features besides location, and may be most effective when seated side-by-side. Additionally, the broader implications for the cognitive and practical study of joint action show the importance of how different features influence shared representations, how different colors are perceived and represented, and how different response orientations influence performance.

This doctoral dissertation proposes a fuller, more inclusive account of practice than that which dominates current discourse on organizations, which typically turns upon occupations, professions and jobs as manifestations of publicly recognized roles or functions within organized activity, established as a function of prescribed divisions of labour and the application of skills and techniques, and assumes that people interact in the ways that their assigned roles and functions are planned to work as interrelated parts of a shared task. The approach here is a reflexive process akin to what Lévi-Strauss characterizes as ‘bricolage’, using ready-to-hand materials linking narrative, literature and argument, adding pieces iteratively in an open-ended building process over the course of the dissertation. The reflexive process entails (a) the act of writing narratives (derived from the author’s own management experiences in the private, public and voluntary sectors) so as to produce insights and themes of interest in relation to the broader theme of practice; and (b) readings of certain key works of the literature on organizations and organized activity (including Sarbin and Allen, Denzin, Wiley, Collins, Elias, Mead, Habermas, Stacey and Mintzberg) so as to expose practice-related themes relevant to the construction of an alternative account which proposes the following: (1) Practice in organizations is communicative in nature and entails the enactment of roles. Conventionally, enactment is taken to mean that the role-incumbent meets expectations set by decision-makers and premised on conformity to preset structures within a metaphorical organizational space. In an alternative account of practice, however, enactment can be more accurately framed as a dialectical process of co-emergence of role and organization by virtue of the local social interaction of the persons involved. (2) In active life the mutually-exclusive emergent process and the spatial organizational metaphor necessarily co-exist. Reframing role enactment opens a path to new understanding, such that role enactment and practice thus become problematized in that practitioners can be seen as holding a paradoxical position of some considerable relevance to practice. Today’s predominantly objectivist management thinking primarily stresses accountability for the communicative interaction of others within the organizational space. The reflexive processual approach contests the adequacy and exclusivity of this position, because managing as an emergent practice is more comprehensively communicative and open-ended. (3) The co-presence of both the objectivist and emergent accounts thus requires the manager paradoxically to hold both these views of role and organization at the same time in his or her experiences of managing. As paradox cannot be resolved, it is instead taken up by the manager-practitioner by virtue of the reflexivity central to all processes of communicative interaction. (4) It follows that acknowledging processes of enactment and the centrality of reflexivity in the practice of managing and bringing that to the attention of managers and management educators will enhance how managing sophisticated cooperation is understood and carried out.

Cette thèse étudie, dans le cadre de la théorie de l’action conjointe, l’évolution de l’épistémologie pratique d’un enseignant d’EPS non spécialiste en danse, en lien avec des stages de formation continue qu’il a suivis pendant trois ans. L’analyse longitudinale effectuée sur une durée de six ans a été menée selon une approche multidimensionnelle de données d’observation de séances. Un premier niveau s’intéresse au système de didactique-formation mis en œuvre dans chacun des trois stages. Un deuxième étudie les pratiques d’enseignement de la danse en classes de sixième selon deux échelles d’analyse. La première, macro-didactique, s’attache à décrire les pratiques et les savoirs mobilisés par l’enseignant au fil des années et à faire émerger des "jeux d’apprentissage" en lien avec les œuvres chorégraphiques. La deuxième échelle, micro-didactique, étudie plus spécifiquement, à partir de quatre jeux d’apprentissage, l’évolution du rapport aux œuvres chorégraphiques de ce professeur. Les résultats montrent que les savoirs mis à l’étude et les expériences réalisées pendant les stages de formation sont (re)convoqués et remaniés de façon singulière par l’enseignant au cours de l’action conjointe avec les élèves, contribuant à faire évoluer son épistémologie pratique. / This doctoral thesis studies within the joint action theory in didactics the evolution of a teacher’s practical epistemology that has no expertise in dance. The analysis is in relation with teacher continuing professional learning sessions he followed during three years. A longitudinal six years analysis was conducted using a multi-dimensional approach of observational data lessons. At a first step the didactical system of professional learning sessions was studied. The second step concerns the observation of teacher’s practice in a middle school during physical education classes (students: 11 to 12 years). Two scales were used: the first macro-didactic scale describes the practices and the knowledge enacted by the teacher all over the years and contributes to define “learning games” which are in relation with choreographic artworks. The second micro-didactic scale examines in details the teacher’s relationships to choreographic artworks during four learning games. The findings show that the knowledge to be taught and learned as proposed during the professional learning sessions is remodeled and mobilized in singular ways during the joint action with students. All of this contributing to teacher’s practical epistemology moves.

In der Hyperscanning-Literatur finden sich wiederholt Befunde, die darauf hinweisen, dass synchronisierte Muster zwischen Gehirnen (inter-brain-Synchronisation) interpersonale Handlungskoordination charakterisieren. Die funktionale Bedeutung dieser Muster wird in der Literatur kontrovers diskutiert. Mit einer Serie empirischer Studien untersucht diese Dissertation den Einfluss einzelner kognitiver Mechanismen auf die inter-brain-Synchronisation. Studie I untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen Aufmerksamkeit und inter-brain-Synchronisation im Kontext einer visuellen Suchaufgabe. Studie II vergleicht, mittels eines neu entwickelten experimentellen Paradigmas, bei konstanter Dynamik der motorischen Handlungen zweier Probanden reziproke und parallele interpersonale Handlungskoordination. Studie III dient der Etablierung der schwachen Wechselstromtechnologie in unserem Labor. In Studie IV werden mittels dieser Technik zwei miteinander trommelnde Probanden auf ‚die gleiche Wellenlänge‘ gebracht um einen möglichen kausalen Zusammenhangs zwischen inter-brain-Synchronisation und interpersonaler Verhaltenssynchronisation zu testen. In der übergreifenden Diskussion der Befunde meiner Studien zeige ich eine mögliche Ursache für die bisherige Unklarheit der funktionalen Rolle von inter-brain-Synchronisation auf: der Mangel einer Definition sozialer Interaktion in der Hyperscanning-Literatur. Basierend auf Theorien der interper¬sonalen Handlungskoordination führe ich eine Arbeitsdefinition sozialer Interaktion und der ihr zugrunde liegenden kognitiven Prozesse ein: Mechanismen der Aufmerksamkeit, der Handlungsvorhersage und der Handlungsreaktion. Ich schließe diese Dissertation mit der Überlegung, dass inter-brain-Synchronisation Übereinstimmungen der Handlungen und der mentalen Handlungsmodelle mehrerer Individuen reflektiert, und zwar unabhängig davon, ob diese Übereinstimmungen von gemeinsamem Handeln begleitet werden oder nicht. / The literature on hyperscanning gives ample evidence that inter-brain synchronized patterns emerge during social interaction. However, it remains under debate to what extent synchronized patterns between brains serve a mechanistic function in social interaction. In this dissertation, I try to disentangle the contribution of cognitive mechanisms on inter-brain synchronized patterns with a series of empirical studies. Study I investigates the influence of modified attention on inter-brain phase synchronization during an enumeration visual search paradigm. Study II uses a novel paradigm of interpersonal action coordination. It compares reciprocal real-time coordination to parallel coordination with a common driver, while keeping behavioral dynamics comparable across conditions. Study III builds methodological expertise in transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). In Study IV, the tACS setup is extended to the simultaneous phase-locked stimulation of multiple individuals (hyper-tACS). This directly tests a potential relation between inter-brain synchronization and interpersonal synchronization performance during dyadic drumming by attempting to experimentally tune two participants’ brains more or less ‚on the same wavelength‘ using the tACS device. In discussing the results of this series of empirical studies, I suggest that the lack of a clear definition of social interaction may be at the origin of controversies about the functional role of inter-brain synchronization patterns. Building on a conceptual framework of interpersonal action coordination, I propose a working definition of social interaction and its cognitive core processes. I suggest to stop trying to disentangle inherent aspects of social interaction, such as synchronized actions, from ‚true social interaction‘ and instead to focus on the relative influence of attentive, predictive and, reactive mechanisms on inter-brain synchronization and associated behavioral dynamics.