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Implicit mentalizing involves the automatic awareness of others' perspectives, but its domain-specificity is debated. The Joint Simon task demonstrates implicit mentalizing as a Joint Simon effect (JSE), proposed to stem from spontaneous action co-representation of a social partner's frame of reference in the Joint (but not Individual) task. However, evidence also shows that any sufficiently salient entity (not necessarily social) can induce the JSE. Here, we investigated the content of co-representation through a novel Joint Simon task where participants viewed a set of distinct images assigned to either themselves or their partner. Critically, a surprise image recognition task allowed us to identify partner-driven effects exclusive to the Joint task-sharing condition, versus the Individual condition. We did not observe a significant JSE, preventing us from drawing confident conclusions about the effect's domain-specificity. However, the recognition task results revealed that participants in the Joint task did not recognize their partner's stimuli more accurately than participants in the Individual task. This implies that participants were no more likely to encode content from their partner's perspective during the Joint task. Overall, this study pushes methodological boundaries regarding the elicitation of co-representation in the Joint Simon task and demonstrates the potential utility of a surprise recognition task.

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Joint action theorizing implies that any coordinated behaviour that induces co-representation with a partner should increase social identification, especially when the associated actions require a high degree of coordination and are experienced as being performed effectively. The current research provides a first test of this new theoretical prediction for complementary (rather than synchronous) joint actions. In each of two pre-registered experiments establishing a novel paradigm, participants performed a digital joystick task with a joint performance goal with three different partners. The task varied in coordination requirements across partners. In Experiment 1, results showed that when task segments were discrete between partners, they identified less as a group than when they had to coordinate their behaviour. Surprisingly, although constant coordination increased co-representation relative to intermittent coordination, it did not correspondingly increase social identification. However, performance correlated positively with identification; as performance was worse when participants had to coordinate, this may explain the results. Experiment 2 showed that performance is causally linked to identification when coordination is necessary. Taken together, our results suggest that experiencing effective coordination leads to greater social identification. In general, paradigms capable of examining the perceptual and motor aspects of collective behaviour may offer a new perspective on social identification in general and the performance-identification link in particular.

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The strength of human society can largely be attributed to the tendency to work together to achieve outcomes that are not possible alone. Effective social coordination benefits from mentally representing a partner's actions. Specifically, humans optimize social coordination by forming internal action models adapted to joint rather than individual task demands. To what extent do humans share the cognitive mechanisms that support optimal human coordination and collaboration with other species? An ecologically inspired joint handover-to-retrieve task was systematically manipulated across several experiments to assess whether joint action planning in chimpanzees reflects similar patterns to humans. Chimpanzees' chosen handover locations shifted towards the location of the experimenter's free or unobstructed hand, suggesting they represent the constraints of the joint task even though their individual half of the task was unobstructed. These findings indicate that chimpanzees and humans may share common cognitive mechanisms or predispositions that support joint action.

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Large-scale functional networks are spatially distributed in the human brain. Despite recent progress in differentiating their functional roles, how the brain navigates the spatial coordination among them and the biological relevance of this coordination is still not fully understood. Capitalizing on canonical individualized networks derived from functional MRI data, we proposed a new concept, that is, co-representation of functional brain networks, to delineate the spatial coordination among them. To further quantify the co-representation pattern, we defined two indexes, that is, the co-representation specificity (CoRS) and intensity (CoRI), for separately measuring the extent of specific and average expression of functional networks at each brain location by using the data from both sexes. We found that the identified pattern of co-representation was anchored by cortical regions with three types of cytoarchitectural classes along a sensory-fugal axis, including, at the first end, primary (idiotypic) regions showing high CoRS, at the second end, heteromodal regions showing low CoRS and high CoRI, at the third end, paralimbic regions showing low CoRI. Importantly, we demonstrated the critical role of myeloarchitecture in sculpting the spatial distribution of co-representation by assessing the association with the myelin-related neuroanatomical and transcriptomic profiles. Furthermore, the significance of manifesting the co-representation was revealed in its prediction of individual behavioral ability. Our findings indicated that the spatial coordination among functional networks was built upon an anatomically configured blueprint to facilitate neural information processing, while advancing our understanding of the topographical organization of the brain by emphasizing the assembly of functional networks.

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Humans have the ability to rapidly extract summary statistics from object groupings through a specific capability known as ensemble coding. Previous literature has reported that this ability can become biased by prior perceptual experiences at the individual level. However, it remains unknown whether interpersonal prior information could also bias ensemble perception through a co-representation process. Experiment 1 found that participants' summary estimations were biased toward their co-actor's stimuli. Experiment 2 confirmed a causal relationship between the bias effect and the co-representation process by showing a reduction in biased estimation after pairing participants with an out-group partner. These findings extend the sources of prior information exploited by humans during perceptual average from individual-level information (i.e., self-tasks) to interpersonal-level information (i.e., co-actor's tasks). More specifically, interpersonal prior information is shown to act in a top-down and implicit manner, biasing ensemble perception.

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Unexpected acute stressors may affect our co-representation with other co-actors when completing the joint tasks. The present study adopted the emergent functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning method to explore the brain-to-brain synchrony when implementing the Joint Simon Task under acute stress induced in the laboratory. The behavioral results reported that the joint Simon effect (JSE) was found in both the stress group and the control group, but the joint Simon effect in the stress group was significantly lessened than the joint Simon effect in the control group, demonstrating that when completing the joint action task in the state of acute stress, women's ability to distinguishing self- from other-related mental representations was improved, and the strength of women's action co-representation was diminished. The fNIRS results showed that when completing the joint Simon task in the state of the acute stress, the brain-to-brain synchrony at the r-TPJ in the stress group was significantly higher than that in the control group, demonstrating that the increased brain-to-brain synchrony at the TPJ may be served as the critical brain-to-brain neural mechanism underlying the joint action task under acute stress.

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Numerous joint action studies have demonstrated that certain low-level aspects (e.g., stimuli and responses) of a co-actor's task can be automatically and implicitly represented by us as actors, biasing our own task performance in a joint action setup. However, it remains unclear whether individuals also represent more abstract, high-level aspects of a co-actor's task, such as regularity. In the first five experiments, participants participated alongside their co-actors and responded to a mixed shape sequence generated by randomly interleaving two fixed order sequences of shapes in both the pre- and post-test sessions. But different intermediate practice sessions were undergone by participants across experiments. When practicing their own fixed order sequences in a mixed shape sequence, either together with another person (Experiment 1) or alone but informed that their partner was performing the same practice task in a different room (Experiment 4), participants exhibited a learning effect on their co-actors' practiced sequences. This indirect learning effect was absent when one of the co-actors did not participate due to either being removed from the practice (Experiment 2) or sitting still without offering responses (Experiment 3), as well as when the two co-actors practiced together but responded to two distinct properties of stimuli (e.g., colour and shape, respectively), with one having regularity and the other not. Finally, participants exhibited comparable direct learning effects on their own practiced sequences for Experiments 1-5 as when performing the pre-test, practice, and post-test sessions alone for Experiment 6. These results demonstrate that, when practicing together, or even when believing that they are acting together with a partner, co-actors do represent the task regularity of one another through social statistical learning and transfer this learned regularity to subsequent task performances. The present study extends our understanding of co-representation in the joint action context in terms of the more abstract and high-level task features people co-represent, such as a co-actor's task regularity.

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In dialogue, people represent each other's utterances to take turns and communicate successfully. In previous work, speakers who were naming single pictures or picture pairs represented whether another speaker was engaged in the same task (vs a different or no task) concurrently but did not represent in detail the content of the other speaker's utterance. Here, we investigate the co-representation of whole sentences. In three experiments, pairs of speakers imagined each other producing active or passive descriptions of transitive events. Speakers took longer to begin speaking when they believed their partner was also preparing to speak, compared to when they did not. Interference occurred when speakers believed their partners were preparing to speak at the same time as them (synchronous production and co-representation; Experiment 1), and also when speakers believed that their partner would speak only after them (asynchronous production and co-representation; Experiments 2a and 2b). However, interference was generally no greater when speakers believed their partner was preparing a different compared to a similar utterance, providing no consistent evidence that speakers represented what their partners were preparing to say. Taken together, these findings indicate that speakers can represent another's intention to speak even as they are themselves preparing to speak, but that such representation tends to lack detail.

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During preschool years, children's interacting with others increases. One of the involved developmental skills is task co-representation, through which children aged 5 years and older represent a partner's task in a similar way to their own task. In adults, task co-representation makes participants attend to and form memories of objects relevant to both their own task and their partner's task; however, it is unclear whether children can also form such memories. In Experiment 1, we examined the memory facilitation of joint search using a contextual cueing effect paradigm. Children were presented with search displays repeatedly with the same or random layouts and searched and responded to the target either alone (the single group; n = 32; Mage = 73.6 months, range = 61-80) or with their parent (the joint group; n = 32; Mage = 74.3 months, range = 64-81). Results showed that the search with the same layouts was faster than that with the random layouts for the single group, indicating that children form associative memories of target and distractors relevant to their own task. For the joint group, this effect was not statistically different from that of the single group, with exploratory analysis suggesting that it was disrupted. In Experiment 2, children performed the search with a peer (n = 32; Mage = 72.7 months, range = 67-79) and the effect was also not found. Our findings suggest that the self's and partner's tasks are represented but might not be incorporated into associative memory in 5- and 6-year-old children.

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Joint action has increasingly become a key topic to understand the emergence of the human mind. The phenomenon is closely linked to several theoretical concepts, such as shared intentionality, which are difficult to operationalize empirically. We therefore employ a paradigm-driven, bottom-up approach, and as such discuss co-representing the partner's and one's own actions as key mechanism for joint action. After embedding co-representation in the broader landscape of related theoretical concepts, we review neurobiological, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic studies, with a focus on whether co-representation and its flexible deployment should be construed as a low- or high-level cognitive process. The empirical findings convergently suggest that co-representation does not require strong inhibitory skills or mentalistic understanding and occurs automatically. Moreover, more cooperative species are better at flexibly suppressing co-representation when required for cooperation success, and frequently rely on cooperation markers, such as mutual gaze. We thus contribute to closing the current gap between theoretical concepts related to joint action research and their empirical investigation, and end by highlighting additional approaches for doing so.

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Recent work has shown that number concepts activate both spatial and magnitude representations. According to the social co-representation literature which has shown that participants typically represent task components assigned to others together with their own, we asked whether explicit magnitude meaning and explicit spatial coding must be present in a single mind, or can be distributed across two minds, to generate a spatial-numerical congruency effect. In a shared go/no-go task that eliminated peripheral spatial codes, we assigned explicit magnitude processing to participants and spatial processing to either human or non-human co-agents. The spatial-numerical congruency effect emerged only with human co-agents. We demonstrate an inter-personal level of conceptual congruency between space and number that arises from a shared conceptual representation not contaminated by peripheral spatial codes. Theoretical implications of this finding for numerical cognition are discussed.

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Several studies have shown that individuals automatically integrate the actions of other individuals into their own action plans, thus facilitating action coordination. What happens to this mechanism in situations of danger? This capacity could either be reduced, in order to allocate more cognitive resources for individualistic actions, or be maintained or enhanced to enable cooperation under threat. In order to determine the impact of the perception of danger on this capacity, two groups of participants carried out, in pairs, the Social Simon task, which provides a measure of co-representation. The task was performed during so-called 'threat blocks' (during which participants could be exposed at any time to an aversive stimulus) and so-called 'safety blocks' (during which no aversive stimulation could occur). In a first group of participants, both individuals were exposed at the same time to threat blocks. In a second group, only one of the two participants was exposed to them at a time. Our results indicate that co-representation, an important cognitive mechanism for cooperation, (i) is preserved in situations of danger; and (ii) may even be increased in participants who are confronted alone to threat but in the presence of a safe partner. Contrarily to popular belief, danger does not shut down our capacities for social interaction.

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Two different variations of joint task switching led to different conclusions as to whether co-acting individuals share the same task-sets. The present study aimed at bridging this gap by replicating the version in which two actors performed two different tasks. Experiment 1 showed switch costs across two actors in a joint condition, which agreed with previous studies, but also yielded even larger switch costs in a solo condition, which contradicted the claim that actors represent an alternative task as their own when it is carried out by the co-actor but not when no one carries it out. Experiments 2 and 3 further examined switch costs in the solo condition with the aim to rule out possible influences of task instructions for and experiences with the other task that was not assigned to the actor. Before participants were instructed on the second of the two tasks, switch costs were still obtained without a co-actor when explicit task names ("COLOUR" and "SHAPE") served as go/nogo signals (Experiment 2), but not when arbitrary symbols ("XXXX" and "++++") served as go/nogo signals (Experiment 3). The results thus imply that switch costs depend on participants' knowledge of task cues being assigned to two different tasks, but not on whether the other task is performed by a co-actor. These findings undermine the assumption that switch costs in the joint conditions reflect shared task-sets between co-actors in this procedure.

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Classification of digital pathology images is imperative in cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Recent advancements in deep learning and computer vision have greatly benefited the pathology workflow by developing automated solutions for classification tasks. However, the cost and time for acquiring high quality task-specific large annotated training data are subject to intra- and inter-observer variability, thus challenging the adoption of such tools. To address these challenges, we propose a classification framework via co-representation learning to maximize the learning capability of deep neural networks while using a reduced amount of training data. The framework captures the class-label information and the local spatial distribution information by jointly optimizing a categorical cross-entropy objective and a deep metric learning objective respectively. A deep metric learning objective is incorporated to enhance the classification, especially in the low training data regime. Further, a neighborhood-aware multiple similarity sampling strategy, and a soft-multi-pair objective that optimizes interactions between multiple informative sample pairs, is proposed to accelerate deep metric learning. We evaluate the proposed framework on five benchmark datasets from three digital pathology tasks, i.e., nuclei classification, mitosis detection, and tissue type classification. For all the datasets, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance when using approximately only 50% of the training data. On using complete training data, the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on all the five datasets.

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Task set selection is facilitated when people expect a partner to perform the same task, suggesting that the features of the partner's performance are represented. However, it is unclear how similar the partner's reactions must be to promote compatibility effects: does a partner have to imitate subjects' specific actions or is it enough to perform the same task while responding to different stimuli with different actions? This present study investigated this question in a joint picture-word interference paradigm. Subjects either named pictures or read words, and a partner responded by performing the same or the competing task. In Experiment 1, the partner used the same picture-word combinations as the subject and thus compatible trials implied a complete imitation. Compatibility benefits were observed. In Experiment 2, the partner performed the same or the competing task on different stimuli, producing different actions. Compatibility effects were absent. To test whether this indicates that an overlap in abstract task features is insufficient or resulted from excessive task difficulty, Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with a smaller stimulus set. Compatibility benefits were found. Taken together, the results suggest that a partner's abstract task can be represented and affect task set selection processes even without an overlap in stimulus-response mappings.

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Human memories are malleable and often shaped by social interactions. Previous work has demonstrated that not only one's own goals, but also those of a task-partner can facilitate subsequent retrieval of goal-relevant lexical stimuli, known as the Joint Memory Effect (JME). We outline a social-epistemic account of the JME which proposes that this memory enhancement reflects humans' tendency to map out their interaction partners' knowledge states, leading them to cognitively prioritize information relevant to and selectively attended by their partner. This account predicts that the memory enhancement for partner-relevant words should be limited to contexts where task partners are required to process their targets in terms of meaning, instead of attending to a surface feature. Additionally, we predicted that facilitated recall performance for partner-relevant information would be accompanied by enhanced memory for the social context of that information, that is, participants should be able to link the remembered content to the agent acting on it. The results of four experiments support these predictions. We demonstrate that the JME emerges selectively, depending on which stimulus feature (word meaning or presentation color) is attended by the partner, and that it extends to (and may even depend on) memory for the social context of the targets. Prioritizing partner-relevant information in memory may be linked to processes involved in establishing and monitoring common ground.

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Recent studies have suggested that individuals are not able to develop a sense of joint agency during joint actions with artificial systems. We sought to examine whether this lack of joint agency is linked to individuals' inability to co-represent the machine-generated actions. Fifteen participants observed or performed a Simon response time task either individually, or jointly with another human or a computer. Participants reported the time interval between their response (or the co-actor response) and a subsequent auditory stimulus, which served as an implicit measure of participants' sense of agency. Participants' reaction times showed a classical Simon effect when they were partnered with another human, but not when they collaborated with a computer. Furthermore, participants showed a vicarious sense of agency when co-acting with another human agent but not with a computer. This absence of vicarious sense of agency during human-computer interactions and the relation with action co-representation are discussed.

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Studies on joint task performance have proposed that co-acting individuals co-represent the shared task context, which implies that actors integrate their co-actor's task components into their own task representation as if they were all their own task. This proposal has been supported by results of joint tasks in which each actor is assigned a single response where selecting a response is equivalent to selecting an actor. The present study used joint task switching, which has previously shown switch costs on trials following the actor's own trial (intrapersonal switch costs) but not on trials that followed the co-actor's trial (interpersonal switch costs), suggesting that there is no task co-representation. We examined whether interpersonal switch costs can be obtained when action selection and actor selection are confounded as in previous joint task studies. The present results confirmed this prediction, demonstrating that switch costs can occur within a single actor as well as between co-actors when there is only a single response per actor, but not when there are two responses per actor. These results indicate that task co-representation is not necessarily implied even when effects occur across co-acting individuals and that how the task is divided between co-actors plays an important role in determining whether effects occur between co-actors.

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