Joint Action With Shared Task Intention Could Facilitate The Learning Of Task-irrelevant Cue

Individuals are able to learn repeated information in the environment during visual search and thus improve their search efficiency in the same or similar contexts,such phenomenon was known as the contextual cueing effect.Previous studies of contextual cueing effect have mostly focused on single-player experiments and have rarely explored the characteristics of the contextual cueing learning in joint behavior.In real life,joint behaviors often make us do more with less,for example,when moving a sofa,it is much more efficient to carry it jointly with others than to drag it alone.Previous studies related to joint actions have focused mostly on extrapolated behaviors or memories,with less involvement in implicit learning.While the joint attention embraced in joint action,which lead both participants pay attention to each other’s task intention and content,and in turn may learn the context that is relevant to their partner but irrelevant to themselves.As results,the current study conducted three experiments by combining the contextual cueing paradigm with the joint action task,to explore the features of joint contextual learning.The first experiment is a joint action task,which aims to explore the feature of joint contextual learning.We used the classical contextual cueing effect paradigm,and allocated each context into task-relevant or task-irrelevant condition by requiring a motor response from a participant or not.In each trial,paired of participants viewed a same visual search display but only one subject was required to make a response.Therefore,for the subject who needed to respond,the context was task-relevant,while for his co-actor,it was task-irrelevant,and vice versa.The results showed that the participants learned the self-irrelevant contexts which were task-relevant to the co-actor,suggesting that joint contextual learning could promote the learning on task-irrelevant contexts.The results of experiment 1 indicated that joint contextual learning could promote the learning of the task-irrelevant context,while in the self-irrelevant context,the co-actor still needs to make a motor response,which might facilitate the contextual learning.A still open question is whether pure presentation of an co-actor(without making any response)would promote contextual learning on task-irrelevant context or not.Thus we conducted a second experiment by adding a passive viewing condition,during which both co-actors were supposed to viewing the search display passively.The results showed that participants could not learn the repeated context in the passive viewing condition,suggesting pure observation could not explain the joint learning effect that was observed in Experiment 1.The third experiment took advantage of the technology of EEG to explore the feature of a classical component called N2 pc in the learning process of joint contextual learning.The results showed that corresponding to the results from the behavior data,the mean amplitudes of N2 pc in repeated and novel contexts is significantly different in the task-irrelevant condition,with the amplitude in repeated condition was more negative than the novel condition.This indicates that under joint learning,the component of N2 pc could reflect the contextual learning effect to the task-irrelevant contexts.The above experimental results indicate that joint action rather than pure bystander effect can facilitate individuals’ learning of task-irrelevant contexts and cause the significant contextual cueing effect.