Joint action over Zoom: Assessing corepresentation with remote task partners using the joint Simon task

Abstract Joint action, or multiple people working together to achieve a shared goal, is a common part of everyday life. Due to an advancing workplace and accelerated in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more collaborative work is being conducted remotely. To help investigate the differences in joint action between in-person and remote settings, the current study used a perceptual cognitive reaction time task known as the joint Simon task. The joint Simon task assesses spatial compatibility effects, such that partners sitting side-by-side respond faster to targets that appear on the side compatible to their response (e.g., left participant/left target) than on the side incompatible to their response (e.g., left participant/right target). The spatial compatibility effect is commonly used to measure self-other integration and corepresentation between task partners. Participants completed a joint Simon task and a go/no-go task (i.e., a joint Simon task with no partner) remotely online via the videoconferencing application Zoom. The remote task partner was either the experimenter (Experiment 1) or a confederate participant (Experiment 2). Both experiments found no spatial compatibility effect when completing a task remotely with a partner but did show social facilitation through faster reaction times when completing the task with a partner vs alone. Additionally, both experiments found a spatial compatibility effect when completing the go/no-go task alone, a finding contradictory to previous literature. Overall, these findings indicate that working remotely with a partner can influence performance, but self-other integration and corepresentation of partners’ actions may be impaired when collaborating remotely.