Possibilities of Reciprocity and Non-Reciprocity: A Minimalist Experimental Study of Perceptual Interaction

Reciprocal perceptual interactions (e.g., mutual gaze) play a central role in social cognition. However, reciprocity only fully makes sense in relation to the possibility of non-reciprocity: others may not perceive what we perceive or what we do. This enables concealment, deception, play, and many forms of social interaction. We adopt an enactive interactionist approach to investigate how perceptual interactions are formed and regulated at the boundary between reciprocity and non-reciprocity. These processes can be explained at the level of interaction dynamics alone, without invoking individual inferential mechanisms. We report two minimalist experiments: the first ( N = 40) reveals an attractor toward perceptual reciprocity; the second ( N = 92) shows that collective interaction enables participants to exploit action possibilities structured by variations in reciprocity, although these possibilities are not accessible from individual perceptual information alone. Together, these findings reveal an autonomous collective dynamic that enables action capacities based on the possibility of reciprocity, even though such capacities are initially absent at the individual level.