ABSTRACT
Many highly skilled actions require people to act together in order to achieve a common goal. From team sports, to orchestras, group dances, and high-risk joint actions such as surgery, joint actions are an integral feature of many domains of expertise. In this chapter we describe the coordination mechanisms that underpin skilled joint actions and we explore how these mechanisms reflect domain-general principles of joint action performance that can apply not only to highly skilled actions but also to more everyday joint actions. These mechanisms allow individuals to facilitate coordination by making specific modulations to their own actions, by predicting others’ actions, and by planning and monitoring joint rather than individual actions. Experts’ superior ability to coordinate on skilled actions compared with novices is due to their ability to refine these domain-general mechanisms to task-specific problems. We draw on studies from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience that show that coordination is a skill in its own right, and highlight the role of visual and motor experience in the flexible use of these domain-general mechanisms. Finally, we discuss the role of context in joint actions, focusing on how the same mechanisms can work very differently under competitive and cooperative contexts. We also outline some open questions relating to how experts such as players in competitive team sports manage to use such context-sensitive flexibility effectively in skilled joint actions.
