The cognitive neuroscience of interpersonal coordination and cooperation: a motor approach in humans and non-human primates

The last decades of research have witnessed to a remarkable progress in the domain of cognitive neuroscience of action. Concepts like intentionality, sense of agency, joint action, cooperation, for a long time a monopoly of philosophers, are now common themes of neuroscientific enquiry and a territory for cross-fertilization for different disciplines, from theorizing to clinical investigation. This project brings together three research groups from the University of Rome Sapienza, Milano Statale and Milano-Bicocca, who are integrating their scientific goals into a shared plan to shed new light on one key aspect of cognitive neuroscience of action: the neurocognitive foundations of how two individuals coordinate to each other and eventually cooperate by sharing a common goal and how their coordination and cooperation turns into a shared motor plan and shared sense of agency. The Milano-Statale Unit (MSU), besides adapting the RSU paradigm for a behavioral-EEG/TMS experiment in humans, will dig deep into the cognitive mechanisms that underlie cooperation in humans and test the hypothesis that collective motor goals are the common ground that permits coordination and cooperation to occur, thus bridging the gap between high (mind-related) intentional and low (body-related biomechanical) levels of representations. This hypothesis will be tested using behavioural experiments aiming to assess whether action planning and execution may differ in coordinated and uncoordinated conditions, with this difference being related to the goal (collective versus individual) rather than to tasks’ contingencies. The same experimental scenarios will then be moved into a TMS experiment and a TMS-EEG experiment to test the hypothesis of a substantial contribution of the (pre)motor cortex to the formation of a collective goal with changes in cortico-cortical EEG coherence and connectivity in the coordinated conditions.