THE COGNITIVE CONTROL OF SOCIAL RESONANCE

funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Principal Investigators: Prof. Dr. Bernhard Hommel, Prof. Dr. Tanja Schultz (Universität Bremen), Prof. Dr. Stefan Zachow (Zuse-Institute Berlin)

People tend to copy behavior shown by others, which is commonly attributed to automatic imitation processes. Based on the theory of event coding (TEC), we argue that this view is incorrect. Rather, whether and to what degree people imitate others depends on (1) the degree to which the cognitive representation of themselves feature-overlaps with the cognitive representation of the other; (2) the degree to which overlapping features are considered to be relevant in the particular situation; and (3) whether people have established a more integrative or a more focused cognitive-control mode. We aim to test these predictions by creating a social, interactive situation in virtual reality, in which the human participant is represented by a tightly synchronized Doppelgänger that is facing another avatar (the Other).

We will establish this new paradigm which will also allow to measure various kinds of explicit and implicit cognitive and bodily reactions of human participants to the features and the behavior of the Other. We will introduce various manipulations of the featural and behavioral relationship between the human’s Doppelgänger and the Other, which allows us to assess how the reactions of the human a moderated by the relationship between Doppelgänger and Other—i.e., between the representation of the human and the interaction partner. We will be using advanced virtual-reality techniques, cutting-edge visual and electromyographic analyses of the human’s facial reactions, machine-learning-based analytical techniques, and feedback-based online reactions of the Other.