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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Attentional Strategies in Social Coordination

Bonnie Yang¹, Mark K Ho¹; ¹New York University

Presenter: Bonnie Yang

Successful coordination often requires people to adapt their plans to their partner's goals and intentions. However, exhaustively considering all possible joint actions and their long-term consequences is computationally infeasible for resource-constrained human minds. We propose that people manage this challenge with construal-aware partner modeling, which involves both selectively attending to task-relevant details and forming expectations about their partner's selective attention. Simulations in a cooperative cooking task show that the construal-aware approach recovers near-optimal joint performance, outperforming classical recursive reasoning models that assume full task representations. These results suggest that successful joint planning can be achieved when players reason about each others' cognitive limitations.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition