Thursday 23 July 08:15 - 09:45

Hall: 17 - Room 14 SA

Chair and Discussant: Becchio Cristina

Division: Division 14: Applied Cognitive Psychology

Contemporary approaches in cognitive psychology and neuroscience show that action is not merely the endpoint of cognitive processing, but a central organizing principle that shapes how humans perceive, predict, and understand others, coordinate with them, and navigate dynamic environments. This symposium brings together complementary perspectives illustrating how action-based mechanisms structure both individual behaviour and social exchange.
Across the four contributions, we highlight how humans learn from and adapt to the statistical structure of their environments, how they communicate and coordinate through movement, and how kinematic cues support real-time social decision-making and collective behaviour. Fiehler and colleagues show that navigation in dynamic environments depends on an adaptive integration of environmental regularities, individual strategy preferences, and sensorimotor decision demands. Knoblich's work demonstrates that joint action coordination is deeply intertwined with communication, revealing how both subtle sensorimotor cues and simple vocalizations can enhance prediction and stabilize collective action. Schmitz and collaborators expand this view to collective decision-making, showing that confidence—a key metacognitive signal—can be encoded and inferred from movement kinematics, thereby shaping the dynamics and accuracy of group decisions. Finally, Novembre and colleagues reveal the geometric and multidimensional organization of interpersonal synchrony in dance, demonstrating how shared sensory input and inter-individual adaptation support distinct but parallel forms of coordination across the body.
Together, these contributions show how action scaffolds both individual cognition and the complex dynamics of social interaction.