Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany; Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition, Göttingen, Germany
Anton M Unakafov
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany; Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition, Göttingen, Germany; Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute of Psychology, University of Gottingen, Göttingen, Germany; Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany; Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks, Gottingen, Germany
Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition, Göttingen, Germany; Cognitive Ethology Laboratory, German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany; Department of Primate Cognition, Johann-Friedrich-Blumenbach Institute for Zoology and Anthropology, University of Gottingen, Göttingen, Germany
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany; Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition, Göttingen, Germany; Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute of Psychology, University of Gottingen, Göttingen, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen, Germany
Stefan Treue
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany; Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition, Göttingen, Germany; Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute of Psychology, University of Gottingen, Göttingen, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen, Germany
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany; Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition, Göttingen, Germany
Many real-world decisions in social contexts are made while observing a partner’s actions. To study dynamic interactions during such decisions, we developed a setup where two agents seated face-to-face to engage in game-theoretical tasks on a shared transparent touchscreen display (‘transparent games’). We compared human and macaque pairs in a transparent version of the coordination game ‘Bach-or-Stravinsky’, which entails a conflict about which of two individually-preferred opposing options to choose to achieve coordination. Most human pairs developed coordinated behavior and adopted dynamic turn-taking to equalize the payoffs. All macaque pairs converged on simpler, static coordination. Remarkably, two animals learned to coordinate dynamically after training with a human confederate. This pair selected the faster agent’s preferred option, exhibiting turn-taking behavior that was captured by modeling the visibility of the partner’s action before one’s own movement. Such competitive turn-taking was unlike the prosocial turn-taking in humans, who equally often initiated switches to and from their preferred option. Thus, the dynamic coordination is not restricted to humans but can occur on the background of different social attitudes and cognitive capacities in rhesus monkeys. Overall, our results illustrate how action visibility promotes the emergence and maintenance of coordination when agents can observe and time their mutual actions.
