Welcome!
Our research focuses on intentional joint action: We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying seemingly easy everyday behaviors such as moving a couch with someone else, shaking hands or clapping together after a concert. This interest extends into domains like musical ensemble coordination, team sports, action understanding, human-robot interaction and sense of agency. More recently, a focus has become studying links between action coordination and (non-verbal) communication and, since joining a Carlsberg-funded project at the intersection of arts and science, the transfer of research from the lab into museum contexts.
We are based at the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. We are also connected to the Interacting Minds Centre.
Scientific focus areas
Joint action such as action coordination, synchronization, musical ensembles, sense of agency
Cognitive semiotics such as sensorimotor communication, common ground, cultural transmission
Motion-tracking such as recording and analysis of real-time social interaction
Art-science interaction such as public experiments and installations in museums
Cordula Vesper
Associate professor in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Semiotics
+++ News +++
18/06/2024 Martin Dockendorff et al.'s paper "Communicative modulations of early action components support the prediction of distal goals" got accepted in PlosONE.
17/06/2024 Very inspiring 2-day workshop on "Brain Theory" in Hamburg, organized by Andreas Engel from UKE. My presentation has the title "Coordinating and communicating through actions: What can joint action research tell us about brain and cognition?"
15/01/2024 Returning to work after 14 months maternity leave.
09/06/2022 New article with colleagues from the EER group, where we report on a score-based intervention at an art exhibition: Løppenthin, Bjerre Jensen, et al., "Sharing perspectives: Inviting playful curiosity into museum spaces through a performative score".
See here for past news
When is ostensive communication used for joint action?
Vesper, C., Morisseau, T., Knoblich, G., & Sperber, D. (2021). When is ostensive communication used for joint action? Cognitive Semiotics, 14(2), 101–129. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2021-2040
"Thus, applied to the context of joint action, the specific argument we put forward here is that, especially in situations without sufficiently available common ground or a possibility to build it up, co-actors resort to ostensive communication to draw attention to the fact that they intend to communicate some specific information that is relevant for their joint performance. (...) In this way, ostensive communication could make joint action possible, or at least more efficient, in cases where communicative behavior not recognized as such would otherwise be unclear or ambiguous."
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Color matching
Dokk 1, Aarhus, DK; October 2020
Crossmodal correspondences as common ground for joint action
Schmitz, L., Knoblich, G., Deroy, O., & Vesper, C. (2021). Crossmodal correspondences as common ground for joint action. Acta Psychologica, 212, 103222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103222
"Here, we suggest that people rely on yet another form of common ground, one that originates in their similarities in multisensory processing. (...) Going beyond previous research that focused on investigating crossmodal correspondences in individuals, we propose that people can use these correspondences for communicating and coordinating with others."
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Sunlight graffiti at Trapholt Museum
Trapholt Museum, Koldinng DK; December 2019
Fall Break topic "Nerds" at the science museum
Steno Museet, Aarhus, DK; October 2019
Modulating action duration to establish non-conventional communication
Vesper, C., Schmitz, L., & Knoblich, G. (2017). Modulating action duration to establish non-conventional communication. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 164(12), 1722–1737. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000379
"Building on earlier work about sensorimotor communication, we hypothesized that Leaders would actively modulate the duration of their actions (...) Such communication should be especially relevant in cases where visual access between co-actors is constrained or unavailable."
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Sharing perspectives: Inviting playful curiosity into museum spaces through a performative score
Løppenthin, A., Bjerre Jensen, D., Vesper, C., Roepstorff, A., & Dumit, J. (2022). Sharing Perspectives: Inviting Playful Curiosity Into Museum Spaces Through a Performative Score. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.825625
"While the Sharing Perspectives score was developed independently of museum contexts, its intervention echoes the “slow art movement” as one intervention into the white cube problem. We explore SP as a performative score in which participants are guided into a different way of experiencing and playing with being in museum exhibition."
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Understanding distal goals from proximal communicative actions
Dockendorff, M., Schmitz, L., Knoblich, G., & Vesper, C. (2021). Understanding distal goals from proximal communicative actions. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43(43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pf3s6kd
"What is less clear from this literature is whether followers can interpret movement modulations that encode information about more distal goals underlying their partner’s actions, i.e., goals that go beyond and temporally follow the observed proximal action."
Informing, Coordinating, and Performing: A Perspective on Functions of Sensorimotor Communication
Vesper, C., & Sevdalis, V. (2020). Informing, Coordinating, and Performing: A Perspective on Functions of Sensorimotor Communication. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00168
"Depending on the social interaction context, sensorimotor communication can serve different functions. This article aims to disentangle three of these functions: (a) an informing function of body movements, to highlight action intentions for an observer; (b) a coordinating function of body movements, to facilitate real-time action prediction in joint action; and (c) a performing function of body movements, to elicit emotional or aesthetic experiences in an audience."
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This is for you: social modulations of proximal vs. distal space in collaborative interactions
Rocca, R., Wallentin, M., Vesper, C., & Tylén, K. (2019). This is for you: Social modulations of proximal vs. distal space in collaborative interaction. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51134-8
"Is near/far coding of space dynamically adapted to the position of a partner when space, objects, and action goals are shared?"
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Reciprocal information flow and role distribution support joint action coordination
Curioni, A., Vesper, C., Knoblich, G., & Sebanz, N. (2019). Reciprocal information flow and role distribution support joint action coordination. Cognition, 187, 21–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.02.006 "Our starting point is the important observation that the coordination tasks used in previous studies differ in one key aspect: the congruency of temporal and spatial coordination demands."
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ZiF workshop on Measuring Charismatic Expression
ZiF, Bielefeld, Germany; July 2019
EEG hyperscanning in joint action
Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University; November 2021 
Sunlight graffiti in Japan
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; March - June 2020
Combining Phase Advancement and Period Correction Explains Rushing during Joint Rhythmic Activities
Wolf, T., Vesper, C., Sebanz, N., Keller, P. E., & Knoblich, G. (2019). Combining Phase Advancement and Period Correction Explains Rushing during Joint Rhythmic Activities. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 9350. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-45601-5
"When humans engage in synchronized, rhythmic joint activities, they tend to increase their pace unconsciously. (...) We argue that if joint rushing indeed emerges from human interaction in contrast to purely individual processes, then predominant models of inter-subjective sensorimotor synchronization are incomplete."
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Moving Humans at the Tate Exchange
Tate Modern, London, UK; June 2019
When Height Carries Weight: Communicating Hidden Object Properties for Joint Action
Schmitz, L., Vesper, C., Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G. (2018). When Height Carries Weight: Communicating Hidden Object Properties for Joint Action. Cognitive Science, 42(6), 2021–2059. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12638
"As there is no a priori reason to think that the flexibility of sensorimotor communication is limited, it is an open question whether its usage extends beyond the communication of spatial locations."
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Workshop @ Aarhus University ARTS summer party
Aarhus, DK; September 2019 