Do Individual and Joint Action Goals Modulate Imitative Response Tendencies?

Coordinated social interaction requires people to control their tendencies to imitate each other's actions. Previous research suggests that imitative response tendencies become modulated by the goals to which one's own and others' actions are individually or jointly directed. However, an open question is how different levels of goal representation (ranging from higher-level goals that specify joint or individual action outcomes to lower-level goals encoding own and others' movement features) interact and shape imitative congruency effects during social interactions. To address this gap, we conducted two online experiments, in which participants selected one of two action targets in turn with a virtual co-actor to achieve either individual or joint task goals. We manipulated imitative congruency between both task partners' task contributions regarding their individual action goals as well as their lower-level movement goals. Our results showed that participants' task performance was driven by imitative congruency between their own and their partner's individual action goals, which modulated effects of imitative congruency between their own and their partner's low-level movement goals. Interestingly, these imitation effects were found to be present regardless of instructing participants to work towards individual or joint task goals. While supporting goal-directed theories of imitation, our findings suggest that modulations of imitative response tendencies may stem from domain-general action planning and control processes that operate across social and non-social task settings, and that instructions to pursue joint rather than individual task goals exert only limited influence on imitative action tendencies in interactive task contexts.