FIS 3 Advanced Grant -JOINT
About
Project Leader: Corrado Sinigaglia
Acting jointly differs from acting in parallel, as anyone who has ever walked, cooked, or danced a tango with a friend knows. This fundamental distinction permeates daily experience and proves crucial for understanding human sociality. Yet investigating this distinction immediately confronts us with a tangle of unresolved basic questions. What makes an action joint rather than parallel? What processes cause agents to act jointly rather than in parallel? How do these processes interface?
The JOINT project aims to address these questions by integrating philosophy and cognitive neuroscience into developing and empirically validating a novel theory of joint action to deepen our understanding of human social life. Our theory respects the twin insights that joint action involves multilevel processes, and that any theory must explain how these processes interface. This will allow overcoming two major limitations in current research: scientific accounts that struggle to identify the core features distinguishing joint action from any other social interaction, and philosophical accounts, which heavily rely on intuition and presuppose sophisticated cognitive capacities—making them ill-suited to explain joint action’s early emergence in evolution and development.
JOINT will develop a minimal account of joint action based on the PI’s recent work on collective goals. We will test this account through behavioral and electrophysiological (dual EEG, TMS-EEG) studies comparing agents acting with a collective goal versus those acting in parallel. These studies will help identify the neural and psychological processes underlying genuine joint action and their interplay. This framework also enables investigation of evolutionary pathways from parallel to joint action in non-human primates and developmental trajectories in typically developing (TD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children, potentially revealing whether social deficits in ASD stem from difficulties with joint action.
Funding
2025-2030 – FIS3 Advanced (Italian Ministry of University and Research) 1.504.620,00 €
Research
JOINT is organised around four research areas.
1. Collective goals and the nature of joint action
This strand develops the project’s theoretical foundation. It asks what distinguishes joint action from parallel action without assuming in advance that joint action must depend on sophisticated shared intentions.
The project develops the Collective Goal Account, according to which agents act jointly when their actions are directed toward a collective goal. This account allows researchers to investigate different psychological and neural processes that may support joint action, from motor preparation to higher-level planning.
Key topics
Collective goals
Joint action and parallel action
Philosophy of action
Motor representation
Shared agency
Social cognition
Collaborators
Prof. S. A. Butterfill — University of Warwick
Prof. G. Rizzolatti — University of Parma
2. Human joint action: behavioural, dual-EEG, and TMS-EEG studies
This strand tests the Collective Goal Account in adult participants. Pairs of participants perform coordinated tasks in a video-game setting, either jointly or in parallel. The experiments compare conditions in which two agents share a collective goal with conditions in which they pursue individual goals while still needing to coordinate.
Using behavioural measures, dual-EEG, and TMS-EEG, the project investigates how collective goals affect action preparation, predictability, response variability, and brain connectivity.
Key topics
Dual-EEG
TMS-EEG
Action preparation
Motor planning
Interpersonal predictability
Brain connectivity
Event-related potentials
Collaborators
Prof. M. Bortoletto — MomiLab, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
3. Evolutionary pathways to joint action
This strand explores whether non-human primates can move beyond coordination and engage in genuine joint action. Macaque monkeys will perform tasks in which they either pursue a collective goal or act in parallel toward individual goals.
The aim is to test whether behavioural and neural markers of collective-goal representation can be found outside humans, and whether these markers reveal evolutionary building blocks of joint action.
Key topics
Non-human primates
Comparative cognition
Dyadic action
Collective goals in evolution
Dual-EEG in macaques
Coordination and cooperation
Collaborators
Prof. Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer — Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Sapienza University of Rome
Battaglia-Mayer Lab — Sapienza University of Rome
4. Developmental trajectories and autism spectrum disorder
This strand applies the project’s theory and methods to the study of social development. It investigates how children acquire the capacity to act jointly, and whether difficulties with collective goals may contribute to altered social interaction in autism spectrum disorder.
The project will compare typically developing children and children with ASD as they perform joint and parallel versions of the experimental task. The aim is to understand whether social difficulties in ASD may partly arise from mutual challenges in forming or responding to collective goals.
Key topics
Autism spectrum disorder
Child development
Social interaction
Developmental neuroscience
Joint action in childhood
Clinical applications of joint action research
Collaborators
Scientific Institute IRCCS E. Medea
Luca Casartelli — IRCCS E. Medea
Laura Villa — IRCCS E. Medea
People
Principal Investigator
Prof. Corrado Sinigaglia
Università degli Studi di Milano
CIA Lab / PHILAB
Collaborating researchers and institutions
Prof. S. A. Butterfill
University of Warwick
Research topics: collective goals, motor representation, acting together
Prof. G. Rizzolatti
University of Parma
Research topics: mirror neurons, social cognition, action understanding
Prof. M. Bortoletto
MomiLab, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Research topics: dual-EEG, TMS-EEG, joint action
Prof. Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer
Sapienza University of Rome
Research topics: non-human primates, dyadic action, joint action
Scientific Institute IRCCS E. Medea
Research topics: neurodevelopment, autism spectrum disorder, paediatric neuroscience
Luca Casartelli and Laura Villa
IRCCS E. Medea
Research topics: autism spectrum disorder, child development, social interaction
Advisory Board
The project is supported by an international Advisory Board connected to PHILAB:
Cristina Bicchieri — University of Pennsylvania
Chris D. Frith — University College London
Edouard Machery — University of Pittsburgh
Kristie Miller — University of Sydney
Carlo Miniussi — CIMEC, University of Trento
Alva Noë — University of California, Berkeley
Natalie Sebanz — Central European University
Barry C. Smith — University of London
Juergen Streeck — University of Texas at Austin
News and Events
No articles available.
