Different ways to distinguish own and others’ actions in social interaction: the role of perceived similarity.

The ability to co-represent actions of others is necessary to correctly perform everyday life-tasks. Action co-representation is commonly measured with the social Simon task. Research suggests that perceived similarity influences whether people use spatial action coding. When people were actin with a dissimilar other, they did not seem to co-represent the actions of their co-actor. The current research wants to explore why people do not use spatial action coding when interacting with dissimilar. First, we investigated if besides a spatial reference frame, people were able to use other reference frames during action discrimination. Second, we wanted to find out if perceived similarity could predict which reference frame was being used to distinguish actions from each other. Before performing an adjusted version of the social Simon task, participants performed a task in which they were put in a similarity mindset or in a dissimilarity mindset. Results showed a robust spatial social Simon effect and an identity social Simon effect. Interestingly, participants were able to use more reference frames at a time. The similarity mindset failed the manipulation check and did not have any influence on the reference frames that were being used during action discrimination. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed