Instructing somebody else to act: motor co-representations in the instructor

Abstract

Instructions enable humans to perform novel tasks quickly. This is achieved by creating and activating the instruction representation for upcoming tasks, which can then modulate ongoing task behaviour in an almost ‘reflexive’ manner, an effect called instruction-based reflexivity. While most research has focused on understanding how verbal instructions are represented within the ‘instructed’ (i.e. the person receiving instructions), here we focus on how the instructor's (i.e. the person giving instructions) behaviour is affected through instructing. In a series of three experiments and one pooled analysis, we extended the classical instruction-based reflexivity paradigm to a novel social variant in which the instructions are given by an instructor (rather than visual computer-generated instructions). We found an instruction-based reflexivity effect for the instructor, that is, the instructor's task performance was better on congruent compared to incongruent trials (i.e. Experiments 1 and 2, pooled analysis). This suggests that the instructor represents the instructions of the instructed in an action-oriented format. However, this did not depend on the specific task of the instructed (i.e. Experiment 1), nor is it exclusively social (i.e. Experiment 3).