Abstract
When people perform joint actions together, their individual actions (e.g., moving one end of a heavy couch) must be coordinated to achieve a collective goal (e.g., moving the couch across the room). Joint actions pose significant challenges for understanding people’s sense of agency, that is, their sense of generating and controlling actions and their effects on the world. Namely, each person engaged in a joint action can have a sense of agency not only at the individual level (a sense that “I did that” or “You did that”), but also at the collective level (a sense that “We did that together”). In this talk, I will discuss a series of studies aimed at uncovering the cues that elicit different forms of collective-level agency in musical joint action, including shared agency (a sense that agency is distributed among co-performers) and united agency (a sense that co-performers are acting a single unit). These studies employed a mixed-methods approach ranging from experimental manipulations of collective-level agency in duet music performance through qualitative investigations of people’s first-hand reports of united agency across a variety of musical settings. Implications of our findings for models of agency in joint action will be discussed.

Bio
Janeen Loehr is an associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Her research investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that allow people to coordinate their actions with others. Her work examines questions such as how people precisely coordinate their actions in time (such as during ensemble music performance), monitor their own and others’ actions to achieve shared goals, and experience a sense of joint agency or shared control over their actions when coordinating with others. See more at www.janeenloehr.com.