An investigation on the effects of social status on motor interactions and performance monitoring in social settings

As social species, in our daily lives we continuously interact with our conspecifics to communicate, cooperate or compete for the same resources. Besides the role of cognitive and emotional factors in determining the quality and success of interpersonal interactions, social factors may also play a crucial role. In the present work, I will first describe the results from a research project that aimed at investigating how social status shapes implicit preference, the ability to coordinate with another person and the monitoring of owns’ performance. In the second part of the thesis, I will present the results from a study that investigated the neural basis of performance monitoring during motor interactions. More in detail, the first two experiments, reported in chapters 2-3, investigated how the perceived (competence-based) social status of other people influences our implicit preference for them (Study 1) and our ability to coordinate with them while performing joint actions (Study 2). Shifting the perspective from other’s to own’s status, in the third experiment I have tested the hypothesis that the relative position a person occupies in a competence-based hierarchy influences their autonomic reactivity to positive and negative feedback after correct and error trials during a collective cognitive game (Study 3). In the last study (Study 4) I investigated the causal role of error-related EEG activity (i.e. frontal theta oscillations) in motor adjustment during a human-avatar motor interaction task by means of transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS).