Cognition and Emotion at play: The contribution of inhibitory control and emotion understanding for peer action coordination.

At the forefront of our research lies an exploration of peer action coordination, a domain traditionally explored solely through the lens of cognitive processes. It has been theorized that emotions might play a role in action coordination, as emotional cues can provide critical information for action planning and execution (Vesper et al., 2017). However, whether and how emotions contribute to coordinating action with a partner has not been investigated in depth until recently. In a previous study, emotion understanding was linked to peer action coordination, as children better at recognizing and interpreting emotions were also better at coordinating their actions during a cooperative sensorimotor task (Viana et al., 2020). The current study planned to replicate and extend this study from Viana and colleagues (2020) by investigating a comprehensive model containing cognitive and emotional components and how these explain the variance within peer action coordination across middle childhood. 108 children between 6 years and 11 months and 10 years and 10 months of age were assessed for their emotion understanding with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), their inhibitory control with the Attentional Network Task (ANT), and their individual and peer action coordination with a sensorimotor game. Contrary to our expectations, our findings revealed that emotion understanding and inhibitory control had no significant association with peer action coordination. Instead, age and gender emerged as the primary indicators, explaining 38% of the variance in our data. Our results are discussed in light of the literature debate on whether possessing individual representations of skills translates into using them in complex social interactions such as peer action coordination. Future research may analyze quantitatively and qualitatively the way children interact during cooperative games, uncovering the subtle dynamics that go beyond the final performance on the task.