Coordinating Movements and Beliefs: Different Facets of Doing Things Together

This study investigates the relations between two forms of joint action (JA)—movement coordination (MC) and goal attainment—and theory of mind (ToM), contrasting the interactionist and traditional cognitivist views. A custom task was carried out to measure the properties of the JAs between children and their parents, while classical tasks were performed to measure first- and second-order ToM. Thereafter, cross-recurrence quantification analysis was applied to quantify participants’ movements. The children were from Poland and were aged 42, 66, and 78 months (N = 297, 133 girls, White, from a large city). The results suggested that the characteristics of dyad movement coordination influence goal attainment and are related to children’s first-order ToM (R2 = .447) but not to their second-order ToM.