One of the key features of the successful evolution of our specie resides in the development of collective intelligence. Thanks to the cooperation and coordinated efforts, individuals achieve forms of environmental adaptation and accomplish complex tasks, reaching goals which could never be achieved by single agents acting alone. Daily life often requires motor coordination with another partner. I will present the results of an experiment performed on pairs of co-acting monkeys, consisting in recording the cell activity from premotor and parietal cortex of the two interacting brains, during the execution of a visuomotor task. In both regions, in addition to canonical action-related cells, firing similarly when a given action is performed in a solo or joint-fashion, we found a population of neuron, referred to as ‘joint-action cells’, active differently when the same action was performed in coordination with another mate, rather than individually. This population of neurons offers a neural representation of joint-action by far more accurate that that provided by solo-action cells, and might represent a neural substrate for inter-individual motor coordination.

Ferrari-Toniolo, S., Visco-Comandini, F., Battaglia-Mayer, A. (2019). Two brains in action: Joint-action coding in the primate frontal cortex. J Neurosci, 1512-18.

Visco-Comandini, F., Ferrari-Toniolo, S., Satta, E., Papazachariadis, O., Gupta, R., Nalbant, L.E., Battaglia-Mayer, A. (2015). Do non-human primates cooperate? Evidences of motor coordination during a joint action task in macaque monkeys. Cortex, 70, 115-127.

Satta, E., Ferrari-Toniolo, S., Visco-Comandini, F., Caminiti, R., and Battaglia-Mayer, A. (2017). Development of Motor Coordination during Joint Action in Mid-childhood. Neuropsychologia, 105, 111-122.