Material-Practical, Verbal and Cognitive Interaction in Dyads

This paper describes interesting experiments on the influence of task conditions on the material-technological interaction between work partners. An elaborate model of the factors affecting partner interaction is described, and an ingenious task for testing derivations from this model is employed. The emergence of leaders and followers under different task distributions of “executive” and “control” functions is noted, and the verbal behaviours related to this differentiation are analyzed. Cognitive indexes (attributions, evaluations) are in turn related to these task and role factors.