Paula L. Silva — Working Together: Experience of Control and Task-Sharing Dynamics in Mixed-Ability Collaboration

Individuals with movement-related disabilities often experience difficulty performing everyday tasks, a challenge typically framed in terms of individual limitations. This perspective overlooks how environments—and other people—can support action. When environments are adapted, individuals can perform successfully and experience control over outcomes. In collaborative settings, however, the picture becomes more complex: even when joint performance is successful, individuals in mixed-ability interactions may experience diminished control. What determines the degree to which an individual feels in control over a shared outcome?

We approach this question through the lens of task-sharing dynamics—the ways partners coordinate their contributions to a shared goal. Prior work has identified distinct task-sharing modes, including one organized around role differentiation, where partners contribute in distinct ways, and a synergistic mode in which both continuously and reciprocally shape the shared outcome without differentiated roles. These modes raise key questions that I will address in this talk: how does the organization of task sharing shape the experience of control when partners differ in their ability to contribute—and, crucially, do visible, disability-related differences introduce qualitatively distinct social constraints on interaction? I approach these questions with the intent to contribute to efforts to understand when collaboration functions as a source of support for the sense of individual agency and when it instead reorganizes control in ways that may diminish it, particularly in mixed-ability collaborations. Work also informs theoretical approaches to the phenomenology of joint action.