Introduction: New Perspectives on Joint Attention

Philosophical Psychology, 2024

One of the main positions in the contemporary debate on joint attention is John Campbell's relationalist account. This account has been welcomed as extremely promising in some strands of philosophy and cognitive science, but it has recently been subject to renewed criticism. In this paper, I take a sympathetic approach toward Campbell's relationalism and I provide support for it by means of a naturalistic theory of the individuation of joint-attentional states. I start from examining some recent objections raised against Campbell's account. I suggest that, although these objections do not undermine the account, they point to questions that current relationalism leaves unanswered. Specifically, current relationalism does not provide an explanation of the psychological processes through which a jointattentional experience is individuated, i.e., assembled and experienced, in such a way that it can constitute an immediate justification for a coordinated action. I propose that such an explanation can be found in a phenomenologicalinteractionist approach to shared intentionality.

Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on …, 2004

This paper discusses the concept of joint attention and the different skills underlying its development. We argue that joint attention is much more than gaze following or simultaneous looking because it implies a shared intentional relation to the world. The current state-of-the-art in robotic and computational models of the different prerequisites of joint attention is discussed in relation with a developmental timeline drawn from results in child studies.

According to Michael Tomasello's evolutionary anthropological approach, joint attention is one of the essential keys to understanding the difference between human and animal. The present paper discusses a recent phenomenological account of the anthropological difference inspired by Tomasello's conception. A criticism of this account is put forward, while an alternative view is also introduced that stresses the impact of differential rearing experiences on the socio-cognitive development of human and nonhuman animals.

Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2018

Two of the most important milestones in children's development are joint action (acting with others) and joint attention (attending with others). These are popular fields in both psychology and philosophy, but have formed surprisingly independent literatures despite the close similarities they share in terms of theoretical and methodological issues. This article

Journal of Pragmatics, 2007

We demonstrate that ''joint attention'', usually conceived of in the psychological sciences as indicative of such minded processes as the capacity for understanding the intentional, goal-directed behavior of others, is fundamentally an interactional process, one that cannot be extricated from the ongoing flow of social activity. We examine very young children's actions of showing objects to others, and explicate the practical procedures by which they draw and sustain another's attention to an object, and convey ''what for''-that is, what another should do in response. At issue is how children in a natural social setting (here, a daycare center) track the activities of others for felicitous moments to present objects, and design and position their actions by reference to the ongoing preoccupations, commitments, and distractions of others. Further, drawing another's attention poses sequential implications for children's actions which structure opportunities for parties (child and other) to display, and modify, their understandings of what sort of social exchange is transpiring between them. #

Topoi, 2024

If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call "the field". This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork-specifically in Participant Observation-and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people's lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing out a view of joint attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit.

Synthese

Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually "open'' to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensory experience. John Campbell's relational theory is a prominent representative of the latter approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell's theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest that perceptual experience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention.

[Abstract. This paper begins by examining some of the claims of Dual-Process Theory (also known as Dual-System Theory), in particular its opposition of rapid, intuitive, automatic thought processes to those that are relatively slow, analytic, and consciously controlled. The former traits we share with our primate cousins and with other mammals, while the latter traits are evolutionarily new and uniquely human. Having outlined this theory, I propose that these apparent opposites are, in fact, correlatives of the same order as ground and figure perception, parallel and serial processing, bi-hemispheric brain functions, and bimanual tool use. Every moment of consciousness entails activity characterized by both broad awareness AND narrowly focused attention. This simultaneous pairing is not only necessary for human survival but also generates some of our most intense intellectual and aesthetic experiences. The old primate mind and the new human mind thus function, not in separation, but in concert and, whenever they do so, they replicate what I call the “dyadic pattern.” I conclude by suggesting that this pattern, by coordinating older-evolved traits with new traits associated with tool use and language, has provided our species with a means to manage the evolutionary transition from the prehuman to the fully human mind.]

Philosophical Psychology, 2016

Since the 1970s, researchers have focused on visual joint attention as a way to observe and operationalize joint attention (JA). I will argue that this methodological choice has neglected other modalities and as a consequence might be missing important elements in the account of the development of JA and the evolutionary history of JA. I argue that by including other modes of interaction, such as touch, we open the possibility of finding that non-human primates and younger human infants engage in basic forms of JA. Moreover, I argue that touch, as a proximal mode of perception, is the ontogenetic precursor of social communication.