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Perspective-Taking and its Foundation in Joint Attention

Profile image of Henrike MollHenrike Moll

2011, Perception, Causation, and Objectivity

https://doi.org/10.1093/ACPROF:OSO/9780199692040.003.0016
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Abstract

Unlike any other species, humans can think about perspectives that are not currently their own. They can put themselves in the "mental shoes" of others and imagine how they perceive, think, or feel about an object or event. Perspectivity in its mature, adult form even goes beyond the ability to determine a specific person's point of view at a certain moment in time.. It entails the general comprehension that one and the same thing or event can be viewed or construed differently depending on one's standpointwhether this is a visuo-spatial, episternic, conceptual, or affective standpoint (perner, Brandl, and• Garnham, 2003). Fro.m a developmental perspective, the question arises when and how children acquire this knowledge. We offer a new look at the early ontogeny of understanding visual perception and experiences-with a major emphasis on the ability to take and understand the perspectives of others. The central claim we aim to develop is that human children first learn about perspectives within the context ofjoint attentional engagement. Infants' ability and motivation to jointly attend to objects and events with others allows them to share perceptions and experiences from very early on in life (Tomasello, Call, Carpenter, Behne, and Moll, 2005). This sharing sets the ground for later perspective-taking. Developmental inquiries ofjoint attention and perspective-taking have mostly been conducted in separation: The term "joint visual attentio~" is often used as a synonym for the specific case of gaze following, which is rarely looked at in terms of its relation to later perspective-taking; and models of perspective-taking have failed to recognize early joint attentional skills as a foundational first step towards perspectivity (but see Martin, Sokol, and Elvers, 2008). We want to bring these two strands together and argue thatjoint attention is a necessary condition for appreciating perspectives. Perspectival differences, however distinct and incompatible they may be-in the sense that they cannot consistently be held by one person at the same time-necessarily converge on one and the same object (where "object" can refer to a thing, an event, a state of affairs etc.

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Paula Rubio

Synthese, 2020

Language and Theory of Mind come together in communication, but their relationship has been intensely contested. I hypothesize that pragmatic markers connect language and Theory of Mind and enable their co-development and co-evolution through a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one skill boosts the development of the other. I propose to test this hypothesis by investigating two types of pragmatic markers: demonstratives (e.g., ‘this’ vs. ‘that’ in English) and articles (e.g., ‘a’ vs. ‘the’). Pragmatic markers are closed-class words that encode non-representational information that is unavailable to consciousness, but accessed automatically in processing. These markers have been associated with implicit Theory of Mind because they are used to establish joint attention (e.g., ‘I prefer that one’) and mark shared knowledge (e.g., ‘We bought the house’ vs. ‘We bought a house’). Here I develop a theoretical account of how joint attention (as driven by the use of demonstr...

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