Shared intentionality

The purpose of this article was to analyze the state of research on how children in inclusive preschools resolve peer conflicts. A systematic review of research results published in the scientific journal databases Scopus, Web of Science (WoS), Ebsco and Google Scholar between 2000 and 2024 was conducted using the PRISMA scheme. The results indicate that teacher intervention using a variety of strategies (6 papers) and programs to develop children's social skills (4 papers) is the main way to develop conflict resolution skills in preschool inclusive units. None of the studies analyzed describe ways for children with disabilities to resolve conflicts on their own. It can be concluded that teachers equipped with conflict resolution strategies can significantly influence preschool children's ability to resolve peer conflicts.

Michael Tomasello and others have adopted the notion of collective intentionality from the debate on social ontology and put it to use in the context of human cultural evolution. I argue that Tomasello’s application of the notion offers something that is, so far, absent in the social ontology literature: a genuine, non-mysterious form of ‘top-down’ influence of group-level processes on the individuals that collectively make up the entities to which collective intentionality is attributed. Collective intentionality, as described by Tomasello and colleagues, implicitly involves suprapersonal, transgenerational self-organizing cycles of socialization that set individuals up as functioning group members who, in turn, will socialize their offspring in a similar fashion. These cycles can, as I will argue, best be explained in terms of cultural group selection. While social ontologists take care to avoid group-to-individual top-down determination in order to avoid either a mysterious ‘hive-mind’ or objectionable historical teleology, I will argue that cultural group selection of self-organizing cycles of socialization is metaphysically bona fide.

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.

In this paper, we introduce the reader to current debates and theoretical disputes concerning minimal forms of shared intentionality. After briefly considering research on the phylogenetic origins of the human capacity to cooperate, we turn to minimal forms of shared intentionality observable in infants and young children. Based on these findings, we then briefly discuss whether dominant theories of shared intentionality adequately capture the full range of collective intentional phenomena or rely on overly complex cognitive assumptions. We conclude with an overview of the contributions to this special issue.

I am a 'child of time', I am in a we-community in the broadest sense … which is once again in community with generative subjects, with the closest and most distant ancestors. And it has 'worked' on me … all that I am is founded, partially by this ancestral tradition, partially by living tradition. (Husserl 1921 -1922, in Husserl 1973a, 223, my translation) Open Access.

This article proposes a novel approach to understanding the affective structure of human interaction, an aspect often overlooked in classical models. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from information theory (Shannon), complex systems theory (Morin), and affective neuroscience (Damasio), we conceptualize emotions as directional forces. Each force is characterized by its intensity (φ) and its orientation (θ) relative to a contextual goal or telos.

Studies in the field of neuroscience have shown that the neural network responsible for numeracy overlaps with the visual and spatial processing regions. Other studies in psychology also highlighted an association of visual-spatial processing with mathematical competence at the early stages of development. These findings suggest that research on the size of the focal area of attention (consciousness) can contribute to understanding the development of numeracy. In this case study, we verified the hypothesis of developing numeracy in children by training the rapid apperception of a few items called "subitizing." Shared intentionality promotes cognition from the onset. Therefore, in this study, we investigated this interaction modality to give an eight-year-old girl an insight into expanded apperception of an array in "subitizing" for improving her numerical competence. The child was stimulated to apperceive more objects while performing "subitizing" tasks with the mother. The course of treatment consisted of the four regimes of human-computer interaction based on rapid exposure to several pictures with a few dots. Simultaneously, this human-computer interaction also stimulated shared intentionality in the mother-child dyad for developing the child's rapid apprehension of these small quantities. The outcome of this intervention was an increase in the size of the focal point of attention (consciousness) and the development of numerical competence, where an association was established between the expanding apperception and the developing numeracy.

This study explores the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Michael Tomasello, three seminal figures in the field of cognitive psychology. Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology emphasizes the biological stages of cognitive development, highlighting how children construct knowledge through active interaction with their environment. Vygotsky introduces a sociocultural perspective, asserting that cognitive development is fundamentally shaped by social interactions and cultural tools, particularly language. Tomasello builds upon these foundations by integrating comparative primate studies, proposing that shared intentionality and cultural learning are unique to human cognition. Through a comprehensive examination of their theories, this study compares and critiques their contributions, illuminating the evolution of developmental psychology from individualistic to more socially and culturally integrated models. The analysis underscores the significance of integrating biological, social, and cultural factors in understanding cognitive development. The conclusion reflects on the enduring impact of these theorists on contemporary psychology and suggests directions for future research that bridges their perspectives.

Is there a qualitative difference between apes' and humans 'ability to estimate others' mental states', a.k.a. 'Theory-of-Mind'? After opting for the idea that expectations are empty profiles that recognize a particular content when it arrives, I apply the same description to 'vicarious expectations'-very probably present in apes. Thus, (empty) vicarious expectations and one's (full) contents are distinguished without needing metarepresentation. Then, I propose: First, vicarious expectations are enough to support apes' Theory-of-Mind (including 'spontaneous altruism'). Second, since vicarious expectations require a profile previously built in the subject that activates them, this subject cannot activate any vicarious expectation of mental states that are intrinsically impossible for him. Third, your mental states that think of me as a distal individual are intrinsically impossible states for me, and therefore, to estimate them, I must estimate your mental contents. This ability (the original nucleus of the human Theory-of-Mind) is essential in the human lifestyle. It is involved in unpleasant and pleasant self-conscious emotions, which respectively contribute to 'social order' and to cultural innovations. More basically, it makes possible human (prelinguistic or linguistic) communication, since it originally made possible the understanding of others' mental states as states that are addressed to me, and that are therefore impossible for me.

Questo articolo offre una riflessione sull’evoluzione del linguaggio
umano, esaminandone la complessità e il carattere multiforme. Nel corso del testo si esplora la natura segnica e simbolica del linguaggio, mettendo in luce come esso sia un sistema di segni che ha origine nei processi comunicativi del mondo animale. Vengono analizzati i processi evolutivi che hanno portato all’emergenza della dimensione sociale e culturale del linguaggio umano,evidenziando come la comunicazione simbolica umana sia un prodotto di convenzioni condivise e tramandate culturalmente. Questi elementi fanno sì che il linguaggio sia un fenomeno incarnato, radicato nei sistemi sensori,affettivi e motori del corpo umano che si è evoluto e intrecciato con i contestisocioculturali della nostra specie. Si conclude che comprendere l’evoluzione del linguaggio richiede un approccio interdisciplinare che integri gli studi culturali e la semiotica con la biologia evoluzionistica, scienze cognitive e neuroscienze.

This paper explores the intentionality of a captivating Jewish-Christian encounter in Amsterdam during the spring of 1657. It features Rabbi Nathan Shapira ha-Yerushalmi and a group of millenarian Christians led by the mystical chiliastPeter Serrarius. Rabbi Shapira, a renowned Kabbalist from the circle of Jacob ben Hayyim Tsemaḥ, was on a mission to raise funds for the beleaguered Ashkenazi Jewish community of Jerusalem. He was convinced that their collective woes were the dramatic overture to the Messiah's grand debut. Meanwhile, the Collegiants–a radical Protestant Christian group –were eagerly awaiting apocalyptic events around 1656. Richard Henry Popkin famously described this meeting as a “touching moment”in Jewish-Christian relations, particularly noting the Rabbi’s surprisingly “philo-Christian”presentation of rabbinic texts. This study examines the source text by contextualisation and reduction. It shows that there was a shared intention, even if different agents participated for different reasons based on their own distinct religious tradition.

La inteligibilidad se relaciona con la agencia de la persona al guiar su comportamiento para que sea razonable y darle sentido durante el transcurso de la acción. Sin embargo, esto no siempre sucede. A veces, la inteligibilidad fracasa y las acciones del sujeto se distancian de lo que antes había tenido sentido para él o para los demás. En ese momento aparecen lo que he denominado malentendidos en la agencia. Una de las causas de los malentendidos en la agencia es cuando el proceso emocional confluye con el proceso de actuación. Entonces, las emociones interfieren en la acción y producen una disociación cognitiva que dificulta la interpretación por parte de los agentes de lo que está ocurriendo en la escena, lo que genera una ruptura entre la inteligibilidad y el dar-sentido. Esto, además, da lugar a serios problemas de entendimiento y de comunicación. Es por ello que el análisis de los malentendidos en la agencia es tan importante.

Gerda Walther's approach to sociality is unique in that it does not start with an act of apperception, with some intellectual form of recognition of the other, but with a very immediate feeling which even precedes thinking and reflection. The key concept here is unification, an emotional connection we involuntarily establish with others. My main goal is to elucidate this concept and its various modifications presented by Walther to account for different forms of communities. In the first part of the paper, I present important ideas of three of Walther's phenomenological interlocutors, namely Edmund Husserl, Alexander Pfänder and Edith Stein. In the second part, I show how Walther combines and modifies theses ideas in her theory of the ontology of social communities. Finally, I discuss how the concept of unification is still relevant today in the context of "we-experiences" of social ontology. By contrast to some contemporary approaches, one can understand collective social phenomena with Walther as the plural within the self, instead of a pluralization of self-awareness.

The variability of the contexts of the social child’s development  This article discusses three different educational microsystems in the child’s social development in the period of middle childhood and does so in the light of the theoretical premises of developmental psychology (Berk, 2002; Parten, 1932; Smith, 2000) and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological psychology (1979).  The empirical project was based on a natural experiment with three measurements: one ascertainment phase and two control phases. The techniques used included observation sheets (e.g. M. Przetacznikowa’s Child’s Behaviour Observation Scale), film recordings, participant observation records, and the author’s own techniques. The findings were collected over a period of two years from two groups of kindergarten children (45 in total) aged 3 to 6 (from three pedagogical systems: Montessorian, Waldorf and standard). The findings in the areas of social development covered by this dissertation indicate a remarkable growt...

This paper aims to place the general thesis for a species-unique “shared” or “we” intentionality, against the theoretical background of the material engagement approach. We will argue that the human ability to enact and share intentions rests upon a relational and participatory foundation of situated activity where intentional transactions between humans as well as between humans and things (in the broadest sense of material environment) are inseparable from the situational affordances of their engagement. Based on that, the paper advocates for an ecological-enactive account of shared intentionality which understands material engagement as central to the evolution and development of human social cognition.

In Becoming Human (2021), evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello provides a comprehensive account of the social intentionality which makes us human. One of the many themes discussed is the intentionality required for switching between perspectives. A number of interesting claims are made in these parts, including that great apes (and young infants) have no sense of perspective, no understanding of false beliefs, and do not know they could be wrong about how they experience things. While I am sympathetic to the general purport of Tomasello's theory of switching perspectives, I believe his theory mispresents the intentional skills that are involved in various pre-conceptual forms of switching perspectives, to the extent that it is worth a brief commentary. I first outline Tomasello's theory of perspectivalness, and subsequently develop an alternative, based on the phenomenological distinction between operative and thematic intentionality.

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the informationtransmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of codebased semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

Celem podjętych badań było poznanie oceny przeprowadzonej przez nauczycieli wychowania przedszkolnego w zakresie gotowości szkolnej dzieci w czasie pandemii, kiedy placówki przedszkolne pracowały w warunkach reżimu sanitarnego. Materiał i metody: Badania przeprowadzono metodą sondażu diagnostycznego z wykorzystaniem autorskiego kwestionariusza ankiety wśród 90 nauczycieli wychowania przedszkolnego pracujących w przedszkolach na terenie miasta Biała Podlaska i powiatu bialskiego. Wyniki: Analiza danych wykazała tzw. "słabe punkty" edukacji na odległość w wychowaniu przedszkolnym. Nauczyciele w przeprowadzonej ocenie wskazali na umiejętności, których część dzieci nie opanowała, szczególnie w sferze emocjonalnej i społecznej, zaś opanowane przez nie umiejętności w sferze poznawczej oceniono bardzo dobrze. Wnioski: Zauważono potrzebę poszukiwań nowych rozwiązań i narzędzi w pracy z dziećmi w wieku przedszkolnym w warunkach edukacji zdalnej, by ocena gotowości szkolnej opierała się nie tylko na obserwacji dzieci ale na ich różnego rodzaju aktywnościach, wytworach i swobodnych zabawach.

Discussions about the evolution of human social cognition usually portray the social environment of early hominins as highly hierarchical and dominant. In this evolutionary narrative, our propensity for violence was overcome in our lineage by a key increase of our intellectual capacities. However, I will argue in this paper that we are at least equally justified in believing that our early hominin ancestors were less aggressive and hierarchical than what is claimed by those models. This view is consistent with the available comparative and paleoanthropological evidence. I will show that this alternative model not only does not support long-held views of human origins but also has important consequences for debates about the evolution of our capacity for normative guidance.

Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly, either because they are absent or because they have no physical form (e.g., people we have not met, concepts like 'justice'). What enables language to transmit such knowledge? We propose that a referential link between words, referents, and mental representations of those referents is key. This link enables us to form, access, and modify mental representations even when the referents themselves are absent ('absent reference'). In this review we consider the developmental and evolutionary origins of absent reference, integrating previously disparate literatures on absent reference in language and gesture in very young humans and gesture in non-human primates. We first evaluate when and how infants acquire absent reference during the process of language acquisition. With this as a foundation, we consider the evidence for absent reference in gesture in infants and in non-human primates. Finally, having woven these literatures together, we highlight new lines of research that promise to sharpen our understanding of the development of reference and its role in learning about the absent and the abstract. Talking about the absent and the abstract: Referential communication in language and gesture Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly (e.g., Deacon, 1997). We learn and reason about people we have never met, about time that hasn't yet passed, and about abstract concepts, such as justice or abelian groups 1 (e.g., Freyd, 1983; Jackendoff, 1997). We readily communicate about such phenomena, learn new information about them, and when (and if) these phenomena ever become perceptually available, we successfully identify them using the knowledge acquired through language. This ability, which appears to be uniquely human, has long been the focus of inquiry among psychologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers-from Plato's early work connecting objects, words, knowledge and knowers (see Scolnikov, 2006, for a review) to Frege, Locke and Russel's inquiries into how we can possibly acquire new knowledge from language alone, in the absence of perceptual information about the referent(s) (e.g., Frege, 1948; Locke, 1847; Russell, 1905). Despite the long and productive history of this inquiry among thinkers and empirical researchers, it remains an open question what cognitive capacities give rise to our ability to learn, reason, and communicate about absent or abstract phenomena from language alone. We propose that at the heart of this problem is the capacity for linguistic reference 2-a three-way referential link between words, their referents (if they are real-world phenomena), and mental representations of those referents. By establishing a referential connection between language and mental representations, this link that permits us to form, access, and modify representations on the basis of language input alone, with no perceptual access to the 1 An abelian group is an algebraic object-a group in which the group operation is commutative-named after Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel (see e.g., Fuchs, 2015). 2 We treat 'linguistic reference' as synonymous to 'verbal reference'. The term 'linguistic' is used here to contrast reference in language with reference in other human and non-human communicative systems, such as gesture. communicated information (for a discussion on the development of linguistic reference, see L.

Compared to other animals, humans appear to have a special motivation to share experiences and mental states with others (Clark, 2006; Grice, 1975), which enables them to enter a condition of ‘we’ or shared intentionality (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005). Shared intentionality has been suggested to be an evolutionary response to unique problems faced in complex joint action coordination (Levinson, 2006; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005) and to be unique to humans (Tomasello, 2014). The theoretical and empirical bases for this claim, however, present several issues and inconsistencies. Here, we suggest that shared intentionality can be approached as an interactional achievement, and that by studying how our closest relatives, the great apes, coordinate joint action with conspecifics, we might demonstrate some correlate abilities of shared intentionality, such as the appreciation of joint commitment. We provide seven examples from bonobo joint activities to illustrate our ...

The concept of mind is widely used in today's debates on the lives, behavior, and cognition of prehistoric hominins. It is therefore presumably an important concept. Yet it is very rarely defined, and in most cognitive-archaeological literature, it does not seem to point to anything distinctive. In recent years, talk of minds has also been criticized as being internalistic and dualistic, in supposed contrast to new materialistic and externalistic approaches. In this paper, I aim to defend a different concept of mind which can be used in theorizing about prehistoric hominin cognition. In short, my concept is simply that of the first-person viewpoint, understood in a naturalized manner, and as characterized by intentionality. The discussion proceeds by examining what I perceive to be three prevailing misconceptions about minds, which I derive mainly from the archaeological literature. I use this discussion to outline my own concept of mind, as well as to defend it against the frequently heard criticisms of dualism and internalism. In the final parts, I briefly discuss some potential practical applications of an intentional approach to past minds. Here I focus on certain conceptual problems in debates on symbolic cognition.

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Background The DeDiMa battery is designed for assessing students’ mathematical learning profiles, and it has been used to validate a 4-dimensional model for classifying mathematical learning difficulties. The model arises from existing hypotheses in the cognitive psychology and neuroscience literature, while the DeDiMa battery provides a reliable set of mathematical tasks that help to match characteristics of students’ mathematical performances to their more basic learning difficulties. Participants and procedure In this report we address the question of how these tools can help sketch out a student’s mathematical learning profile. The participants are 5th and 6th grade students. Results We compare the emerging profiles of two students with mathematical learning difficulties (MLD) matched for age, performance on a standardized test, non-verbal IQ, and educational experiences. The profiles are very different. Conclusions We believe that this approach can inform the design of individu...

The current study explored the relationships between declarative pointing and theory of mind abilities in 30 children between 3 and 4 years of age. Measures used to examine theory of mind (ToM) included a parental questionnaire and the Scaling of Theory of Mind Tasks. Results showed a dissociation between expressive and informative pointing, which have been regarded as two subcategories of the declarative function. ToM abilities were significantly related to the production of informative pointing, but not to the production of expressive pointing. This distinction might be explained by special features associated with informative pointing, such as early signs of cooperation abilities. Our results might have key implications for psychologists, as they may help improve evaluation and intervention programs for the development of social skills in preschoolers.

Empirical evidence shows the efficiency of coordinated interaction in mother-infant dyads through unintentional movements: social entrainment, early imitation. The growing body of the literature evidently shows an impact of arousal on group performance and spreading emotion from one individual to another organism, called emotional contagion. The emotion sharing somehow stimulates shared intentionality in individuals of "primary group". Although there is increasing evidence of consistency between some "motion" and "emotion" concepts, research demonstrating the synergy of the integrative process of all these five concepts is limited. This study presents a dynamic integrated model of motion-emotions synergy that combines and manages all the above-mentioned appearances-the Model of Coherent Intelligence. This model is supported by arguments that are strictly based on experimental evidence in the literature and 24 online experiments in 2020. Primary groups show empirical evidence of a more significant accuracy in problem-solving in the coherent intelligence state. In specific, we conducted 13 online experiments in dyads (116 subjects) with P-value < 0.001, and 7 experiments in primary group adults (41 subjects) with the P-value < 0.002. Experiments with not well-known adults from the secondary group show the effect only within task UL3 (41 subjects in experiment No.12 with translation of unfamiliar language). Non-semantic tasks-SL3 (synthetic language) and US3 (two-color symbols)-did not stimulate the effect in 3 experiments with 207 secondary group subjects (unfamiliar students). The outcome demonstrates inter-brain connectivity through ongoing emotions and motion dynamics, creating cooperation levels beyond sensory modalities.

According to recent studies in developmental psychology and neuroscience, symbolic language is essentially intersubjective. Empathetically relating to others renders possible the acquisition of linguistic constructs. Intersubjectivity develops in early ontogenetic life when interactions between mother and infant mutually shape their relatedness. Empirical findings suggest that the shared attention and intention involved in those interactions is sustained as it becomes internalized and embodied. Symbolic language is derivative and emerges from shared intentionality. In this paper, we present a formalization of shared intentionality based upon a quantum approach. From a phenomenological viewpoint, we investigate the nonseparable, dynamic and sustainable nature of social cognition and evaluate the appropriateness of quantum interaction for modelling intersubjectivity.

The article attempts to answer the question: why standardization of early education can limit the development of children and disintegrate the learning process? The main topic is focused on the issue of standardization in early childhood education. The goals of education, core curriculum, expected developmental effects and learning outcomes are most often standardized. The standardization process has specific consequences that affect the quality of education and development opportunities for students. The effect of this approach, especially close to politicians, stakeholders, is limited variety of educational approaches, fragmentation, depersonalization of education and subordinating it to standards and set goals. All these activities should favor the control of results achieved. The destination is defined at the beginning of the education process. The achievement of “experts’” aims is the basis for assessments of the value of the teacher’s work and the effectiveness of educational ...

According to Deely, because humans are “semiotic animals”, the “ways
of signs” structure our consciousness and experience in ways that inherently
support our ability not only to know that signs exist, but to recognize that
“the way of signs” can be altered, reconstituted and invented into being
(Deely 2005, 2010, 2015). In qualifying the “semiotic animal”, Deely –
with Petrilli (1998) and Ponzio (see, in particular, Deely, Petrilli, Ponzio
2005) noted that because humans are conscious of the existence of signs,
we are not only capable of recognizing, manipulating, and making use of
them (as many other species do), but we are also able to contrive and mobilize new signs and “ways of signs” in the universe in exceedingly intrinsic, inventive, and calculated ways.

An important thesis discussed in the literature on shared agency is that group identification motivates pre-school children to act together. This paper aims at further illuminating this thesis by clarifying what triggers the process of group identification in young children. It is argued that joint attention, among other functions in supporting joint actions, can reveal to the co-attenders that they share some preferences. Since sharing preferences has been established by the literature to be a reliable motivation of group identification and since joint attention has an early emergence in development, one can consider joint attention to be a putative trigger of group identification in pre-school children. If this is on the right track, group identification, joint attention, and preferences identify a cluster of minimal pre-conditions for joint actions.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the role of self-directed metacognitive capacities in fostering inter-temporal coordination of one&#x27;s own intentional conduct. Our striking talents for long-term planning are considered here as an amazing feat that needs explaining, in view of the biological mechanisms that ensure our responsiveness to the immediate demands of the environment. This view is partially contrasted with other approaches, most prominently Bratman&#x27;s planning theory of intentions, where plans and long-terms goals are taken as a ...

A motor representation is agent-neutral if it concerns an action which is not one&#x27;s own or, in the case of joint action, not entirely one&#x27;s own. ... Two or more motor representations are reciprocal just if there is a single outcome which each motor representation represents. ... Premise Reciprocal agent-neutral motor representation enables joint action ... &#x27;the social relation between individuals modulates action simulation ... motor activation during action anticipation depends on the ... relation between the actor and the observer ... Simulation of another person&#x27;s ...

This research was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (R00023 4949). The author would like to thank Zita Bareham for her invaluable assistance in coding the play sessions and the reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

The psychological literature on the development of gestures during the first year of life has been limited. It has mainly focused on the development of pointing at around 11 months of age, considering it the gesture that allows triadic interactions. However, recent studies have argued for the importance of earlier ostensive gestures (showing and giving), not only as precursors of pointing, but also as important gestures for early cognitive and communicative development. These studies have also emphasized the mediating role of materiality and of others (adults and peers) in communicative acts, especially in pre-verbal interactions. This paper reports a longitudinal study of first-year infants in an Infant School classroom in Madrid. Through a microgenetic analysis both infants' gestures and teachers' educational actions related to gesture development were investigated. The results highlight (1) the central role of the teacher in the birth and configuration of infants' gestural repertoire; and (2) materiality as a configurative aspect of communicative interactions during this period as infants communicate not only about objects but through them. Among the types of gestures observed, self-directed gestures predominated, especially ostensive gestures, these being related to early self-regulation processes. Gesture development could be understood as a process of progressive distancing of the infant from or between the material world and himself/ herself. In this process, the teacher can encourage, redirect, and structure the infant's productions through adjustment of their educational activity.

Distinguishing intentional behavior from accidental behavior is a crucial component of social cognition and a major developmental achievement. It has often been assumed that developmental changes in intentional reasoning result from a gradual sophistication in the ability to discern intentions in action. We take issue with this notion, demonstrating that data from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology are more consistent with the hypothesis that it is instead a gradual sophistication in the ability to understand accidents that drives developmental change.

Received models of cooperative action overlook the way that the social environment itself features in collective intentions; recognising the divergent ways that norms function can help explain how people collaborating covertly are not considered irrational even though the things they are doing are totally contrary to the principles and convictions they sustain as individual agents.

We try not just to reconcile but to “integrate” Cognitivism and Behaviorism by a theory of different forms of purposiveness in behavior and mind. This also implies a criticism of the Dual System theory and a claim on the strong interaction and integration of Sist1 (automatic) and Sist2 (deliberative), based on reasons, preferences, and decisions. We present a theory of different kinds of teleology. Mere “functions” of the behavior: finalism not represented in the mind of the agent, not “regulating” the behavior. Two kinds of teleological mental representations: true “Goals” in control-theory, cybernetic view, with “goal-driven” behavior (intentional action); vs. Expectations in Anticipatory Classifiers: a reactive but anticipatory device, explaining the “instrumental” (finalistic) nature of Skinner’s reinforcement learning. We present different kinds of Goals and goal processing and on this ground the theory of what “intentions” are. On such basis, we can discuss Kathy Wilkes’s hint...

What is involved in acting together with others? Most shared agency theorists endorse the Shared Intention Thesis, i.e., the claim that shared agency necessarily involves shared intentions. This article dissents from this orthodoxy and offers a minimalist account of shared agency—one where parties to shared activities need not form rich webs of interrelated psychological states. My account has two main components: a conceptual analysis of shared agency in terms of the notion of plan, and an explanation of undertheorized agency‐sharing mechanisms. My analysis states that we act together just in case our activities conform to a plan and that plan figures in an explanation of our activities’ joint conformity to it. To sloganize: shared activity is plan‐coordinated activity. Sometimes, plan‐coordination goes by way of shared intentions. However, besides shared intentions, there are at least two additional families of agency‐sharing mechanisms. The first features a central planner who determines the content of a plan and attributes the different parts of that plan to a collection of agents. The second does away with the planner and involves a roughly Darwinian selection of patterns of activity. Both families of mechanisms enable us to act together even in the absence of shared intentions.

Naturalistic joint action between two agents typically requires both motor coordination and strategic cooperation. However, these two fundamental processes have systematically been studied independently. We presented 50 dyads of adult participants with a novel collaborative task that combined different levels of motor noise with different levels of strategic noise, to determine whether the sense of agency (the experience of control over an action) reflects the interplay between these low-level (motor) and high-level (strategic) dimensions. We also examined how dominance in motor control could influence prosocial behaviors. We found that self-agency was particularly dependent on motor cues, whereas joint agency was particularly dependent on strategic cues. We suggest that the prime importance of strategic cues to joint agency reflects the co-representation of coagents’ interests during the task. Furthermore, we observed a reduction in prosocial strategies in agents who exerted domina...

Abstract. Shared intentionality is well-known as a key aspect of social relation-building. Anthropological studies show that human infants begin early to establish social relations via shared intentionality, which is not topically restricted to the satisfaction of basic needs. Contrary to the widespread opinion that little children have to abstract meaning structures from incoherent sense data they are initially confronted with, in Waldorf education the early co-intentional skill is reasoned by a holistic state of consciousness of the child. Thus, it could not be a lack of common meaning structures which characterizes the mental state of children, but rather the intention to individualize adequate meanings at experienced breaking points occurring in the holistic state in order to explore the world and building social relations. Based on this in view, several psychological and philosophical models are examined in order to attain a sound conceptualization of shared intentionality. Fur...

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective action according to our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations prese...

El libro que comentaré a continuación compila doce artículos de Michael Bratman publicados entre el año 2000 y el 2005. Los artículos giran en torno a aquellas estructuras psicológicas que subyacen a nuestra autonomía personal. La función de nuestros juicios evaluativos a la hora de posibilitar esa peculiar capacidad y el estatus teórico de la propuesta de Bratman son los otros dos bloques temáticos que unifican el material contenido en este libro. Todos los artículos compilados aquí presuponen distinciones conceptuales elaboradas por Bratman en libros anteriores. 1 La novedad, sin embargo, es que Bratman aplica esas distinciones a los tópicos que acabo de mencionar, desarrollando una teoría compleja y sugerente sobre el valor de nuestra autonomía dentro de un marco explicativo naturalista. El plan de esta nota crítica es el siguiente: en la sección 1 esbozo los contornos que enmarcan gran parte del debate reciente en torno a nuestro concepto de "autonomía personal". Asumido esto, la sección 2 expone los aspectos más generales de la teoría de la intención defendida por Bratman en Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reasons (1987/1999). Allí explico en qué sentido algunas de las distinciones adelantadas en este libro permiten a Bratman modelar una determinada imagen del sujeto autónomo. La sección 3, finalmente, presenta una objeción contra este modelo de autonomía.

The conference brought together scholars from various academic fields and different levels of research experience with a shared interest for the study of social interaction. The program included invited talks and keynote presentations given by more advanced researchers, as well as oral and poster presentations primarily authored by young researchers. In line with the general ideas of the Centre for Research on Social Interactions 1 , the CRSI-YR conference aimed at promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. The event thus provided researchers at the beginning of their academic career with a concrete opportunity to discover and discuss innovative research topics and methodologies, to partake in scientific debates from various strands of social interaction research, and to benefit from the experience of more advanced researchers. Since a detailed report of the conference has been presented elsewhere 2 , we will not provide more details here than specifying that the complete list of the 36 (oral and poster) presentations of the conference can be found in the aforementioned publication.