Joint Action

Dialogic resonance, or the tendency for speakers to reproduce constructions across speaker turns, is a compelling type of coordination in everyday conversation. In (1), speaker B resonates with A along words, structures and meanings, while at the same time disagreeing with him. Moreover, as indicated by the square brackets, the disagreement is produced in overlap with A’s prior turn, a turn-taking pattern that has previously been more commonly associated with agreement (Pomerantz, 1984).

(1) A: she hasn’t hitherto been particularly interested in religious things [has she]
B: [you mean] she hasn’t particularly been up at seven AM

In this study, we take a closer look at why and when speakers make use of each other’s contributions in dialogue. What are the social and cognitive aspects underpinning this behaviour? Previous work in two different areas of dialogue research offers different explanations. Du Bois (2014), on the one hand, argues that resonance is a socially motivated phenomenon that occurs for various communicative purposes, while Garrod and Pickering (2004) regard dialogue in general to be an automatic cognitive process facilitated by the reuse of prior expression. In this study, we aim to provide empirical evidence in support of the close association between social motivation and cognitive facilitation in dialogic resonance in everyday conversation.
We explore (i) social motivation through the functions that resonance has in discourse (agreement vs. disagreement) and (ii) cognitive facilitation through measurements of turn transitions. Firstly, based on previous research on the potential for resonance to occur in disagreement (Dori-Hacohen, 2017), we predict that

• resonance is more likely to be used by speakers in disagreement, while non-resonance is the preferred option in agreement.

Secondly, based on the view that the reuse of prior expression has a facilitating effect (Garrod & Pickering, 2004), we predict that

• transitions between speaker turns are faster in resonating sequences compared to when the sequences are constructed anew.

In addition, we explore whether or not there are timing differences between agreement and disagreement.
The sample contains 100,000 words of everyday face-to-face conversation among dyads from London–Lund Corpus 2 of spoken English. Using ELAN, we extracted 260 resonating and 316 non-resonating sequences, and analysed them in terms of function (agreement vs. disagreement) and the duration of turn transitions. Then, we fitted mixed-effects regression analyses to the data to test the predictions above.
The results provide full support for the first prediction. We propose that this is due to the cooperative nature of everyday conversation and the important role that resonance plays in mitigating the force of the ensuing disagreement through linguistic parallels. The second prediction also receives support. We see this as an indication that resonance has a facilitating effect on turn uptake, prompted by the activation of the same linguistic representations in the prior turn. Even though disagreements were expressed later than agreements, their mean durations were still strikingly fast (200–300 ms). This leads us to conclude that, in resonance, the face-saving intersubjective motivations of resonance combine with its facilitating cognitive effect to promote smooth communication.

References
Dori-Hacohen, G. (2017). Creative resonance and misalignment stance: Achieving distance in one Hebrew interaction. Functions of Language, 24(1), 16–40.
Du Bois, J. W. (2014). Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics, 25(3), 359–410.
Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy? TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 8(1), 8–11.
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds), Structures of social action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 57–101). Cambridge University Press.

The notion of collective responsibility is not without its difficulty. One may claim that, as men are responsible for the lives they lead, so collectively they must be responsible for the resultant situation. But that claim is too rapid to be convincing. No doubt, single elements in the resulting situation are identical with the actions or the effects for which individuals are responsible. But the resulting situation as a whole was neither foreseen nor intended, or when it does happen that it was, still such foresight and intention are apt to reside not in the many but the few and rather in secret schemes and machinations than in public avowal. 1 Thus Lonergan on some difficulties in an idea that he will nonetheless go on to defend. In this short note I will look at one difficulty in the idea of collective responsibility by introducing the idea of collective intention. Here we may begin by recalling St. Anselm, " Every will inasmuch as it wills something, wills as it does because of something … Wherefore every will has a what and a why, for we will absolutely nothing unless there be a reason why we will. " 2 Or in other words, we may speak of an agent X who wills an object Y because of an intention Z. The problem as regards common responsibility is that we can suppose two agents (or groups sharing a common aim) who find a common cause in wanting the same object but do so for different reasons. In other words, X1 and X2 both want Y but X1 wants Y for the sake of Z1 but X2 for the sake of Z2 where Z1 ≠ Z2. We may also recall that St. Thomas, in his commentary on that locus classicus of Aristotle on the idea of responsibility, by no means reduces responsibility to intentionality. For he argues that " it is unreasonable to assert that a man who does unjust actions does not wish to be unjust. " And he deploys the metaphor of someone who goes for a walk on a hot day and becomes sweaty. 3 Although it was unintended it was foreseeable that the walker would become sweaty – but concretely the agent is responsible. For here and now the choice is either to walk and get sweaty or to avoid the sweat by not walking: the choice manifests the preference schedules of the agent. In this sense one wills the effect if one wills the cause. Returning to collective responsibility, we can imagine two groups getting together to attain a common object, perhaps agreeing to act in particular circumstances (at a definite time, for example) when the action may be seen to lead to consequences that are actively intended by the first group but not by the other. Indeed, if such intentions were spelled out to the others some of the others would harbour misgivings on that project: X2 does not want Z1. This of course underlines Lonergan's point about " secret schemes and machinations " – for the first group may be aware that their intentions are not commonly shared, and this is why they keep them secret. Still, in this example where certain consequences are foreseen by only one group, we can suppose that eventually those consequences will become obvious to others, at any rate to those willing to raise questions-awkward because they indict X2 for choosing Y when it contributed to Z1 even though X2 did not intend Z1.

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of categorization. We discuss how theoretical perspectives and neuroscientific evidence are converging towards the current paradigm of embodied cognition. From this perspective, we discuss the role of action and simulation in cognitive processes, which lead to the perceptual recognition of objects, and actions and to their conceptual categorization.

This study focuses on intervention processes that support sustainable agriculture. It argues that we know very little about how to intervene for sustainable agriculture, particularly for those areas where the Green Revolution has passed almost unnoticed and where degradation of natural resources is the normal practices, rather than the exception. As sustainability is a constructed, contextual and complicated concept, it is far from clear what sustainability is, how it comes about, and what it is actually for, although it has been at the top of the agenda for nearly a decade. No substantial biological or socialinstitutional breakthroughs or innovations have yet emerged, despite the considerable efforts that have been devoted so far to sustainable agriculture. Impressively, the word "sustainability" is such a powerful symbol that the very thought of an unsustainable agriculture immediately conjures up images of massive human deprivation and suffering and, ultimately, mass st...

Collaborating with others takes intriguing and complex forms. We collaborate with others in a wide variety of activities: from team sports to shared labour, from committee work to mass demonstrations, from dancing to reminiscing together about old times. Recently, philosophy of mind and cognitive science has turned to theorizing and studying socio-cognitive interactions of these kinds, asking what kinds of adaptive and shared intelligence are involved in collaborative activities in small groups. Theorists focus on complex and intricate cognitive and affective processes that spread beyond a single individual’s brain – distributed across the body and/or the environment, coopting objects and driving interactions with other individuals. We explore embodied practices of collaboration in sporting and other performance contexts, drawing on rich literatures from cognitive psychology, sports psychology, organisational psychology and social ontology.  Our interest in both sport and embodied minds centres on cases in which people are not working or moving alone, but in which individual participants’ unique skills and capacities are coordinated with those of others in service of shared goals. We identify a range of levels of socio-cognitive processes that interact to drive and sustain embodied collaboration in a variety of contexts. By appreciating how such processes interact, we can begin to understand how human collaboration is achieved and maintained.

This contribution surveys strategies for analyzing highly coordinated forms of collaborative dance improvisation, based on tango argentino. Specifically, we take interest (a) in micro-coordination at the <1 s timescale in dance elements
such as steps or rotations, (b) in meso-scale patterns of 2–8 step “figures”, and (c) in general enabling macro-patterns maintained throughout, a kind of “grammar” of tango. Across these timescales, dancers supply individual action-readiness,
dynamic stability, proper form and connectivity, while jointly “managing” structures of interpersonal coordination such as enabling configurations. Our study engages qualitative and quantitative methods in a dialogue. Starting with micro-genetic elicitation interviews, dancers reported ideomotor concepts, perceptual triggers, and didactic imagery. Besides general (e.g. postural) habits, task-specific forms or techniques, and attentional foci, this yields insights into the
interlocking contributions and information flow between tango leaders and followers within units as small as half-steps. The subjective data was then “frontloaded”
into a motion-capture study in which six expert couples, fitted with 2 × 21 light-point reflectors, executed various tango techniques. We developed kinematic indicators for individual and interpersonal coordination (degree of coupling, relative movement onset and action timing, role specifics); we also measured geometries underlying various tango tasks and style variations. The combined data suggests a micro-coordination model where dynamic interdependencies enable precise mutually adaptive action. The criss-crossing signals, e.g. when the increasing lability of
the leader’s torso triggers the follower’s leg extension at the beginning of a forward step, suggests task-, phase- and body-part specific contingencies whereby leaders
and followers micro-coordinate actions with respect to one another.

John Searle’s account of collective intentions in action appears to have all the theoretical pros of the non-reductivist view on collective intentionality without the metaphysical cons of committing to the existence of group minds. According to Searle, when we collectively intend to do something together, we intend to cooperate in order to reach a collective goal. Intentions in the first-person plural form therefore have a particular psychological form or mode, for the we-intender conceives of his or her intended actions as singular contributions by means of which – or: by way of which – a collective goal is pursued. Accordingly, we-intentions are held to have a psychological mode with a “collective goal by means of (viz. by way of) singular contribution” structure, which makes them primitive and irreducible to intentions in the I-form. It is further contended that, albeit primitive and irreducible, we-intentions are not the mental states of an alleged group mind but always of an individual’s mind. This paper targets Searle’s claim of irreducibility by developing an argument whose aim is to show that, pace Searle, it is possible to track the idea of intentions with a psychological mode structured in terms of “collective goal by means of (viz. by way of) singular contribution” back to the concept of intentions in the I-form. The argument mainly relies on the idea that Searle’s technical expressions “being a collective goal by means of singular contribution intention in action” or “being a collective goal by way of singular contribution intention in action” are susceptible to conceptual analysis. The upshot of this analysis is that we-intentions can be reduced to complex bundles of mental states, all of which come in the first-person singular form. If this argument is sound, Searlean we-intentions do not belong to a primitive kind of mental states.

Dewey’s social ontology could be characterized as a habit ontology, an ontology of habit qua second nature that offers us an account of intentionality, social statuses, institutions, and norms in terms of habituations. Such an account offers us a promising alternative to contemporary intentionalist and deontic approaches to social ontology such as Searle’s. Furthermore, it could be the basis of a social ontology better suited to explain both the maintenance and the transformation of social reality.
In the first part I will characterize Dewey’s model as a social ontology based on the notion of habit, and present it as an alternative to intentionalist approaches to social reality. In the second part I will argue that habit ontology offers us an account of social norms that is based on a peculiar understanding of the notion of ‘status’, and represents an alternative to deontic accounts. In the third part I will claim that Dewey’s notion of “public” offers us a dynamic understanding of social institutions and a ‘reactive’ notion of collective intentionality as an achievement rather than as a presupposition of social practices. In the final section I will summarize some advantages of the Deweyan over the Searlean social ontology concerning our understanding of acceptance, maintenance and transformation of statuses, and of the role played by the ‘background’.

The basic function of emotion in life is to know what matters in a situation in a way that tightly connects cognition to evaluation and action. Emotions focus our attention on what’s significant in the light of our aims and values, and they dispose us to act. Emotions are thus practical knowledge par excellence. As such, they are indispensable, at least for our kind of agency. To put all of this in a simple slogan: emotions are our way of getting our act together.
This chapter opens with a discussion of how this works in the individual case (1.), and then proceeds to examining how this carries over to joint action (2.). It is argued that in spite of some important differences between these cases, in order for us to get our joint act together, we need to know what matters to us. For such knowledge to be suitably related to action, it has to involve a single unified evaluative perspective (3.). The way in which this perspective is unified is plural self-knowledge: a non-observational and non-inferential sense of our concerns as ours. Such emotion is a collection’s, or a group’s; its subject is plural rather than singular.

In this paper we articulate an empirical approach to the study of social action in digitallymediated contexts. Our approach extends Carl Couch’s theory of cooperative action, which is based on a set of “elements of sociation”: acknowledged attentiveness, mutual responsiveness, congruent functional identities, shared focus, and social objective. Three additional elements of sociation, adapted from studies of jazz performance, are added to the list of elements that characterize coordinated action: a formal theory of task performance, an informal theory of task performance, and synchronicity of individual actions. Using audio-visual recordings of gameplay, the minutiae of social action were captured and subjected to repetitive, reflexive and collaborative analysis in order to identify these patterns, including their potential causes and consequences. We use data from two games—the single-player real-time strategy game Eufloria and the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft...

Common ground is a problematic concept. It is a necessary part of any pragmatic theory because it names the context that speakers take for granted in carrying out a communicative act, or in other words the background against which a signal shows up as a particular pattern of sounds or shapes, words, and social effects. But it is too often either ignored or treated as a stative body of information, a definition which makes it impossible to understand how common ground is used and instantiated in actual conversations. This essay remedies this problem by presenting a novel account of common ground which subsumes most extant theories by approaching the topic separately on each of three levels of explanation. I begin by presenting a dynamical definition of common ground based on elements of Stalnaker’s theory of speaker presupposition, on which common ground is the information presented by a speaker as not-at-issue in the process of carrying out some speech act. I then justify and enrich this approach with a psycholinguistic account of the uses of common ground in conversation based on Clark’s work on joint action, and show that common ground underlies both egocentric and cooperative communication. I then justify and enrich the psycholinguistic account by showing how it is instantiated on a biological level as intra- and interpersonal synergies in a conversation. Finally, I use an analysis of referring to illustrate the relations between these three levels of description, which between presupposition and joint action and between joint action and synergies I take to be one of coherence, clarification, and specifying the object of explanation. In the other direction - from synergies to joint action and joint action to presupposition - the relation is one of grounding and providing naturalistic credentials via mechanistic details. The originality and generality of this explanatory strategy suggest tremendous opportunities for pragmatic research from a dynamical perspective.

Theory of mind explanations of how we know other minds are limited in several ways. First, they construe intersubjective relations too narrowly in terms of the specialized cognitive abilities of explaining and predicting another person’s mental states and behaviours. Second, they sometimes draw conclusions about second-person interaction from experiments designed to test third-person observation of another’s behaviour. As a result, the larger claims that are sometimes made for theory of mind, namely that theory of mind is our primary and pervasive means for understanding other persons, go beyond both the phenomenological and the scientific evidence. I argue that the interpretation of ‘primary intersubjectivity’ as merely precursory to theory of mind is inadequate. Rather, primary intersubjectivity, understood as a set of embodied practices and capabilities, is not only primary in a developmental sense, but is the primary way we continue to understand others in second-person interactions.

IPB doctrine states that all four mission variables—including civil considerations—and their interactions must be analyzed if the process is to be effective. Staffs must “determine how the interactions of friendly forces, enemy forces, and indigenous populations affect each other.” However, in practice, the process tends to emphasize the enemy and not holistically account for the civil considerations.

On some accounts, prostitution is just another form of casual sex and as such not particularly harmful in itself, if regulated properly. I claim that, although casual sex in general is not inherently harmful, prostitution in fact is. To show this, I defend an account of sex as joint action characteristically aimed at sexual enjoyment, here understood as a tangible experience of community among partners, and argue that prostitution fails to achieve this good by incentivizing partners to mistreat each other. To substantiate this claim, I explore ways in which prostitution fails on the virtues of temperance, respect , and sincerity.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

In the face of the current proliferation of existential threats – the risk of nuclear war, anthropogenic climate change, COVID-19, and (arguably) disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence – it is imperative that Australia embrace the notion of shared responsibility in international politics. Individual states have limited capacities to effectively tackle such large-scale, complex emergencies on their own. Highlighting the moral implications of the philosophical notion of joint action, this commentary makes the case for a particular type of responsibility, which can only be discharged when states deliberate and coordinate their actions. Moreover, it explores what this notion of shared responsibility means for Australia – and its international relationships – with respect to responding to climate chaos and COVID-19. 

Even though Australia, acting on its own, can neither significantly mitigate climate change nor halt the current global pandemic, it nevertheless has demanding moral responsibilities to respond to both. This is because the capacities necessary to affect meaningful change can be created through collaboration with other institutional agents. In the absence of intergovernmental organizations able to respond effectively to such crises, Australia has shared responsibilities to contribute to establishing, and then acting as part of, informal, purpose-driven, climate change and COVID-19 ‘coalitions of the obligated’.

Countless everyday activities require us to coordinate our actions and decisions with others. Coordination not only enables us to achieve instrumental goals, but has also been shown to boost commitment, leading people to persevere with an interaction even when their motivation wavers. So far, little is known about the mechanism by which coordination generates commitment. To investigate this, we conducted two experiments which represented very different coordination problems: coordination of movement timing on a joint drumming task (Experiment 1) and coordination of decision-making on a joint object matching task (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the similarity of the participant and partner was manipulated by varying whether or not they had perceptual access to the participant’s workspace, and the participants’ attribution of (un)willingness to invest effort into the joint action by adapting was manipulated by varying whether or not the participant believed their partner had perceptual access. As a measure of commitment, we registered how much participants’ persisted on a boring and effortful task to earn points for their partners. Participants were significantly less committed to earning points for unadaptive partners than for adaptive partners, but only when they believed that their partner was unwilling to adapt rather than unable to adapt. This demonstrates that coordination can generate commitment insofar as it provides a cue that one’s partner is willing to invest effort to adapt for the good of the interaction. Moreover, we demonstrate that this effect generalises across different kinds of coordination.

Bringing research on collective memory together with research on episodic future thought, Szpunar and Szpunar (Mem Stud 9(4):376–389, 2016) have recently developed the concept of collective future thought. Individual memory and individual future thought are increasingly seen as two forms of individual mental time travel, and it is natural to see collective memory and collective future thought as forms of collective mental time travel. But how seriously should the notion of collective mental time travel be taken? This article argues that, while collective mental time travel is disanalogous in important respects to individual mental time travel, the concept of collective mental time travel nevertheless provides a useful means of organizing existing findings, while also suggesting promising directions for future research.

A growing number of scholars regard language as social co-ordination. Not only does this overcome stale debate about whether langauge is cognitive or communicative but it opens up new thinking about its evolutionary history. Focusing on populations, the paper outlines and critiques Merlin Donald’s view of the human mind. It endorses the view that the evolutionary emergence of language can be traced to mimesis or what, twenty years ago, was called the “ability to produce conscious self-initiated representational acts that are intentional” (Donald, 1991: 168). However, ecological critique rejects the original theory’s appeal to symbolic models. I therefore argue that, while Donald is regarded as likely to be correct about the evolutionary basis of language (and languaging), it is possible to simplify his account. Instead of positing 3 evolutionary thresholds (mimesis, language and writing), mimetic skills may themselves be sufficient to ground all the slow processes of human cognition. Indeed, like tool-making, they probably co-evolved with vocal coordination. As cultures developed tools together with ‘public language’, we gained skills in using distributed cognition –ways of living that were later extended by external resources such as, for example, writing, religions, laws and technologies.

Research has shown that the brain is constantly making predictions about future events. Theories of prediction in perception, action and learning suggest that the brain serves to reduce the discrepancies between expectation and actual experience, i.e., by reducing the prediction error. Forward models of action and perception propose the generation of a predictive internal representation of the expected sensory outcome, which is matched to the actual sensory feedback. Shared neural representations have been found when experiencing one's own and observing other's actions, rewards, errors, and emotions such as fear and pain. These general principles of the "predictive brain" are well established and have already begun to be applied to social aspects of cognition. The application and relevance of these predictive principles to social cognition are discussed in this article. Evidence is presented to argue that simple non-social cognitive processes can be extended to explain complex cognitive processes required for social interaction, with common neural activity seen for both social and non-social cognitions. A number of studies are included which demonstrate that bottom-up sensory input and top-down expectancies can be modulated by social information. The concept of competing social forward models and a partially distinct category of social prediction errors are introduced. The evolutionary implications of a "social predictive brain" are also mentioned, along with the implications on psychopathology. The review presents a number of testable hypotheses and novel comparisons that aim to stimulate further discussion and integration between currently disparate fields of research, with regard to computational models, behavioral and neurophysiological data. This promotes a relatively new platform for inquiry in social neuroscience with implications in social learning, theory of mind, empathy, the evolution of the social brain, and potential strategies for treating social cognitive deficits.

Intersubjectivity is central to human social life. We argue that the uniquely human form of intersubjectivity can be defined as the combination of activity and accountability. It consists of more than merely sharing knowledge or perspectives. Intersubjectivity arises through human social activity in which people pursue shared goals and where their respective contributions are observable and subject to public evaluation. We also argue that human intersubjectivity is intertwined with language, in two ways. First, some form of intersubjectivity is necessary for language to have evolved in our species in the first place. Second, language then transforms the nature of our intersubjectivity, through its definitive properties of inferentially-articulated description, self-reflexivity, and productive grammatical flexibility. Social accountability-the bedrock of society-is grounded in this linguistically-transformed kind of intersubjectivity. We illustrate these points with reference to data from two relatively simple examples: two-person timber sawing and two-person mat-weaving.

The main research question motivating this paper is what types of experience are shared in empathy. Simulation theories (ST) of empathy suggest that state-matching between oneself and another allows for an emotional sharing through motor resonance. Theory of Mind (ToM) suggests a move from shared affective states to a cognitive understanding of another's mental states. Thus, theorists like Barresi and Moore (2008) and Lockwood (2016) unite the two theories by dividing empathy along affective and cognitive dimensions processed at different neural and cognitive levels. This paper argues that empathy cannot be divided into such clear and distinct informational processing units based on third-person observational inference and first-personal mentalizing or simulation, but is instead rooted in the space of social interaction. However, interaction theory (IT) only accounts for everyday social cognition and not empathy. This paper argues that such social cognition is the root of empathy as a deeper mode of interactive engagement that involves reciprocity and mutual recognition.

The phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life. Commitments make individuals' behavior predictable, thereby facilitating the planning and coordination of joint actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, commitments make people willing to rely upon each other, and thereby contribute to sustaining characteristically human social institutions such as jobs, money, government and marriage. However, it is not well understood how people identify and assess the level of their own and others' commitments. The Philosophy and Psychology of Commitment explores and explains the philosophical and cognitive intricacies of commitment. John Michael considers how commitments motivate us and their often implicit and tacit nature. To flesh out the philosophical framework of his argument he draws on experimental work with young children, adults and human-robot interaction within the context of joint action, considering the role of the emotions and whether very young children are sensitive to commitment. Providing an important account of the nature and operation of commitment, this book is essential reading for those working in philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, experimental philosophy, and social and developmental psychology. It will also be of interest to those working in emerging fields such as human-robot interaction and behavioral economics.

Vygotsky conceptualized the teaching/learning process as inherently collaborative. We extend prior evaluations of this claim by enlisting eye-tacking instruments to monitor the perceptual activity of four teacher-student dyads, as the student solves a challenging manipulation problem designed to ground the scientific notion of parabolas in their new sensorimotor routines. Analyzing each dyad's gaze paths led us to model the teaching/learning process as the emergence and dynamic transformation of intersubjective coupling between the student and tutor perception action systems. While the student's sensory-motor coordination gradually gravitates toward an effective routine, the tutor's perception is iteratively launched from the student's current action, until the tutor detects an optimal moment for verbal intervention. In this micro-zone of proximal development, the student's motor action comes to align with the tutor's cultural-perspective strategy. Our elaboration of the cultural-historical approach to teaching/learning draws on research on joint attention and joint action from the cognitive sciences as well as the embodied design approach from the educational sciences and demonstrates a compatibility of Vygotsky's heritage and complex dynamic systems theory. Finally, we discuss the educational value of the observed student-tutor intersubjective coupling phenomena, thus grounding the contribution of this multidisciplinary study within educational concerns. 1. Overview The objective of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the teaching/learning process. Our approach is to evaluate and elaborate on Vygotsky's historical assertion that learning is a student and a teacher's irreducibly collaborative achievement, through which the student develops existing naive forms of perceiving and acting on the environment into cultural forms (Vygotsky, 1935/2001). One major challenge of this enduring effort to evaluate Vygotsky's model has been the lack of research instruments for making evident how the student and tutor are perceiving the world as they act upon it. Now, almost a century since Vygotsky first articulated his model, we are equipped with technological instruments and analytic methodology for tracking people's gaze direction at a high sampling frequency and searching for patterns in this sensory activity as they relate to co-performed physical actions. Recent