Joint attention

What is the relationship between pointing and joint attention? Can two individuals point to an object and not jointly attend to that object? Can two individuals jointly attend to an object without pointing to that object? Do the phenomena of pointing and joint attention emerge, evolve and develop at the
same or different times? Are humans and non-humans both equally capable of pointing and joint attention? When do infants develop the ability for pointing and joint attention? Do the diverse distinctions involved in accounts of joint attention — rich / lean, cognitivist / non-cognitivist, individualist / antiindividualist, internalist / externalist, reductionist / relationalist, highlight the relevance of pointing in different ways? Can the jointness in joint attention be understood in terms of “pointing looks”?

The ability to coordinate our actions with those of others is crucial for our success as individuals and as a species. Progress in understanding the cognitive and neural processes involved in joint action has been slow and sparse, because cognitive neuroscientists have predominantly studied individual minds and brains in isolation. However, in recent years, major advances have been made by investigating perception and action in social context. In this article we outline how studies on joint attention, action observation, task sharing, action coordination and agency contribute to the understanding of the cognitive and neural processes supporting joint action. Several mechanisms are proposed that allow individuals to share representations, to predict actions, and to integrate predicted effects of own and others' actions.

... As part of a study to identify children with autism prospectively at 18 months of age (Baird and Baron), we assessed a small comparison group of typically developing infants on experimental tasks of joint attention, imitation, and play at 20 months (Charman; Charman and ...

As compared with other primates, humans have especially visible eyes (e.g., white sclera). One hypothesis is that this feature of human eyes evolved to make it easier for conspecifics to follow an individual's gaze direction in close-range joint attentional and communicative interactions, which would seem to imply especially cooperative (mututalistic) conspecifics. In the current study, we tested one aspect of this cooperative eye hypothesis by comparing the gaze following behavior of great apes to that of human infants. A human experimenter ''looked'' to the ceiling either with his eyes only, head only (eyes closed), both head and eyes, or neither. Great apes followed gaze to the ceiling based mainly on the human's head direction (although eye direction played some role as well). In contrast, human infants relied almost exclusively on eye direction in these same situations. These results demonstrate that humans are especially reliant on eyes in gaze following situations, and thus, suggest that eyes evolved a new social function in human evolution, most likely to support cooperative (mututalistic) social interactions.

Mobile devices such as tablets are increasingly used in primary schools with reported benefits in communication, independent learning and creativity. Children with autism spectrum disorder have an affinity with tablets, which is recognised by the autism research community with many studies gradually emerging in this field. This qualitative study aims to explore primary school teachers' experiences of developing joint attention skills in children with autism using strategies and iPads. Joint attention (JA) can be defined as the act of sharing, sustaining and shifting attention between two social partners and an object, activity or another person. It is an essential life skill which can indicate the later development of social communication, language acquisition and behaviour. It is usually absent or impaired in children with autism, which means that they often find it difficult to share attention with an adult or peer about a toy by following gaze, pointing and alternating gaze, but also showing interest to the other person. Joint attention difficulties can also be a prognostic indicator of autism. Research on the use of tablets to develop skills in autism is limited. In order to understand current practice, semi structured interviews with 16 school staff members and non-obtrusive observations of 12 pupils interacting with the teacher using iPads were held in three UK schools (one mainstream and two special needs). All teachers used teaching strategies to promote joint attention on a daily basis, a few used targeted interventions for joint attention and even less used iPads in general in their classroom. Participants expressed different opinions about the effectiveness of teaching strategies and iPad use in developing joint attention skills since it relied on their ability to implement them appropriately and their knowledge of each child. The observations showed that teachers used a variety of evidence-based strategies to engage their pupils with autism in joint attention opportunities but that there was little use of iPads. The iPad was mainly used as a reward, a motivator to direct and sustain pupils' attention, to practice turn-taking and waiting skills and to teach the curriculum. The research points to the need to provide schools with guidance on how to use tablets to teach joint attention skills and that teachers would welcome opportunities to share knowledge with colleagues and parents so that they can work together.

This study examined the age of onset of the capacity to align with direction of gaze, and the relations between individual differences in this capacity, temperament and language acquisition. Infants demonstrated the capacity to match mother’s direction of gaze, and individual differences in this capacity were related to temperament and vocabulary development.

Two experiments examined the origins of joint visual attention with a training procedure. In Experiment I, infants aged 6-11 months were tested for a gaze-following (joint visual attention) response under feedback and no feedback conditions. In Experiment 2, infants 8-9 months received feedback for either following the experimenter's gaze (natural group) or looking to the opposite side (unnatural group). Results of the 2 experiments indicate that (a) joint visual attention does not reliably appear prior to 10 months of age, (b) from about 8 months of age, a gaze-following response can be learned, and (c) simple learning is not sufficient as the mechanism through which joint attention cues acquire their signal value.

The impaired development of joint attention is a cardinal feature of autism. Therefore, understanding the nature of joint attention is central to research on this disorder. Joint attention may be best defined in terms of an information-processing system that begins to develop by 4-6 months of age. This system integrates the parallel processing of internal information about one's own visual attention with external information about the visual attention of other people. This type of joint encoding of information about self and other attention requires the activation of a distributed anterior and posterior cortical attention network. Genetic regulation, in conjunction with self-organizing behavioral activity, guides the development of functional connectivity in this network. With practice in infancy the joint processing of self-other attention becomes automatically engaged as an executive function. It can be argued that this executive joint attention is fundamental to human learning as well as the development of symbolic thought, social cognition and social competence throughout the life span. One advantage of this parallel and distributed-processing model of joint attention is that it directly connects theory on social pathology to a range of phenomena in autism associated with neural connectivity, constructivist and connectionist models of cognitive development, early intervention, activity-dependent gene expression and atypical ocular motor control.

Background: Deficits in joint attention are considered by many researchers to be an early predictor of childhood autism (e.g., and are considered to be pivotal to deficits in language, play, and social development in this population . Although many researchers have noted the importance of joint attention deficits in the development of children with autism (e.g., and have called for intervention strategies (e.g., , few studies have attempted to target joint attention. In this study, joint attention behaviors were taught to children with autism using a behavior modification procedure. Methods: A multiple-baseline design was implemented to evaluate intervention effects. The following target behaviors were included in the intervention: 1) Responding to showing, pointing, and gaze shifting of adult; 2) Coordinated gaze shifting (i.e., coordinated joint attention); and 3) Pointing (with the purpose of sharing, not requesting). Generalization to setting and parent, follow-up sessions, and social validation measures were also analyzed. Results: Joint attention behaviors were effectively trained and targeted behaviors generalized to other settings. In addition, positive changes were noted by naïve observers using social validation measures. Conclusions: Integrating joint attention training into existing interventions may be important for children with autism. In addition, training parents in these techniques may help to maintain joint attention skills outside of the treatment setting.

The current study investigated differences in the language learning environments of singletons and twins, with special reference to pragmatic factors that might be expected to differ in dyadic and triadic interactive situations. Six twin pairs and 12 singleton children (all firstborn) were observed in natural interactions with their mothers, once at 15 months of age and again at 21 months of age. Twins were lower than singletons on all measures of language development. The language learning environments of the two groups differed as well. Although twin mothers spoke and interacted with their children as much as singleton mothers when twins were analyzed together, when analyzed from the point of view of the individual twin child, twin children received less speech directed specifically to them, participated in fewer and shorter episodes of joint attentional focus, and had fewer and shorter conversations with their mothers. In addition, twin mothers were more directive in their interactional styles. Correlational analyses indicated that variation of these language learning environment factors for the sample as a whole, as well as variation for some of these factors within the twin group itself, was related to early language growth. It is proposed that both the quantitative and qualitative differences observed in the language learning environments of singletons and twins derive from the nature of the triadic situation and that these differences have important effects on the child's early language development.

PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote.
To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000105
History of Psychology, Vol 22(2), May 2019, 113-129

A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."

This study investigated the role of joint attention in infants' word learning. Infants aged 18-21 months were taught new words in two social contexts, joint attention (eye contact, positive tone of voice) or non-joint attention (no eye contact, neutral tone of voice). Event-related potentials were measured as the infants saw objects either congruent or incongruent with the taught words. For both social contexts, an early negativity was observed for the congruent condition, reflecting a phonological-lexical priming effect between objects and the taught words. In addition, for the joint attention, the incongruent condition elicited a late, widely distributed negativity, attributed to semantic integration difficulties. Thus, social cues have an impact on how words are learned and represented in a child's mental lexicon. NeuroReport Examples of novel [(a) and (c)] and known [(b) and (d)] objects used in the study. All words including an article 'a' were presented in German. Joint attention helps infants learn new words Hirotani et al. 601

This essay examines the contrasting visions of the expressive powers of the human face—both from neuroscientific approaches rooted in Darwin which argue for a codified system of six basic emotions universally recognized (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) and from the visual arts of cinema, television and portraiture painting that rely on facial close-ups to represent an emotional fluidity that is always subjective. As a means of reconciling the two approaches, it turns to the current study of infants by developmental psychologists (like Peter Mundy and Daniel Stern) who stress the importance of an infant's ability to read the mother's face, which facilitates joint attention, the acquisition of verbal language and social interactions with the world. Although Stern's imaginative dialogues sound literary and subjective, his description of the infant's encounter with the mother's face is actually consistent with the explanation by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1999) of how consciousness is first launched in the ―core self.‖ By treating the mother's face as the crucial object in the infant's early development and by perceiving this encounter awash in reflective feelings (which Damasio distinguishes from basic emotions shared with other species), he helps explain the dichotomy between the two systems of emotive facial expressions: reading the specific codified emotions (in humans and other species) versus experiencing the flow of (what Damasio calls) ―background feelings‖ that continuously play across the human face. By emphasizing the theories of Béla Balázs and films of Ingmar Bergman and Chick Strand, which literally teach us how to read these background feelings moving across the human face, this essay claims facial close-ups do not distract us from our social circumstances or political action as Walter Benjamin argued. Instead they can have an ideological edge in a wide range of genres as they enable us to see this emotional engagement in joint attention both as a form of interpellation and as a means of survival—not only for infants but for all those engaged with the visual narrative arts.

Background: The present study sought to examine the specificity, developmental correlates, nature and pervasiveness of imitation deficits very early in the development of autism. Methods: Subjects were 24 children with autism (mean age 34 months), 18 children with fragile X syndrome, 20 children with other developmental disorders, and 15 typically-developing children. Tasks included manual, oralfacial, and object oriented imitations, developmental measures, joint attention ability, and motor abilities. Results: Children with autism were found to be significantly more impaired in overall imitation abilities, oral-facial imitation, and imitations of actions on objects than children in all of the other groups. Imitation skills of young children with fragile X syndrome were strongly influenced by the absence or presence of symptoms of autism. For children with autism, imitation skills were strongly correlated with autistic symptoms and joint attention, even when controlling for developmental level. For comparison groups, imitation was related to other developmental abilities including play, language, and visual spatial skills. Neither motor functioning nor social responsivity accounted for a significant amount of variance in imitation scores, when controlling for overall developmental level, which accounted for much of the variation in imitation ability. Conclusions: Simple imitation skills were differentially impaired in young children with autism, and lack of social cooperation did not account for their poor performance. In autism, imitation skills clustered with dyadic and triadic social interactions and overall developmental level, but were not related to play or language development. For comparison children, all these areas were inter-related. Hypotheses about a specific dyspraxic deficit underlying the imitation performance in autism were not supported.

The Hand, an Organ of the Mind, edited by Zdravko Radman, consists of seventeen essays by an impressive array of philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, as well as a foreword by Jesse Prinz and a postscript by haptic artist Rosalyn Driscoll.

Children with autism exhibit significant deficits in imitation skills which impede the acquisition of more complex behaviors and socialization, and are thus an important focus of early intervention programs for children with autism. This study used a multiple-baseline design across five young children with autism to assess the benefit of a naturalistic behavioral technique for teaching object imitation. Participants increased their imitation skills and generalized these skills to novel environments. In addition, participants exhibited increases in other social-communicative behaviors, including language, pretend play, and joint attention. These results provide support for the effectiveness of a naturalistic behavioral intervention for teaching imitation and offer a new and potentially important treatment option for young children who exhibit deficits in social-communicative behaviors.

Background: Deficits in joint attention (JA) and joint engagement (JE) represent a core problem in young children with autism as these affect language and social development. Studies of parent-mediated and specialist-mediated JA-intervention suggest that such intervention may be effective. However, there is little knowledge about the success of the intervention when done in preschools. Aim: Assess the effects of a preschool-based JA-intervention. Methods: 61 children (48 males) with autistic disorder (29-60 months) were randomized to either 8 weeks of JA-intervention, in addition to their preschool programs (n = 34), or to preschool programs only (n = 27). The intervention was done by preschool teachers with weekly supervision by trained counselors from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Clinics (CAMHC). Changes in JA and JE were measured by blinded independent testers using Early Social Communication Scale (ESCS) and video taped preschool teacher-child and motherchild play at baseline and post-intervention. Clinical trials registration: Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT00378157. Results: Intention-to-treat analysis showed significant difference between the intervention and the control group, with the intervention group yielding more JA initiation during interaction with the preschool teachers. The effect generalized to significantly longer duration of JE with the mothers. Conclusions: This is the first randomized study to show positive and generalized effects of preschool-based JA-intervention.

Taking the general definition of intersubjectivity in terms of a mutual sharing of experiences as its startingpoint, the present inquiry aims to give an account of intersubjectivity that will detail its role for the development of intentional communication. This requires, however, an account of intentional communication that permits identifying those of its constitutive behaviours that are as well intersubjective; behaviours that do not involve intersubjectivity will not be vulnerable open to its influence. Section 2 provides such an account, and then establishes that types of referential behaviour and of such that indicates communicative intent are intersubjective. Section 3 brings up some data on pointing, visual attention contact, and gaze following -behaviours that in the preceding section have been identified as intersubjective. The data shows that these behaviours may appear well ahead of the time at which intentional communication normally is held to emerge. A few general suggestions as to why they nevertheless do not result in the onset of intentional communication are discussed and found wanting. Instead a search is launched for individual factors that might explain the contradictory data on intersubjective behaviour and intentional communication, while still being general enough to be useful for the inquiry concerning the global relation between intentional communication and intersubjectivity. In sections 4 and 5, three factors are discerned that fit the desired profile, pertaining to, respectively, the relation of intersubjectivity; the various forms that intersubjectivity may take in contexts of use as determined by the kind(s) of sharing between sender and observer which occurs in that context; and finally, the processing modes and processing levels of intersubjective behaviour. These factors all have varieties, making it possible to, by changing either the strength and form of individual factors or exchanging factors for each other, experimentally as well as conceptually (in theory construction) test the over-all relevance of each factor for specific elements of intentionally communicative behaviour. Finally, in section 6, a general perspective is taken on the relation between sender and observer, criticising attempts to model it in terms of, first, instrumental action, then, co-operation. The discussion pinpoints yet some intersubjective aspects of intentional communication, and ends in the claim that a primordial self-other equivalence constitutes the source of intersubjectivity.

The PDD Behavior Inventory (PDDBI) is a rating scale filled out by caregivers or teachers that was designed to assess children having a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD; autism, Asperger disorder, PDD-NOS, or childhood disintegrative disorder). Both adaptive and maladaptive behaviors are assessed in the scale, making it useful for treatment studies in which decreases in maladaptive behaviors and improvements in adaptive social and language skills relevant to PDD are expected. The adaptive behaviors assessed include core features of the disorder such as joint attention skills, pretend play, and referential gesture. The maladaptive behaviors sample a wide variety of behaviors observed in both lower- and higher-functioning individuals and include stereotyped behaviors, fears, aggression, social interaction deficits, and aberrant language. The inventory was found to have a high degree of internal consistency. Inter-rater reliability was better for adaptive behaviors than for malada...

Abstract This paper examines the phenomenon of looking together in art therapy. It argues that the triangular relationship–on which much of art therapy theory is premised–takes as a priori the capacity of the patient to look together with the therapist at the art object. This ...

"The combination of developmental and cultural perspectives provides a framework to consider toy-play as an emerging socio-cognitive skill. We examined the development of spontaneous gestures and imitation among 50 Lazuri-speaking toddler-caregiver dyads in Lazona, Turkey. Dyads engaged in structured-play activities utilizing tea party and farm-animal toy sets (video-recorded for 10-min/activity). The findings reveal widespread use of gestures in toddler-caregiver interactions, with culture-specific patterns of gesturing developing in tandem with imitation of object use and speech.
"

When surveying recent philosophical work on the nature
and status of collective intentionality and we-intentions, it is striking how much effort is spent on analysing the structure of joint action and on establishing whether or not the intention to, say, go for a walk or paint a house together is reducible to some form of I-intentionality. Much less work has been devoted to an analysis of shared affects and
emotions. This is regrettable, not only because emotional sharing in all likelihood is developmentally prior to and logically more basic than joint action, but also because it might constitute a way of being together with others, which we need to study if we wish to better understand the nature of the we. In the present contribution, my primary
aim will be to offer an answer to the following question: does the we-experience, the experience of being part of a we, presuppose, precede, preserve, or abolish the difference between self- and other-experience? In pursuing this task, I will take a closer look at emotional sharing and draw on resources that are too frequently ignored in current
social ontology, namely insights found in classical phenomenology and in contemporary research on social cognition.

As this foreword is written, at the dawn of the 21st Century, the cognitive sciences are in epistemological ferment. The exuberant optimism of the late 20th-Century adaptationist programme has, itself, started to fragment like the many fingers of a wave against the implacable shore of empirical reality. Dramatic new directions in the philosophy of mind (enactivism, embodied cognition, distributed cognition) and in developmental psychology (dynamic systems theory) are beginning to mature. This special issue, Pointing: Where Embodied Cognition meets the Symbolic Mind, edited by Massimiliano Cappuccio, brings together in one volume an incendiary mix of the emerging generation of philosophers and language researchers, who bring their diverse perspectives to moor on one of the most fascinating phenomena in human development: the ability to co-orient in both space and time to a common focus with what seems, on the face of it, to be a simple pointing gesture. The emerging significance of research and analysis pertaining to pointing reflects a recent phase shift in the sciences concerned with mind and behaviour. To put these innovations in context, it might be worthwhile to review the sweeping upheavals that have recently occurred in the conceptual bedrocks of psychology and the philosophy of language.

The marvel of God making us friends is given practical contours through the gifts of the Spirit, which are interpersonal dispositions that allow us to relate to God. By living through these gifts, we live in personal contact with the Gift—the holy Spirit.

This study compared behavioral presentation of toddlers with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and toddlers with global developmental delay (DD) or developmental language disorder (DLD) who display some characteristics of ASD using the diagnostic algorithm items from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Generic (ADOS), the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), and Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT). To date, 195 children have failed the M-CHAT and have been diagnosed with ASD, DD or DLD. Children with ASD had prominent and consistent impairments in socialization skills, especially joint attention skills and were more impaired in some aspects of communication, play, and sensory processing. Children with ASD and children with DD/ DLD shared common features, but certain behavioral markers differentiated the two groups.

The field of social neuroscience has made considerable progress in unraveling the neural correlates of human cooperation by making use of brain imaging methods. Within this field, neuroeconomic research has drawn on paradigms from experimental economics, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) and the Trust Game. These paradigms capture the topic of conflict in cooperation, while focusing strongly on outcome-related decision processes. Cooperation, however, does not equate with that perspective, but relies on additional psychological processes and events, including shared intentions and mutually coordinated joint action. These additional facets of cooperation have been successfully addressed by research in developmental psychology, cognitive science, and social philosophy. Corresponding neuroimaging data, however, is still sparse. Therefore, in this paper, we present a juxtaposition of these mutually related but mostly independent trends in cooperation research. We propose that the neuroscientific study of cooperation could benefit from paradigms and concepts employed in developmental psychology and social philosophy. Bringing both to a neuroimaging environment might allow studying the neural correlates of cooperation by using formal models of decision-making as well as capturing the neural responses that underlie joint action scenarios, thus, promising to advance our understanding of the nature of human cooperation.

There is a large body of research indicating that speakers of (familiar) European languages tend to encode and conceptualize space from an egocentric perspective, but linguistic fieldworkers have shown that speakers of certain other languages (e.g. Tzeltal) often describe the same spatial scenes based on fixed coordinates of the environment. This has led some researcher to challenge long-standing assumptions about semantic universals of space and the uniformity of spatial cognition. Specifically, Levinson and colleagues have questioned the hypothesis that there is a universal preference for egocentric, body-oriented representations of space in language and cognition. It is the purpose of the present paper to reconsider this hypothesis in light of an important class of spatial terms that has been disregarded in this research: demonstratives such as English this and that and here and there. The paper shows that the semantic interpretation of demonstratives presupposes a coordinate system with the same conceptual constituents as body-based expressions such as left and right or up and down. Combining evidence from linguistic typology with psychological research on joint attention, it is argued that demonstratives constitute a universal class of spatial terms that invoke an egocentric, body-anchored frame of reference grounded in basic principles of spatial and social cognition.

click on the Somatosphere.net link above for a copy of the paper
---
This article presents a summary and discussion of key findings from ten months of experimental cyberethnography among tulpamancers . Tulpas, a term reportedly borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, are imaginary companions who are said to have achieved full sentience after being conjured through ‘thought-form’ meditative practice. Human ‘hosts’, or tulpamancers, mediate their practice through open-ended how-to guides and discussion forums on the Internet and experience their Tulpas as semi-permanent auditory and somatic hallucinations.
Studying Tulpas and their hosts is fascinating on many counts, not least because it provides an opportunity to observe an emerging culture and the mediation of new kinds of persons – in this case, that of multiple humanoid and non-human persons ‘hosted’ in single bodies and a large-scale sociocultural matrix of ‘healing’ generated without physical interaction between members. As an anthropologist who underwent retraining in cognitive science, however, I am less concerned with the seemingly ‘strange’ and ‘exotic’ aspects of Tulpamancy and am most interested in what the practice can reveal about fundamentally human mechanisms and processes. Thus, I seek to investigate (but in no pre-determined order) how neurocognitive, attentional, and narrative processes invariably shape all forms of sociality and experiences of personhood on the one hand, but also how social, political, and technological processes invariably shape mechanisms of attention, cognition, and perception. I gravitate toward sociocognitive, enactive models of hypnosis as ways of mediating sociality and personhood.

Rather than rely on functionalist or enactivist principles, Beyond the Brain traces thinking to human artifice. In pursuing this approach, we have gradually developed what can be deemed a third position in cognitive science. This is because, like talking, doing things with artifacts draws on both biological and cultural principles. On this systemic view, skills embody beliefs, roles and social practices. Since people rely on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination, action also re-enacts cultural history. Bidirectional dynamics connect embodiment to non-local regularities. Thinking thus emerges in a temporal trajectory of action that takes place within a space populated by people and objects. Utterances, thoughts and deeds all draw on physical, biological and cultural constraints. Even plans are shaped as first-order activity is shaped by second-order structures. Intentions and learning arise as dynamics in one time-scale are co-regulated by dynamics in other scales. For example, in ontogenesis, interactivity prompts a child to strategic use of second-order language. By linking cultural scales to inter-bodily dynamics, circumstances are coloured by resources that serve in using simulation to manage thought, feeling and action. The systemic nature of cognition connects now, the adjacent possible, implications for others and, potentially, social and environmental change.

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

The relation between language and theory of mind remains in need of clarification, both at the level of language evolution, language acquisition and the very content of theory of mind. This raises the question of the very nature of theory of mind. Is it a monolithic, more or less modular mental faculty; or is it a combination of different mechanisms, some of which may be rather low-level? How much theory is there in theory of mind and how much is needed to evolve a language? Very much the same questions apply to language acquisition. This workshop will attempt to analyse the coevolution of these two uniquely human capacities, their co-dependence and interaction. The Workshop is organized by the Institut des Sciences Cognitives CNRS, Lyon. Starting from February 2004, a new paper will be put on line and open to discussion every two weeks. The research presented in this workshop is supported in the framework of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES programme.

One of the primary diagnostic criteria for the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is the presence of a language delay or impairment. Children with ASD are now being identified at significantly younger ages, and prior research has consistently found that early language skills in this population are heterogeneous and an important predictor for later outcome. The goal of this study was to systematically investigate language in toddlers with ASD and to identify early correlates of receptive and expressive language in this population. The study included 164 toddlers with ASD between the ages of 18 and 33 months who were evaluated on several cognitive, language and behavioral measures. Results suggested good agreement among different measures of early language, including direct assessment and parent report measures. Significant concurrent predictors of receptive language included gestures, non-verbal cognitive ability and response to joint attention. For expressive language, the most significant predictors were non-verbal cognitive ability, gestures and imitation. These findings have important implications for intervention programs targeting this population.

Drawing on recent work in developmental and comparative psychology, this paper argues that demonstratives function to coordinate the interlocutors' joint focus of attention, which is one of the most basic functions of human communication. The communicative importance of demonstratives is reflected in a number of properties that together characterize them as a particular word class: In contrast to other closed-class expressions, demonstratives are universal, they are generally so old that their roots cannot be traced back to other linguistic items, they are among the earliest words that children learn, and they are closely tied to a particular gesture. Moreover, demonstratives play an important role in the organization of discourse and the diachronic evolution of grammar, which arguably is also motivated by their communicative function to establish joint attention.

This article engages critically with Margaret Gilbert's proposal that joint commitments are necessary for collective emotions. After introducing Gilbert's concept of joint commitment (Section 2), and the joint commitment account of collective emotions (Section 3), we argue in Section 4 that research from developmental psychology challenges the necessity of joint commitments for collective emotions. In that section, we also raise a more principled objection to Gilbert's account, independently of developmental considerations. Section 5 develops a complementary line of argument, focused on the notion of mutual recognition. While we agree with Gilbert that mutual recognition has an important role to play in an account of collective emotions, we take issue with her attempt to analyse face-to-face based mutual recognition in terms of the concept of joint commitment. We conclude by sketching an alternative analysis of collective emotions that highlights the role of interpersonal identification and socially mediated self-consciousness.

ABSTRACT Joint attention is an essential developmental milestone; deficits in joint attention, effectively assessed in young children, are one of the earliest markers of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Despite theoretical indications that these skills may have an extended trajectory and continue to interact with other aspects of development, research has been limited by the absence of available assessment measures that are appropriate for older children and adolescents. This study designed and examined a measure consisting of prompts for initiation and response to joint attention in school-age children with typical development and ASD. This measure effectively discriminated between individuals with and without ASD, and demonstrated excellent external validity. This study reports on a novel approach to assessing joint attention in older children and adolescents.