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”?

... 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 ...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.