Complex systems are to be seen as typically having multiple levels of organization. For instance, in the behavioural and cognitive sciences, there has been a long lasting trend, promoted by the seminal work of David Marr, putting focus on three distinct levels of analysis: the computational level, accounting for the What and Why issues, the algorithmic and the implementational levels specifying the How problem. However, the tremendous developments in neuroscience knowledge about processes at different scales of organization together with the (...) complexity of today cognitive theories suggest that there will hardly be only three levels of explanation. Instead, there will be many different degrees of commitments corresponding to the different granularities—from high-level (behavioural) models to low-level (neural and molecular) models of the cognitive research program. For instance, Bayesian approaches, that are usually advocated for formalizing Marr’s computational level and rational behaviour, have even been adopted to model synaptic plasticity and axon guidance by molecular gradients. As a result, we can consider the behavioural scientist as dealing with models at a multiplicity of levels. The purpose of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology is to promote an approach to the role of the levels and explanation and models which is of interest for cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Multiple theories of problem-solving hypothesize that there are distinct qualitative phases exhibited during effective problem-solving. However, limited research has attempted to identify when transitions between phases occur. We integrate theory on collaborative problem-solving with dynamical systems theory suggesting that when a system is undergoing a phase transition it should exhibit a peak in entropy and that entropy levels should also relate to team performance. Communications from 40 teams that collaborated on a complex problem were coded for occurrence of problem-solving processes. (...) We applied a sliding window entropy technique to each team's communications and specified criteria for identifying data points that qualify as peaks and determining which peaks were robust. We used multilevel modeling, and provide a qualitative example, to evaluate whether phases exhibit distinct distributions of communication processes. We also tested whether there was a relationship between entropy values at transition points and CPS performance. We found that a proportion of entropy peaks was robust and that the relative occurrence of communication codes varied significantly across phases. Peaks in entropy thus corresponded to qualitative shifts in teams’ CPS communications, providing empirical evidence that teams exhibit phase transitions during CPS. Also, lower average levels of entropy at the phase transition points predicted better CPS performance. We specify future directions to improve understanding of phase transitions during CPS, and collaborative cognition, more broadly. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We build from a recent integrative framework unifying these divergent perspectives through the use of dual-process theory and supporting social neuroscience research. Our elaboration considers two complementary notions of direct perception: one (...) primarily stemming from ecological psychology and the other from enactive cognition theory. We use this as the foundation from which to offer an account of the informational basis for social information and assert a set of research propositions to further the science of social cognition. In doing so, we point out how perception of the minds of others can be supported in some cases by lawful information, supporting direct perception of social affordances and perhaps, mental states, and in other cases by cues that support indirect perceptual inference. Our goal is to extend accounts of social cognition by integrating advances across disciplines to provide a multi-level and multi-theoretic description that can advance this field and offer a means through which to reconcile radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Musical improvisation is a natural case of human pattern formation, and Walton and colleagues investigate the way that different contextual constraints affect patterns of improvisation and their aesthetic quality. The authors find that coordination patterns are more diversified between two musicians when the musical space in which to improvise is relatively more constrained. They also find that listeners experience more diversified, complementary patterns between musicians as more enjoyable and harmonious.

Observing others in conversation is a common format for comprehending language, yet little work has been done to understand dialog comprehension. We tested whether overhearers use addressee backchannels as predictive cues for how to integrate information across speaker turns during comprehension of spontaneously produced collaborative narration. In Experiment 1, words that followed specific backchannels were recognized more slowly than words that followed either generic backchannels or pauses. In Experiment 2, we found that when the turn after the backchannel was a (...) continuation of the narrative, specific backchannels prompted the fastest verification of prior information. When the turn after was an elaboration, they prompted the slowest, indicating that overhearers took specific backchannels as cues to integrate preceding talk with subsequent talk. These findings demonstrate that overhearers capitalize on the predictive relationship between backchannels and the development of speakers’ talk, coordinating information across conversational roles. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-42, January 2022. This paper distinguishes collective emotions from other phenomena pertaining to the social and interactive nature of emotion and proposes a taxonomy of different types of collective emotion. First, it emphasizes the distinction between collective emotions as affective experiences and underpinning mechanisms. Second, it elaborates on other types of affective experience, namely the social sharing of emotion, group-based emotions, and joint emotions. Then, it proposes a working definition of collective emotion via (...) a minimal threshold and four structural features. Finally, it develops a taxonomy of five types of collective emotion: emotional sharing, emotional contagion, emotional matching, emotional segregation, and emotional fusion. (shrink)

Communicative interactions across different species have so far received relatively little attention from cognitive or behavioral scientists. Most research in this area views the process of communication as the adaptive interaction of manipulative signalers and information-assessing receivers. This paper discusses some shortcomings of the information/influence model of communication, particularly in the empirical study of interspecific communicative interactions. It then presents an alternative theoretical model, based on recent contributions in psycholinguistics and semiotics. The semiotic alignment model views communication as a dynamic (...) process of joint semiosis resulting in the alignment of the interactants’ own-worlds (Umwelten). It is argued that this model can improve our understanding of communicative interactions between heterospecifics and provide the basis for future work in the empirical study of interspecific communication. (shrink)

Communicative interactions across different species have so far received relatively little attention from cognitive or behavioral scientists. Most research in this area views the process of communication as the adaptive interaction of manipulative signalers and information-assessing receivers. This paper discusses some shortcomings of the information/influence model of communication, particularly in the empirical study of interspecific communicative interactions. It then presents an alternative theoretical model, based on recent contributions in psycholinguistics and semiotics. The semiotic alignment model views communication as a dynamic (...) process of joint semiosis resulting in the alignment of the interactants’ own-worlds (Umwelten). It is argued that this model can improve our understanding of communicative interactions between heterospecifics and provide the basis for future work in the empirical study of interspecific communication. (shrink)

How can we best understand human cognitive architectural variability? We believe that the relationships between theories in neurobiology, cognitive science and evolutionary biology posited by evolutionary psychology’s Integrated Causal Model has unduly supported various essentialist conceptions of the human cognitive architecture, monomorphic minds, that mask HCA variability, and we propose a different set of relationships between theories in the same domains to support a different, non-essentialist, understanding of HCA variability. To set our case against essentialist theories of HCA variability, we (...) detail the general notion of an ICM and the specific ICM at the heart of evolutionary psychology. We briefly illustrate the type of essentialism fostered by evolutionary psychology’s ICM by showing how it grounds essentialist theories of cognitive gender. We shall not criticize these theories here since the literature is replete with compelling objections to them, but shall instead focus on motivating a replacement ICM to destabilize evolutionary psychology’s ICM wholesale. ICMs usually span larger than the models they support, hence larger than arguments against these models, and one reason the essentialist theories addressed here have the kind of staying power they do is that they are partly supported by the ICM in which they are grounded. In short, we offer “A New Hope” against the essentialist empire. True to the Hollywood trope, this new hope rests on an alliance between a young theory, cognitive network neuroscience, and two older, but still quite young, epistemic rebels: enactive cognitive science and developmental systems theory. Accordingly, we detail and discuss the proposed emerging ICM and test-drive it by sketching the multimorphic view of gender it grounds. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory. The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST (...) can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. (shrink)

We address what it means to “engage in a relationship” and suggest Social Breathing as a model of immersing ourselves in the metaphorical social air around us, which is necessary for shared intention and joint action. We emphasize how emergent properties of social systems arise, such as the shared culture of groups, which cannot be reduced to the individuals involved. We argue that the processes involved in Social Breathing are: automatic, implicit, temporal, in the form of mutual bi-directional interwoven exchanges (...) between social partners and embodied in the coordination of the brains and behaviors of social partners. We summarize cross-disciplinary evidence suggesting that these processes involve a multi-person whole-brain-body network which is critical for the development of both we-ness and relational skills. We propose that Social Breathing depends on each individual’s ability to sustain multimodal interwovenness, thus providing a theoretical link between social neuroscience and relational/multi-person psychology. We discuss how the model could guide research on autism, relationships, and psychotherapy. (shrink)

Body movement is a primary nonverbal communication channel in humans. Coordinated social behaviors, such as dancing together, encourage multifarious rhythmic and interpersonally coupled movements from which observers can extract socially and contextually relevant information. The investigation of relations between visual social perception and kinematic motor coupling is important for social cognition. Perceived coupling of dyads spontaneously dancing to pop music has been shown to be highly driven by the degree of frontal orientation between dancers. The perceptual salience of other aspects, (...) including postural congruence, movement frequencies, time‐delayed relations, and horizontal mirroring remains, however, uncertain. In a motion capture study, 90 participant dyads moved freely to 16 musical excerpts from eight musical genres, while their movements were recorded using optical motion capture. A total from 128 recordings from 8 dyads maximally facing each other were selected to generate silent 8‐s animations. Three kinematic features describing simultaneous and sequential full body coupling were extracted from the dyads. In an online experiment, the animations were presented to 432 observers, who were asked to rate perceived similarity and interaction between dancers. We found dyadic kinematic coupling estimates to be higher than those obtained from surrogate estimates, providing evidence for a social dimension of entrainment in dance. Further, we observed links between perceived similarity and coupling of both slower simultaneous horizontal gestures and posture bounding volumes. Perceived interaction, on the other hand, was more related to coupling of faster simultaneous gestures and to sequential coupling. Also, dyads who were perceived as more coupled tended to mirror their pair's movements. (shrink)

According to the prevailing paradigm in social-cognitive neuroscience, the mental states of individuals become shared when they adapt to each other in the pursuit of a shared goal. We challenge this view by proposing an alternative approach to the cognitive foundations of social interactions. The central claim of this paper is that social cognition concerns the graded and dynamic process of alignment of individual minds, even in the absence of a shared goal. When individuals reciprocally exchange information about each other's (...) minds processes of alignment unfold over time and across space, creating a social interaction. Not all cases of joint action involve such reciprocal exchange of information. To understand the nature of social interactions, then, we propose that attention should be focused on the manner in which people align words and thoughts, bodily postures and movements, in order to take one another into account and to make full use of socially relevant information. (shrink)

This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, interactive alignment and interpersonal synergy, and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy approach points to structural organization at the level of the interaction—such as complementary patterns straddling speech turns and interlocutors. We develop a general, quantitative method to assess lexical, prosodic, and speech/pause patterns related to the two approaches and their impact on collective (...) performance in a corpus of task-oriented conversations. The results show statistical presence of patterns relevant for both approaches. However, synergetic aspects of dialog provide the best statistical predictors of collective performance and adding aspects of the alignment approach does not improve the model. This suggests that structural organization at the level of the interaction plays a crucial role in task-oriented conversations, possibly constraining and integrating processes related to alignment. (shrink)

In a matter of mere milliseconds, conversational partners can transform their expectations about the world in a way that accords with another person's perspective. At the same time, in similar situations, the exact opposite also appears to be true. Rather than being at odds, these findings suggest that there are multiple contextual and processing constraints that may guide when and how people consider perspective. These constraints are shaped by a host of factors, including the availability of social and environmental cues, (...) and intrinsic biases and cognitive abilities. To explain how these might be integrated in a new way forward, we turn to an adaptive account of interpersonal interaction. This account draws from basic principles of dynamical systems, principles that we argue are already expressed, both implicitly and explicitly, within a broad landscape of existing research. We then showcase an initial attempt to develop a computational framework to instantiate some of these principles. This framework, consisting of what we argue to be important mechanistic insights rendered by neural network models, is based on a promising and long-standing approach that has yet to take hold in the current domain. We argue that by bridging this gap, new insights into other theoretical accounts, such as the connections between memory and common ground information, might be revealed. (shrink)

Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low‐level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high‐level convergence. Linguistic alignment captures the ways people reuse, that is, “align to,” the lexical, syntactic, and semantic forms of others' utterances. Our focus is on the temporal change of multi‐level linguistic alignment, as well as how alignment is (...) related to communicative outcomes within a unique collaborative problem‐solving paradigm. The primary task, situated within a virtual educational video game, requires creative thinking between three people where the paths for possible solutions are highly variable. We find that over time interactions are marked by decreasing lexical and syntactic alignment, with a trade‐off of increasing semantic alignment. However, greater semantic alignment does not translate into better team performance. Overall, these findings provide greater clarity on the role of linguistic coordination within complex and dynamic collaborative problem‐solving tasks. (shrink)

Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so, people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Here, we explore whether the use of conversational devices might be influenced by cross‐linguistic differences in the speakers’ native language, comparing two matched languages—Danish and Norwegian—differing primarily in their sound structure, with Danish being more opaque, that is, less acoustically distinguished. Across systematically manipulated conversational contexts, we find that processes supporting mutual understanding in (...) conversations vary with external constraints: across different contexts and, crucially, across languages. In accord with our predictions, linguistic entrainment was overall higher in Danish than in Norwegian, while backchannels and repairs presented a more nuanced pattern. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that native speakers of Danish may compensate for its opaque sound structure by adopting a top‐down strategy of building more conversational redundancy through entrainment, which also might reduce the need for repairs. These results suggest that linguistic differences might be met by systematic changes in language processing and use. This paves the way for further cross‐linguistic investigations and critical assessment of the interplay between cultural and linguistic factors on the one hand and conversational dynamics on the other. (shrink)

Received approaches to a unified phenomenon called “language” are firmly committed to a Cartesian view of distinct unobservable minds. Questioning this commitment leads us to recognize that the boundaries conventionally separating the linguistic from the non-linguistic can appear arbitrary, omitting much that is regularly present during vocal communication. The thesis is put forward that uttering, or voicing, is a much older phenomenon than the formal structures studied by the linguist, and that the voice has found elaborations and codifications in other (...) domains too, such as in systems of ritual and rite. Voice, it is suggested, necessarily gives rise to a temporally bound subjectivity, whether it is in inner speech (Descartes' “cogito”), in conversation, or in the synchronized utterances of collective speech found in prayer, protest, and sports arenas world wide. The notion of a fleeting subjective pole tied to dynamically entwined participants who exert reciprocal influence upon each other in real time provides an insightful way to understand notions of common ground, or socially shared cognition. It suggests that the remarkable capacity to construct a shared world that is so characteristic of Homo sapiens may be grounded in this ability to become dynamically entangled as seen, e.g., in the centrality of joint attention in human interaction. Empirical evidence of dynamic entanglement in joint speaking is found in behavioral and neuroimaging studies. A convergent theoretical vocabulary is now available in the concept of participatory sense-making, leading to the development of a rich scientific agenda liberated from a stifling metaphysics that obscures, rather than illuminates, the means by which we come to inhabit a shared world. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

Coordinated group behaviour can result in conflict or social cohesion. Thus having a better understanding of coordination in social groups could help us tackle some of our most challenging social problems. Historically, the most common way to study group behaviour is to break it down into sub-processes, such as cognition and emotion, then ideally manipulate them in a social context in order to predict some behaviour such as liking versus distrusting a target person. This approach has gotten us partway to (...) understanding many important collective behaviours, but I argue that making major changes in the world will require a more integrated approach. In this review, I introduce dynamic systems theory, with a focus on interpersonal systems, where all the processes we typically study in individuals, such as cognition and emotion, become intertwined between social partners over time. I focus on the concept of coordination, defined as a temporal correlation between interacting components of a system (or systems) arising due to coupling between them. Finally, I show how this perspective could be used to guide investigations of social problems such as polarisation. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at (...) timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4). (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: faster, lower-levelcoordination processesof behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale t1; mid-rangecollaborative (...) processeswhich re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; cooperative processesinvolved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and cultural processesand practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales. (shrink)

Collaborative remembering is essential to enabling teams to build shared understanding of projects and their progress. This article presents an analysis of collaborative remembering sequences in a corpus of interactions collected in a workplace where a team of designers developed a video television commercial. On the basis of coding and analysing linguistic and bodily behaviors in 158 such sequences, extracted from over 45 hours of video recordings, recurrent patterns of collaborative remembering processes were identified, relating to the interplay of work (...) roles. This article shows that collaborative remembering in the design studio is structured by behavioural, interactive and social factors. (shrink)

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific (...) communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog. (shrink)

A growing conceptual and empirical literature is advancing the idea that language extends our cognitive skills. One of the most influential positions holds that language – qua material symbols – facilitates individual thought processes by virtue of its material properties (Clark, 2006a). Extending upon this model, we argue that language enhances our cognitive capabilities in a much more radical way: the skilful engagement of public material symbols facilitates evolutionarily unprecedented modes of collective perception, action and reasoning (interpersonal synergies) creating dialogically (...) extended minds. We relate our approach to other ideas about collective minds ( Gallagher, 2011, Theiner et al., 2010 and Tollefsen, 2006) and review a number of empirical studies to identify the mechanisms enabling the constitution of interpersonal cognitive systems. (shrink)