Thirty years ago, grounded cognition had roots in philosophy, perception, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology. During the next 20 years, grounded cognition continued developing in these areas, and it also took new forms in robotics, cognitive ecology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology. In the past 10 years, research on grounded cognition has grown rapidly, especially in cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology. Currently, grounded cognition appears to be achieving increased acceptance throughout cognitive (...) science, shifting from relatively minor status to increasing importance. Nevertheless, researchers wonder whether grounded mechanisms lie at the heart of the cognitive system or are peripheral to classic symbolic mechanisms. Although grounded cognition is currently dominated by demonstration experiments in the absence of well-developed theories, the area is likely to become increasingly theory driven over the next 30 years. Another likely development is the increased incorporation of grounding mechanisms into cognitive architectures and into accounts of classic cognitive phenomena. As this incorporation occurs, much functionality of these architectures and phenomena is likely to remain, along with many original mechanisms. Future theories of grounded cognition are likely to be heavily influenced by both cognitive neuroscience and social neuroscience, and also by developmental science and robotics. Aspects from the three major perspectives in cognitive science—classic symbolic architectures, statistical/dynamical systems, and grounded cognition—will probably be integrated increasingly in future theories, each capturing indispensable aspects of intelligence. (shrink)

Joint action is central to countless aspects of human life. Here I examine the roots of joint action in infancy. First, I provide evidence that—contrary to popular belief—1‐year‐old infants do have the social‐cognitive prerequisites needed to participate in joint action, even in a relatively strict sense: they can read others’ goals and intentions, they have some basic understanding of common knowledge, and they have the ability and motivation to help others achieve their goals. Then I review some evidence of infants’ (...) and young children’s active participation in different types of joint action, from prelinguistic communication to more instrumental collaborations with others, with a particular focus on whether young children show evidence of an understanding of the commitments and obligations entailed in joint action. I conclude that the uniquely human ability and motivation to participate in joint action is already seen in infants by 1 year of age. (shrink)

Language use can be viewed as a form of joint activity that requires the coordination of meaning between individuals. Because the linguistic signal is notoriously ambiguous, interlocutors need to draw upon additional sources of information to resolve ambiguity and achieve shared understanding. One way individuals can achieve coordination is by using inferences about the interlocutor’s intentions and mental states to adapt their behavior. However, such an inferential process can be demanding in terms of both time and cognitive resources. Here, we (...) suggest that interaction provides interlocutors with many cues that can support coordination of meaning, even when they are neither produced intentionally for that purpose nor interpreted as signaling speakers’ intention. In many circumstances, interlocutors can take advantage of these cues to adapt their behavior in ways that promote coordination, bypassing the need to resort to deliberative inferential processes. (shrink)

No one denies that people adapt what they say and how they interpret what is said to them, depending on their interactive partners. What is controversial is when and how they do so. Several psycholinguistics research programs have found what appear to be failures to adapt to partners in the early moments of processing and have used this evidence to argue for modularity in the language processing architecture, claiming that the system cannot take into account a partner’s distinct needs or (...) knowledge early in processing. We review the evidence for both early and delayed partner‐specific adaptations, and we identify some challenges and difficulties with interpreting this evidence. We then discuss new analyses from a previously published referential communication experiment (Metzing & Brennan, 2003) demonstrating that partner‐specific effects need not occur late in processing. In contrast to Pickering and Garrod (2004) and Keysar, Barr, and Horton (1998b), we conclude that there is no good evidence that early processing has to be be “egocentric,”“dumb,” or encapsulated from social knowledge or common ground, but that under some circumstances, such as when one partner has made an attribution about another’s knowledge or needs, processing can be nimble enough to adapt quite early to a perspective different from one’s own. (shrink)