Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that it holds (...) partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)

Many accounts of collective intentionality target rather sophisticated types of cooperative activities, i.e., activities with complex goals that require prior planning and various coordinating and organizing roles. But although joint action is of obvious importance, an investigation of collective intentionality should not merely focus on the question of how we can share agentive intentions. We can act and do things together, but it is not obvious that the awe felt and shared by a group of Egyptologists when they gain entry (...) to a newly discovered pharaonic tomb can or should be analyzed in the same way as, say, a heist that a group of criminals carefully plan and execute together. The aim of the article is to better understand the kind of emotional sharing that can occur between two individuals who are perceptually co-present. Does the sharing involve a kind of phenomenal fusion? Is it a matter of sharing one and the same token experience? It will be argued that both of these recent suggestions must be rejected as misleading in favor of an account that sees emotional sharing as a form of emotional integration that involves constitutively interdependent processes of empathy, second-personal address, and identification. (shrink)

Recent theoretical work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with those of other individuals. One way this manifests is in cooperative communication ; that is, intentional communication aimed at aligning individuals’ mental states with respect to events in their shared environment. This idea has received strong empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to extend this account by proposing an integrative model of the biobehavioral dynamics of cooperative communication. Our formulation is based (...) on active inference. Active inference suggests that action-perception cycles operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual’s internal model of the world. We propose that humans are characterized by an evolved adaptive prior belief that their mental states are aligned with, or similar to, those of conspecifics (i.e., that ‘we are the same sort of creature, inhabiting the same sort of niche’). The use of cooperative communication emerges as the principal means to gather evidence for this belief, allowing for the development of a shared narrative that is used to disambiguate interactants’ (hidden and inferred) mental states. Thus, by using cooperative communication, individuals effectively attune to a hermeneutic niche composed, in part, of others’ mental states; and, reciprocally, attune the niche to their own ends via epistemic niche construction. This means that niche construction enables features of the niche to encode precise, reliable cues about the deontic or shared value of certain action policies (e.g., the utility of using communicative constructions to disambiguate mental states, given expectations about shared prior beliefs). In turn, the alignment of mental states (prior beliefs) enables the emergence of a novel, contextualizing scale of cultural dynamics that encompasses the actions and mental states of the ensemble of interactants and their shared environment. The dynamics of this contextualizing layer of cultural organization feedback, across scales, to constrain the variability of the prior expectations of the individuals who constitute it. Our theory additionally builds upon the active inference literature by introducing a new set of neurobiologically plausible computational hypotheses for cooperative communication. We conclude with directions for future research. (shrink)

Many theorists have defended the claim that collective entities can attain genuine agential status. If collectives can be agents, this opens up a further question: can they be conscious? That is, is there something that it is like to be them? Eric Schwitzgebel argues that yes, collective entities, may well be significantly conscious. Others, including Kammerer, Tononi and Koch, and List reject the claim. List does so on the basis of Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. I argue here that (...) List’s rejection is too quick, and that groups can, at least in principle, display the kind of informational integration we might think is necessary for consciousness. However, group consciousness will likely differ substantially from the individual experiences that give rise to it. This requires the defender of group consciousness to face up to a similar combination problem as the panpsychist. (shrink)

Joint attention is an early-emerging and uniquely human capacity that lies at the foundation of many other capacities of humans, such as language and the understanding of other minds. In this article, I summarize what developmentalists and philosophers have come to find out about joint attention, and I end by stating that two problems or questions of joint attention require additional research: 1) the relation between joint attention and the skills for dyadic sharing or affect exchange in young infants, and (...) 2) the evolution of joint attention. (shrink)

Research on collective emotion spans social sciences, psychology and philosophy. There are detailed case studies and diverse theories of collective emotion. However, experimental evidence regarding the universal characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective emotion remains sparse. Moreover, current research mainly relies on emotion self-reports, accounting for the subjective experience of collective emotion and ignoring their cognitive and physiological bases. In response to these challenges, we argue for experimental research on collective emotion. We start with an overview of theoretical frameworks to (...) identify a set of three characteristics of collective emotion. Based on research in cognitive and affective sciences, we then examine the corresponding candidate mechanisms. Finally, we highlight outstanding questions, review experimental evidence, and suggest ideas for future experimental research. (shrink)

From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to gaze coordination. But (...) are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointers, when joint attention needs to be shifted away from the whole object to one of its properties, say weight or texture. This multisensory approach to joint attention has important implications for social robotics, clinical diagnostics, pedagogy and theoretical debates on the construction of a shared world. (shrink)

The tendency for people to remember less as members of a group than they would be capable of were they to remember alone is a phenomenon known as collaborative inhibition. The article offers a phenomenological account of this highly counterintuitive effect of group remembering. It argues that the mutual failure to live up to one’s potential does not warrant the standard, strongly negative views about the role of others in recall. Rather, the phenomenon may imply that sharedness itself becomes constitutive (...) of the process in the sense that interaction partners co-determine what and how to remember. Drawing on phenomenological approaches to remembering and second-person engagement, the article argues that individuals participating in shared remembering co-construct their memories by reciprocally and dynamically incorporating each other’s perspectives, attitudes, and emotions about their shared past. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

In this article, we give much needed attention to the nature and value of corporate prayer by drawing together insights from theology, philosophy, and psychology. First, we explain what it is that distinguishes corporate from private prayer by drawing on the psychological literature on joint attention and the philosophical notion of shared situations. We suggest that what is central to corporate prayer is a “sense of sharedness,” which can be established through a variety of means—through bodily interactions or through certain (...) environments. Second, we argue that corporate prayer, when understood as a kind of shared situation, enables common knowledge, as well as a kind of alignment between participants. Through this process, participants’ attention is focused on the same target and affiliation between participants increases. Thus, we suggest, one benefit of understanding corporate prayer as a shared situation is that it establishes and deepens a sense of community in such a way that common purposes and goals can be enacted more effectively. (shrink)

One of the main positions in the contemporary debate on joint attention is John Campbell’s relationalist account. This account has been welcomed as extremely promising in some strands of philosophy and cognitive science, but it has recently been subject to renewed criticism. In this paper, I take a sympathetic approach toward Campbell’s relationalism and I provide support for it by means of a naturalistic theory of the individuation of joint-attentional states. I start from examining some recent objections raised against Campbell’s (...) account. I suggest that, although these objections do not undermine the account, they point to questions that current relationalism leaves unanswered. Specifically, current relationalism does not provide an explanation of the psychological processes through which a joint-attentional experience is individuated, i.e., assembled and experienced, in such a way that it can constitute an immediate justification for a coordinated action. I propose that such an explanation can be found in a phenomenological-interactionist approach to shared intentionality. (shrink)

Joint attention is recognised by many philosophers and psychologists as a fundamental cornerstone of our engagement with one another and the world around us. The most familiar paradigm of joint attention is joint perceptual—specifically visual—attention to an object in the present environment. However, some recent discussions have focused on a potentially different form of joint attention: namely, ‘joint reminiscing’ conversations in which two or more people discuss something in the past which they both remember. These exchanges are in some ways (...) comparable to joint perceptual attention to something present, and have been characterised by some as a form of joint attention to the past. In this paper, I will assess the prospects for characterising joint reminiscing as a genuine form of joint attention to the past, as understood on the model of joint perceptual attention to something present. My conclusions will be tentative, and my primary aim will be to explore how different commitments regarding the nature of both joint attention and episodic memory give rise to different possibilities for characterising joint reminiscing as a distinctive form of collective engagement with the past. I will suggest that joint reminiscing is unlike ordinary joint attention at least insofar as joint reminiscing trades on the participants’ mutual recognition of one another as having been present at an earlier experience. This is connected with joint reminiscing’s social function, and its role in facilitating the special kind of relationship conveyed by the idea of knowing a person. (shrink)

Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual event, this should affect the weighing of visual information during (...) multisensory integration. We tested this prediction in this preregistered study, using the well-documented sound-induced flash illusions, where the integration of an incongruent number of visual flashes and auditory beeps results in a single flash being seen as two (fission illusion) and two flashes as one (fusion illusion). Participants were asked to count flashes either alone or together, and expected to be less prone to both fission and fusion illusions when they jointly attended to the visual targets. However, illusions were as frequent when people attended to the flashes alone or with someone else, even though they responded faster during joint attention. Our results reveal the limitations of the theory that joint attention enhances visual processing as it does not affect temporal audiovisual integration. (shrink)

Prominent research programs dealing with the nature and mechanisms of interpersonal social coordination have emerged in cognitive science, developmental psychology and evolutionary anthropology. I argue that the mechanistic approach to explanation in contemporary philosophy of science can facilitate interdisciplinary integration and division of labor between these different disciplinary research programs. By distinguishing phenomenal models from mechanistic models and structural decomposition from functional decomposition in the process of mechanism discovery, I argue that behavioral and cognitive scientists can make interlocking contributions to (...) families of mechanism models representing a) what central forms of interpersonal social coordination consist in, b) what types of agents engage in such forms of coordination, c) what types of cognitive mechanisms give rise to such forms of coordination, d) how the operation of such mechanisms is modulated by the natural and social environments that the agents populate. Thus mechanistic philosophy of science can play a heuristic role in guiding the research strategies of scientists in different scientific disciplines in a manner that is complementary to the research strategies of scientists in other disciplines and thereby efficient from the point of view of the division of epistemic labor. (shrink)

Discussions of joint attention often focus on examples that involve multiple interacting thinkers who align their attention by triangulating upon an object (e.g., by pointing, gaze following, orienting, etc.). However, not all forms of attending together seem to involve this kind of interpersonal coordination. When an audience attends to a talk, they do not do so by engaging in the perspective-driven alignment of attention that is characteristic of joint attention. Nor do students learning in a digital environment (e.g., on Zoom) (...) triangulate a perspective in the manner typical of joint attention. One might conclude that accounts of joint attention must be broader than have typically been proposed and cannot require coordinated interactions which draw upon the participant’s perspective. I argue that this argument fails because there are multiple forms of attending together, and the processes that enable collective attention in conference talks and Zoom classrooms are different from those that enable the more familiar interaction-based forms of joint attention. By distinguishing joint attention and collective attention, this essay seeks to better understand both the ways in which the digital environments demand a broader concept of joint attention, as well as the place of attending together in digital environments. (shrink)

An important thesis discussed in the literature on shared agency is that group identification motivates pre-school children to act together. This paper aims at further illuminating this thesis by clarifying what triggers the process of group identification in young children. It is argued that joint attention, among other functions in supporting joint actions, can reveal to the co-attenders that they share some preferences. Since sharing preferences has been established by the literature to be a reliable motivation of group identification and (...) since joint attention has an early emergence in development, one can consider joint attention to be a putative trigger of group identification in pre-school children. If this is on the right track, group identification, joint attention, and preferences identify a cluster of minimal pre-conditions for joint actions. (shrink)

Infant carrying provides an important context for cognitive development and social learning in the first year of life. It enables children to perceive the world from a perspective similar to that of their parents. Lateral carrying provides children with new experiences because it gives them access to a broader range of objects. It also gives them better access to socially significant stimuli and aspects of the environment that are relevant to their parents. Thus, it can significantly contribute to learning about (...) objects and their affordances as well as agents, their actions, and mental states. The paper argues that lateral carrying not only contributes to the development of skills related to the emergence of shared intentionality but may also play an important role in the development of the understanding of the we-mode and perhaps also in the formation of associations in the mirror neuron system. The final sections of the article offer suggestions for further research. (shrink)

Prelinguistic cognitive reference comprehension is foundational to language acquisition and higher cognitive functions. However, its ontogenetic origins in the first year of life are currently not well understood. The current study pitted cognitivist against social interactionist views. We worked with infants monthly from 10 to 13 months of age and observed their behavioral search during a reference comprehension task. Our goal was to first establish the age at which infants begin to cognitively expect an occluded object in one of two (...) locations following a communicative pointing cue. We then tested whether infants' cognitive referential expectations would prospectively predict social interaction skills and experiences (as assessed by spontaneous infant and parent pointing) or, conversely, be predicted by social interaction skills and experiences. Results revealed a linear increase in cognitive reference comprehension, with clear above chance performance, individual stability in month‐to‐month correlations, and a synchronous correlation to referential pointing all emerging at 12 months but not earlier. Regarding developmental predictions, infants' cognitive referential expectations were not predictive of social interaction skills and experiences; on the contrary, they were predicted by social interaction skills and experiences. Findings suggest that a nonverbal cognitive understanding of reference to occluded entities is neither early emerging, hard wired, nor causal to infants' or caregivers' referential pointing. Instead, this foundational skill is predicted by earlier social interaction. Findings are consistent with the view that cognitive reference comprehension develops via a social construction process in the first year of life. (shrink)

Humans have a flexible and accurate ability to coordinate their movement in time with external rhythms. However, it remains unclear when and how, during their development, human children acquire the ability to adjust tempo and control the timing of their movement toward others. A previous study suggested that such self-regulation of coordination develops at around 18 and 30 months after birth. In this study, we investigated the performance of 24-month-old children and compared their data with those of 18- and 30-month-olds (...) provided in our previous study. In the joint-drumming task, each child was enticed to drum under four conditions [partner: mother or robot; speed: 400 or 600 ms inter-stimulus-interval ]. The most pivotal test condition was the 600 ms ISI speed condition. We found that from the age of 24 months, children try to slow down their drumming tempo toward the 600 ms ISI speed condition, regardless of the drumming partner. On the other hand, significant timing control toward the onset of the 600 ms ISI condition was observed from the age of 30 months. This implies that both motor and cognitive mechanisms are required for flexible tempo adjustment and accurate synchronization and that these develop gradually among 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds. (shrink)