When characterizing the different levels involved in selfcorrection (a pervasive feature of normative behavior), I mentioned: (a) the application of concepts (the actions of applying or misapplying a concept), (b) The ability to evaluate (a) and (c) the modification of (a) according to the results of (b). Both causalist and interpretationist account of conceptual capacities fail to provide a consistent answer to account for the difference between conceptual mistake and absence of application overemphasizing one of the elements, (a) as a model for (b) in the case of causalism, (b) as the all-encompassing interpreter's perspective in the case of interpretationism. My proposal, on the contrary, is to think of level (b) as constituted by *sensitivity to correction*, that is the ability to correct and monitor our own action in the light of the reactions of others toward those very actions23. In this case (a) corresponds to a kind of behavior that displays intentionality, being directed toward an object to which the behavior is responding and (b) corresponds to the dimension in which we self-monitor our reaction to the object by tuning it to the way other reacts to us and our directed behavior. Sensitivity to correction is a social disposition, that is, a disposition to tune our behavior to the assessments and normative feedbacks we get from others in particular interactions. It is then an evaluative attitude that involves the perceiving and attunement to the approval or disapproval from others. Finally, corresponding to (c), the way in which we apply concepts is of course modified through the assessments involved in (b): actually, we may say, assessing our conduct amounts – at least in the most early stages of the acquisition of language and conceptual abilities – to modifying it according to the approval or disapproval of others.

We may now characterize the difference between conceptual mistakes and absence of application given the framework I have just presented. This distinction will take different shapes along the different stages involved in learning and grasping concepts. It will first consist in the ability to correct ourselves by tuning the other person's assessments (monitoring myself through you, trying to make my own the perspective of the other with whom the interaction is taking place). It is a self-monitoring mechanism based upon the convergence of joint attention mechanisms that identify what is salient in the context and of the other's monitoring of my own performance; the individual monitors her conduct taking into account both what she is directed to (level a) and assessing it in accordance to the assessment of others (level b), by then modifying the behavior accordingly (level c). It is precisely through responding to the other's gaze and his attitudes of approval or disapproval that a criteria for the application of a concept in practice can be thought to be in place, as a standard of correction, hence distinguishing the case at stake from one in which the concept is not relevant at all, a case of absence of application. The concept in question would be poor in content at this point and its boundaries blurry. Thus conceptual competence at this stage is understood as a minimum conceptual understanding: but that minimum is exhibited precisely by the fact that the behavior is sensitive to a distinction between right and wrong ways of acting according to specific standards of correction (concepts), and this in turn is equivalent to there being a right way of acting in the world that the other and I share. Sensitivity to correction is, we may say, the phenomenological exhibition of the normativity of concepts. We

22Varga and Gallagher (2012) have claimed that the notion of recognition, as an interpersonal demand, that occupies a central role in the discussions of moral normativity, should be traced back to its primary location in this first strongly psychologically based kind of interaction with others. I am claiming that this recognitional competence plays a role in conceptual normativity as well.

23According to this view, what is directly perceived are emotions, associated with positive and negative reactions toward other's behavior when conceiving it correct or incorrect. So by extension, understanding such assessment can be thought as based on the ability to perceive these positive and negative emotions and tune to them by changing one's behavior accordingly. The intentional directed behavior of the adults or peers, that is also perceived, will also play a key role in understanding what kind of performance is expected. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pressing this point.

can thus distinguish conceptual mistakes from cases of absence of application in that the subject is responding to the assessment of his behavior by modifying it accordingly as will not be the case if it were a case of absence of application. So, what makes the crucial difference is sensitivity to correction, a sensitivity that is displayed in actual interactions. Now, as learning progresses, self-correction gains independence from the presence of actual assessors. And then the subject self-corrects herself according to different actual or imagined scenarios and perspectives that she can reenact. Sociability is still a pervasive and crucial element of self-correcting behavior but is now exhibited as the very idea that I can be wrong according to different standards (which equates to the idea that there are other perspectives)24.

Finally, it is time to consider whether the tools just introduced are capable of properly meeting NC when accounting for the normative dimension involved in concept use. I cannot provide in this paper a detailed and all-encompassing answer to NC but, as it will be shown next, this proposal can give a proper general strategy to meet NC. This general strategy consists in identifying sensitivity to correction as the middle step between mere causal responses to the environment and contentful propositional attitudes. While the latter imply complete independence, flexibility, detachability, and general inferential articulation; the former, on the contrary, only amounts to nomological covariances between states and objects that may fail given an open number of contextual variations. The important point is that between these two ends of the invisible line of development and evolution there are as well different intermediate stages.

Following this strategy, we can then give a general outline of the evolutionary path from creatures without language or thought to creatures with both abilities. In a first very elemental level there may only be reactions to stimuli, being error just a failure in causal mechanisms. The true normative dimension emerges precisely when sensitivity to correction enters into stage, displaying the ability to interact with others (same species, interspecies) in a primary interaction sort of exchange. This hypothesis is supported from the fact, underlined by many evolutionary theories (Tomasello, 1999, 2014; Tomasello and Racokzy, 2003), that the main evolutionary step that distinguishes humans from other species is the ability to engage in social interactions of a highly sophisticated nature. Accordingly, in this stage subjects are capable of applying concepts independently of stimuli and are capable of applying the same concept to different objects and different concepts to the same object25, ultimately gaining the capacity to associate language items with meanings (norms of use of sounds and marks). Thus, the well-acknowledged idea of sociality as the trait characteristic

of the emergence of the human26, when understood in terms of sensitivity to correction, can also explain the emergence of normative behaviors without any explanatory gap. The possibility of interpreting others and ourselves explicitly as following or failing to follow certain norms or rules, an ability that involves already propositionally articulated thoughts, is to be gained by engaging in earlier forms of sociality27.

A similar point can be made regarding the question of ontogenesis, where practical engagements with others in face-to-face encounters (primary intersubjectivity) that display a primitive form of sensitivity to correction progressively lead to secondary intersubjectivity, as a form of interaction involving shared attention mechanisms, monitoring and correcting, in the context of which language is learned. Learning is a process in which the child eventually gets to be a competent user. At the beginning she may need guidance and mainly self-correct when assessed negatively but later on, she will try herself to repeat this correcting behavior thus generalizing what is learnt and gaining autonomy in self-assessing her own behavior. Once again, the third-personal interpretative stance can only get into the picture much later once the full inferential capacity and the capability of complex interpretation processes are in place.

# **CONCLUDING REMARKS**

I have claimed that two of the most popular theories that account for conceptual competence fail when considered against the background of both the NC, i.e., the challenge of accounting for both the ontogeny and phylogeny of conceptual thought without explanatory or evolutionary gaps, and the normative constraint, i.e., the distinction between conduct that is guided by an standard of correction and the conduct that can only be externally assessed as responding to concepts.

Following some insights from developmental psychology and phenomenology, I have presented an alternative framework, interactionist theory, in the context of which the normativity constraint is accommodated in the domain of actual interactions with others in the learning of language and concepts. My central claim was that sensitivity to correction is a social, evaluative disposition that tunes us to other people's assessments of our behavior in actual interactions and allows us to learn from them standards of correction for our actions. This kind of disposition is what makes the difference evolutionarily and in terms of individual development. The fact that human sociality is the main difference between us and other species is pervasively accepted and has independent grounds in evolutionary studies. If we can make sense of the connection between conceptual informed behavior and social behavior, as we

24It is important noticing that contrary to Hutto's (1999) and Davidson's (2001) view the idea is not that perceiving other perspectives as such gives a normative dimension to what I am doing, but that first I *attune* my behavior to what others *expect* from me and only latter the difference of perspectives can became salient and object of my own reflection. This last possibility is only present when there is also the capability of grasping explicitly the standards that this other perspectives represent and how they stand to the behavior being assessed.

25This is the satisfaction of a simplified version of the Generality Constraint (see Camp, 2009). All these abilities together amount to the acquiring of minimal conceptual capacities (for conditions on minimal conceptuality, see Camp, 2009; Scotto, 2010).

26See Sterelny (2012) and Tomasello (2014).

27I am making a distinction between three paradigmatic and different abilities: (i) causal responses to the environment; (ii) sensitivity to correction in interaction; (iii) entertaining of propositionally articulated thoughts. This distinction is schematic and it is meant to distinguish important milestones in development and evolution. But this threefold classification should not be taken to characterize one stage in development as opposed to others. On the contrary, those abilities appear in Interactionist Theory only as paradigmatic of some stages that give rise to the others (and multiple other intermediate ones in between) by ways of progressive complexity. Accordingly, each stage in evolution and development integrates in different manners previous stages not by replacing them but by complementing them with new abilities.

have proposed we can, then this gives indirect support to the idea that this might be the crucial step in the evolutionary story of the human species. As for the case of human learning, I argued that recent studies in developmental psychology suggest that it is precisely our ways of engaging with others and understanding them what underlies our capacity to learn from each other the kind of general and abstract meanings that we then deploy in our social lives. The so often underlined social character of human life may find in the idea of sensitivity to correction a further specification capable of illuminating the way in which language and thought emerge.

## **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

The research for this paper was supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, "TESIS: Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity" (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828), The National Council for Scientific Research (Argentina) and PICT 02344-2011, National Agency for the Promotion of Science, Argentina.

## **REFERENCES**

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 14 May 2014; accepted: 07 July 2014; published online: 23 July 2014. Citation: Satne GL (2014) Interaction and self-correction. Front. Psychol. 5:798. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00798*

*This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Satne. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Navigating beyond "here & now" affordances—on sensorimotor maturation and "false belief" performance

# *Maria Brincker\**

*Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA*

#### *Edited by:*

*Hanne De Jaegher, University of the Basque Country, Spain*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Leon de Bruin, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands James M. Dow, Hendrix College, USA*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Maria Brincker, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., MA 02125, Boston, USA*

*e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
How and when do we learn to understand other people's perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of "sensorimotor priors," i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance.

**Keywords: affordances, false belief test, metacognition, sensorimotor priors, developmental psychology, embodied cognition, theory of mind, social cognition**

# **FALSE BELIEF TESTS AND CONFLICTING EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT FINDINGS**

The question of how and when children learn to understand other people's beliefs and perspectives has long been an object of study and philosophical debate. Many experimental paradigms use false belief (FB) scenarios to test this development. Typical FB paradigms set up a discrepancy between a test subject's accurate information about a scenario and a divergent perspective, which then is used to probe whether the false perceptive of the other is taken into account. Interestingly so-called "explicit" and "implicit" categories of FB tests each consistently point to very different minimal ages for the development of FB abilities.

Explicit FB tests can be exemplified by the Sally-Anne task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), which involves a presented story with two protagonists Sally and Anne. The FB discrepancy is set up as the test subject watches that Sally puts a marble in location A and leaves, whereupon Anne unbeknownst to Sally transfers the marble to location B. The experimenter/story-teller then prompts the test subject to anticipate an action by the mislead Sally. e.g., "Where do you think Sally *would* look for her toy?" Researchers have overwhelmingly found that typically developing (TD) children generally do not "pass" this kind of FB test before about age four or older. Younger children have a strong tendency to suggest the current toy-location rather than where Sally left it (Wellman et al., 2001). If one assumes the test tracks abilities to understand "beliefs," then results indicate that TD kids cannot handle others' beliefs before age four. Accordingly, failing to produce the correct answer has been interpreted as revealing either a categorical inability to understand minds (Baron-Cohen, 1995), or performance difficulties with linguistic aspects and/or with prioritizing and using FB information executively over current factual information (Moses et al., 2005; Carruthers, 2013).

Conclusions of relative "mind-blindness" in toddlers have been challenged by various so-called "implicit" experimental paradigms, showing that children seem to track and form FB expectations much earlier. These studies use non-verbal/active participation FB tasks, relying on either looking-time (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005), communicative reference (Southgate et al., 2010) or helping paradigms (Buttelmann et al., 2009; Knudsen and Liszkowski, 2010, 2012). These paradigms do not explicitly ask the child about *expected actions of another agent*, but rather measures whether their *own action selections vary* significantly with respectively true/false belief conditions of observed others. e.g., in Buttelmann et al.'s helping paradigm the test subject is invited to open either of two boxes given a manipulation where, during the crucial toy transfer, an experimenter is observed either staying in the room (true belief) or leaving (FB). The remarkable finding was that even 18 months-olds varied their box choice significantly with the manipulation of the experimenters "belief scenario." Thus, the results suggested that toddlers might indeed understand FBs. Looking-time paradigms indicate FB understanding perhaps as early as 9–15 months (Baillargeon et al., 2010; see also Reddy, 2008), but I focus uniquely on the helping paradigm and the specific puzzle of why 18–30 month-old toddlers appropriately vary their behavior according to perceived FBs (and also handle object permanence and pretense play), and yet consistently fail Sally-Anne style FB tests.

In addition to the age disparities between Sally-Anne and the helping-paradigm FB findings, the labels of implicit/explicit and their core experimental differences are not easily conceptualized, as discussed by Carruthers (2013). Existing theories often distinguish *information types* of FB tasks; i.e., mental, counterfactual, linguistic, conceptual, representational, etc. and theorize the *domain-specific* or *domain-general capacities* needed to handle these kinds of information. Further, debates often center on whether the observed infant/toddler capacities should be interpreted as based on mindreading or on behavioral rules (Knudsen and Liszkowski, 2010; Perner, 2010; Carruthers, 2013).

This perspective article points to an alternative framework for theorizing the Sally-Anne and helping-paradigm and the developmental processes underlying the discrepancy of their findings. Given the short format I do not argue against any existing theory, but rather propose that a sensorimotor maturation-based explanation would expand the existing interpretive possibility space, as mental processes are modeled differently than current categorizations imply.

The core proposal is that the age discrepancy of FB findings might be rooted in sensorimotor maturation processes taking place around age four, as these might ground the relevant cognitive developments documented at this age. It is suggested that the helping and Sally-Anne paradigms might require different kinds of "navigation," which again depends on different levels of sensorimotor maturation. More precisely a distinction is drawn between the ability to navigate presently available "here & now" perceptual space vs. navigating an imagined, remembered or otherwise currently counterfactual bodily space. The latter ability to "navigate beyond the here & now" is hypothesized to depend on late-developing predictable movement variations, and further that such abilities support successful Sally-Anne FB performance. By contrast it is proposed that helping paradigm FB tasks are based on the child's understanding of the "here & now" social affordance space and thus can be navigated without this aspect of sensorimotor maturation. To explain this unexplored possibility and theorize the distinction between here & now and counterfactual navigation, we need to look to neuroscientific evidence for (1) affordance tracking and decision-making, (2) default systems and self-projection and lastly (3) the maturation of sensorimotor priors.

## **DECISION-MAKING AND NAVIGATION OF "HERE & NOW" AFFORDANCES**

The idea that we track multiple affordances, i.e., perceived action possibilities in the "engageable" space around us, is not new (Gibson, 1977). Recently, the affordance notion has attracted renewed attention, through theories (Heft, 2003; Gallagher, 2005; Rietveld, 2008; De Jaegher et al., 2010), but also via neuroscientific discoveries about cortical fronto-parietal sensorimotor processes and massively parallel and dynamic circuits mediated by cortical and sub-cortical circuits (Cisek and Kalaska, 2010) and advances in e.g., robotics (Horton et al., 2012) where these kinds of ecological agent-environment relations have begun to replace traditional input-output representational frameworks. Cisek and Kalaska point to findings that sensorimotor processes are engaged early, in parallel and support not only action execution but also decisionmaking and action selection between multiple tracked options. They argue these findings of early and parallel affordance tracking are inconsistent with modular input-output information processing frameworks. Further, mirror neuron research has shown that we track object affordances as they relate to perceived others, as well as complex and dynamic social affordances between self and other (Casile et al., 2011; Sartori et al., 2012).

Thus, in opposition to classic notions of the mind as entirely hidden or "sandwiched" between action and perception (Hurley, 2001), a relational affordance story lets decision-making processes partially reveal themselves through not only actual but possible engagements with our environment. On a theoretical level such findings complicate our notion of social perception, as we see not only the actual behaviors of others, but their potential and afforded action targets, and how these relate to our own current action in overall shared affordance space. The key is that affordances alert to potential outcomes as they relate to actual objects and agents in the spatial environment.

Carruthers (2013) hypothesizes that FB abilities require a "domain specific mindreading module" (tracking other's goals, beliefs etc.), domain general planning, and decision-making abilities (own action selection) plus belief attribution processes. But the question is if we need to postulate a separate "mindreading module" and attribution processes for FB understanding. If sensorimotor processes ground a complex and dynamic tracking of current affordance relations of self and other (Trevarthen, 1979; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Gallagher, 2012), then might we not oftentimes understand goals and FBs of interaction partners though this tracking of their actions and affordances and how they differ from and dynamically modulate our own?

Fronto-parietal processes have been found to support not only action planning and decision-making but also perception of the affordances of others. Notably these circuits show complex and dynamic properties, as affordances can be social, visible or hidden (e.g., Umilta et al., 2001). Further, the complexities of our context relations undergo various crucial maturation processes, particularly in the first years of life as evidenced by "A-not-Berror" (Smith and Thelen, 2003) and pretense play studies (Leslie, 1987) etc. For our present purposes we should note that affordances and thus action planning of 2–3 year-old toddlers is not necessarily restricted to what is presently *sensed,* but rather to that which offers our spatially situated bodies sensorimotor engagement. Thus, the door behind us might still be tracked as an afforded "escape-route" even if currently unseen. Similarly, a pretend banana, which is not actually there, can–as spatially actable—be part of the shared affordance space and must comply with certain rules of engagement. Research on mirror neuron circuits also indicates that others' actions and affordances are dynamically integrated into this affordance space understanding (Caggiano et al., 2009; Sartori et al., 2012). The "here & now" affordance space might thus contain counterfactual and prospective teleological *elements*—such as unseen and pretense affordances or others' falsely maintained affordances—as long as these are placed in relation to embodied agents (Gibson, 1977; Brincker, 2010, 2012). A source of complexity is that limits to the current affordance space are fluid, but it is an empirical question how far from our current position our skilled, cultured, and toolenhanced bodies can track own and shared potentialities (Iriki, 2006).

In sum, the proposal is that we reach boxes, answer questions, and point to hidden marbles via a "here & now" affordance space, and further that FBs of others might, as long as they relate to the space we concretely inhabit, be understood, tracked, and engaged through our affordance space understanding.

Looking at the typical helping paradigms, they allow the child to incorporate relevant past and present perspectives of others into their present scenario, without requiring them to abstract from their embodied relation to it. e.g., 18/30 month-olds in the Buttelmann et al. study must integrate contrasting perspectives and "false beliefs" of others within their affordance space. However, they need not let go of their pragmatic relations to this current space to perform the task. Thus, it can be interpreted as "here & now" social navigation incorporating FB *content* in their actual body *space*.

In Sally-Anne style tests on the other hand, toddlers might be aware that Sally doesn't know and yet still not pass the test. Perhaps they even have extra difficulties not sharing the true location of the marble precisely *because* they know Sally doesn't know where it is. In navigational terms, passing the Sally-Anne test requires a child–beyond linguistic skills—to be able to handle the *conflicting pragmatic contexts* of the marble hunt story and the experimenter-meta-question. To pass this test one might need to (1) understand and remember Sally's perspective, but also—and this is where we seem to move beyond the here & now—(2) navigate the situation from her counterfactual vantage-point, which involves momentarily setting aside one's current position in relation to the marble, and finally (3) to return to the verbal prompt and respond to what Sally would have done (had we not been there to help her). Each of these subsequent aspects contribute to the complexity of this highly non-cooperative scenario where one in addition to *including the other's perspective*, also must *exclude one's own* embodied knowledge, and *navigate* both via the current affordance space and beyond it.

## **SELF-PROJECTION AND NAVIGATING BEYOND THE "HERE & NOW"**

In contrast to here & now navigation, we sometimes—typically in our thoughts–engage in what we might call *counterfactual navigation*. i.e., when we place ourselves in remembered, imagined or otherwise not-actually-bodily-inhabited-spaces to use the resulting relational body-space understanding for various deliberations. The key is that it is the *relation* that is counterfactual, not the information or the objective existence of the space. Thus, such navigation goes beyond merely including *counterfactual information,* i.e., memories, perspectives or pretense objects, in our actually inhabited space and situated action choices. Rather it is about "placing oneself" and "making moves" via a space, which– although perhaps factually existing—is *pragmatically counterfactual*, and requires one to abstract from actual embodied relations to the current affordance space.

In terms of Sally-Anne tasks, one might thus be able to track Sally's FB in the current affordance space, but unable to plan a response from Sally's perspective and/or shift back and verbalize it in the prompt context, which requires one to ignore the current position of the marble as it relates to both oneself and Sally (see Bloom and German, 2000; Rubio-Fernández and Geurts, 2013 for Sally-Anne variations that probe some of these behavioral complexities and age limitations). Own prior beliefs and misperceived affordances might also under some conditions require counterfactual navigation, as in e.g., the Smarties box/ appearance-reality paradigms (Gopnik and Aslington, 1988). In short, task aspects of planning, deciding and inferring via remembered/projected scenarios can all be interpreted as involving navigating beyond the current affordance space, as one needs to relate to options, which cannot be interpreted through the sensorimotor affordance space that our situated bodies are actually dwelling in.

The idea of such counterfactual navigation differs from traditional modular, non-relational, and knowledge-focused aspects of "theory of mind" theories (e.g., Leslie et al., 2004; Carruthers, 2013), as no domain specific mindreading or ToM module is postulated. Rather the crucial distinction of the navigational hypothesis pertains not to the other mind *content per se* but rather to how it is presented, assessed or navigated by the understanding subject. Similarly, though there are parallels between the idea of counterfactual navigation and that of off-line simulation (e.g., Heal, 1996; Goldman, 2006), an important contrast is that counterfactual content or "pretense" can play a role in both kinds of navigation. Thus, specific overlaps and contrasts exist to aspects of traditional theory, ToMM etc.

Interestingly, the core cortical areas implicated in much social cognitive research of "theory of mind" have been found to overlap greatly with the default-mode network (Schilbach et al., 2008). The default mode network was precisely isolated due to its sustained activity in the absence of current external-directed attention and stimuli (Gusnard and Raichle, 2001), and has been interpreted as supporting various kinds of "self-projection" (Buckner and Carroll, 2007) or "internal mentation" (Andrews-Hanna, 2012), whether these pertain to social cognition, memory or future projection. In other words, it fits with a notion of navigation beyond the here & now.

Another line of social cognitive research that could be reinterpreted within a navigation framework is the role of the rTPJ in thinking about other minds. This cortical region has been consistently implicated in imaging studies and thus on a modular account proposed to support "theory of mind" (Saxe and Wexler, 2005). However, another possibility is that the region is important for *shifting* between here & now navigation and counterfactual navigation. This hypothesis would fit with broader evidence regarding the role of the rTPJ in attentional shifts (Mitchell, 2008).

These preliminary notes are meant simply to highlight that the navigation hypothesis throws a new light on existing imaging findings and most importantly is empirically tractable.

## **MATURATION OF SENSORIMOTOR PRIORS AND COUNTERFACTUAL NAVIGATING**

The distinction between these two kinds of navigation is proposed as a new interpretation of the age discrepancy of implicit vs. explicit FB tests. The idea is that what is maturing around age four might not be the ability to represent minds, non-current facts or that others have counterfactual beliefs. Rather the proposal is that a counterfactual use of one's embodied learning becomes possible, which again allows for ignoring "here & now" perspectival affordances and for acting on the basis of a navigation of counterfactual space. Toddlers are typically capable of remembering, making predictions, telling us what we don't know etc., and they actively do so in present contexts (Poulin-Dubois et al., 2007; Apperly and Butterfill, 2009). What the smaller children might not be able to do is pragmatically navigating counterfactual terrains. The hypothesis is thus that non-current information only can take on the needed affordance organization for action choice in relation to their current body.

But why would the counterfactual navigation not be available to toddlers? In other words, according to the navigation hypothesis what is the crucial maturation that happens around age four? Recent experimental data from Elizabeth Torres' sensorimotor lab points to a fascinating answer. She found that typically developing (TD) 3-year-olds do not yet have statistical predictability of temporal features of their limb movements (Torres et al., 2013). One might say that they do not yet have "sensorimotor priors" with respect to their own bodily movements and their ensuing reafferent sensations (Von Holst and Mittelstaedt, 1950). Notably, Torres found that hand movement variations go through a crucial maturation precisely around age four. More specifically the variations are noisy and random in toddlers but then begin to show predictability and better signal-to-noise ratios in the 4 year-olds.

These are remarkable findings and their potential goes beyond this current project. The hypothesis that I would like to bring attention to here is that such "sensorimotor priors" can precisely be seen as a kind of predictable probabilistic body, an abstract body that we can "bring into" counterfactual scenarios and thus use to navigate and make decisions in spaces we do not stand in current embodied relations to. The idea is that only when we have established a reliable and predictable baseline expectation about our own re-afferent movements, can we use these hypothetically. In other words, sensorimotor priors as such embodied expectations might ground abstract navigational relations to non-present spaces, and thus allow us to navigate beyond the pragmatic relations of our actually situated bodies. Torres further found that this sensorimotor maturation does not follow the usual trajectory in individuals with autism—which suggests that they have to rely on their "here & now" body and world sensation in very different ways than TD children, and offers a new perspective on their social interaction and FB task difficulties (Brincker and Torres, 2013; Torres, 2013; Torres et al., 2013).

Thus, the proposal is that typical 2–3 year-olds can engage in elaborate pretense incorporating hypothetical content such as memories, fantasy objects and alternative perspectives in their present affordance space, relating to their bodies and sensorimotor capabilities. But they might not have the statistical body expectations needed to navigate counterfactual spaces "in their head" so to speak. The proposal is thus that the helping paradigm does indeed show early understanding of FBs, but not the ability to go beyond the current affordance relations to counterfactual spaces or mental navigation, which seems to be needed in the traditional Sally-Anne task. Under this framework, the development of sensorimotor priors around age four might transform some here & now social knowledge and interactions, but does not move the child from "mind-blindness" to "mindreading."

## **REFERENCES**

Gibson, J. J. (1977). *The Theory of Affordances*. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Reddy, V. (2008). *How Infants Know Minds*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 25 July 2014; accepted: 24 November 2014; published online: 15 December 2014.*

*Citation: Brincker M (2014) Navigating beyond "here & now" affordances—on sensorimotor maturation and "false belief" performance. Front. Psychol. 5:1433. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01433*

*This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Brincker. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation

# *Valentina Fantasia1\*, Hanne De Jaegher 2,3 \* and Alessandra Fasulo1*

1 Centre for Situated Action and Communication, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

2 IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain

3 Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

## *Edited by:*

Eddy J. Davelaar, Birkbeck College, UK

#### *Reviewed by:*

Joachim Funke, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany

Nicola Yuill, University of Sussex, UK

#### *\*Correspondence:*

Valentina Fantasia, Centre for Situated Action and Communication, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, King Henry 1 Street, Portsmouth, Hants PO1 2DY, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Hanne De Jaegher, IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country, Avenida de Tolosa 70, 20018 San Sebastián, Spain e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
The past years have seen an increasing debate on cooperation and its unique human character. Philosophers and psychologists have proposed that cooperative activities are characterized by shared goals to which participants are committed through the ability to understand each other's intentions. Despite its popularity, some serious issues arise with this approach to cooperation. First, one may challenge the assumption that high-level mental processes are necessary for engaging in acting cooperatively. If they are, then how do agents that do not possess such ability (preverbal children, or children with autism who are often claimed to be mind-blind) engage in cooperative exchanges, as the evidence suggests? Secondly, to define cooperation as the result of two de-contextualized minds reading each other's intentions may fail to fully acknowledge the complexity of situated, interactional dynamics and the interplay of variables such as the participants' relational and personal history and experience. In this paper we challenge such accounts of cooperation, calling for an embodied approach that sees cooperation not only as an individual attitude toward the other, but also as a property of interaction processes. Taking an enactive perspective, we argue that cooperation is an intrinsic part of any interaction, and that there can be cooperative interaction before complex communicative abilities are achieved. The issue then is not whether one is able or not to read the other's intentions, but what it takes to participate in joint action. From this basic account, it should be possible to build up more complex forms of cooperation as needed. Addressing the study of cooperation in these terms may enhance our understanding of human social development, and foster our knowledge of different ways of engaging with others, as in the case of autism.

**Keywords: cooperation, development, autism, infancy, social interaction, participatory sense-making**

# **INTRODUCTION**

The ability to cooperate has received increasing attention over the past years, particularly by researchers from analytical philosophy, and from developmental and comparative psychology. Cooperation has been described as the "coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem" (Teasley and Roschelle, 1993) or, more basically, as consisting in "(i) acting or working together and (ii) a common or the same end or purpose" (Tuomela, 2000, p. 3). One of the reasons why cooperation has been considered such an important topic in the past two decades, is its apparent importance in exploring differences between humans and other animals (especially great apes; Tomasello et al., 2005; Tomasello, 2009). Moll and Tomasello (2007, p. 1) have argued that "among primates, humans are by far the most cooperative species, in just about any way this appellation is used (...) constituted by all kinds of cooperative institutions and social practices with shared goals and differentiated roles."

Despite its extensive exploration by philosophers and psychologists, a clear description and understanding of what makes an activity cooperative is still controversial. This is because cooperation is often described, by mainstream accounts, as depending on high-level social skills, and this, as Butterfill (2012) puts it, "already presupposes too much sophistication in the use of psychological concepts" to be applicable in the investigation of more basic forms of cooperation. Indeed, most of the empirical studies on children's cooperation are based on inferential and mentalistic theoretical accounts, which may not be the most adequate framework to study how it emerges in typical and atypical developmental paths.

In this paper we challenge these theoretical models and propose to widen the exploration of what cooperation is, what kind of experiences may support someone's cooperative participation in joint actions, and how this participation may develop over time. Widening the concept of cooperation, we aim to explore the different interactional modalities for it to work out, including those that are not explicitly or previously agreed on as cooperation. We end by drawing some implications of such a change in perspective for cooperation in infancy and in autism.

## **PHILOSOPHICAL ACCOUNTS OF COOPERATION**

Current theories of joint action have attempted to describe cooperation as a phenomenon primarily based in cognitive abilities. These theories depict social encounters (and cooperative actions) as encounters of minds, where participants have to infer each other's beliefs and desires to understand and predict the other's intentions and moves. Central to these theories is the concept of shared intentionality. Many philosophical theories propose that joint actions require the creation of shared (or collective, or joint) intentions1 (Gilbert, 1989; Bratman, 1992, 1993; Searle, 1995; Tuomela,1995). Sharing intentions is possible when partners make individual plans for achieving a common goal, and then formulate predictions upon the other's intention to achieve the same goal (Gilbert, 1989, 2000; Bratman, 1992; Tuomela, 1993, 2005; Pacherie, 2006). Shared intentions, according to Bratman (1992) are defined as a set of interrelated individual intentional states. In shared activities, he claims, "each agent intends that the group perform the joint action in accordance with and because of meshing subplans of each participating agent's intention that the group so act." (Bratman, 1992, p. 333). According to this view, a joint activity is the result of a shared intention, and a shared intention is simply a pattern of "interlocking" plan-intentions of the participants about which they have common knowledge. Essentially, for cognitivist philosophical approaches, partners engage in cooperative actions if they are able to infer each other's thoughts and plans, and combine them to build their co-actions in some shared way.

As the interest in exploring joint intentionality and joint actions has grown, further theorization followed the original descriptions of cooperation. Building up on Bratman's account, for example, Tummolini (2013) suggests that representing one's own goal and those of others from a third-person observational perspective is also a necessary cognitive ability to collaborate, along with mindreading. Thanks to this allocentric representation of goals (as he names it) individuals are endowed with both "an intention in favor of the joint action and one in favor of a joint mode of reasoning," which enables them to coordinate in a joint action. Other researchers have attempted to formulate less cognitively demanding accounts of shared intentionality, yet still considering representing intentions at the very ground of any joint action. Sebanz et al. (2006, p. 70), for instance, proposed that a successful joint action "depends on the abilities (i) to share representations, (ii) to predict actions, and (iii) to integrate predicted effects of own and others' actions."

Because they presuppose the presence of high-level sociocognitive capacities, standard accounts of cooperation hardly apply to those who do not possess propositional knowledge about others' intentions, such as young children or animals, and some philosophers have already questioned this assumption. Tollefsen (2005), for instance, argued that awareness of another's intention may not depend on inferring it, but on the ability to track intentions-in-action. She argues that attending to each other's actions provides participants with a shared perceptual space constructed through joint attention dynamics. In this shared space, intentions-in-action are perceptually overt and identifiable so that even young children without a "robust theory of mind" (p. 81) can theoretically engage in cooperative activities. Despite these developmental concerns, the author

explicitly renounces to address how this perspective can be effectively applied from very early in development, by saying that "[p]rior to the first year, young infants are like windowless monads" (p. 80), implying that they cannot yet interact. By stressing the importance of joint attention and social referencing mechanisms (as defined by Tomasello, 1995) for the building up of a shared space, she neglects the possibility of earlier forms of cooperation, e.g., in infancy. Similarly concerned with understanding the role of joint action in development, Butterfill (2012) proposed to replace the concept of shared intentions with that of shared goals. Sharing a goal, in his view, only requires agents' goaldirected actions to be coordinated, but does not imply knowledge. This move should make cooperation possible in early development. However, he also claims that possessing a shared goal requires representing goal-directed actions, and the way this is achieved by young children, in his proposal, is not completely clear.

We find all these arguments to reflect a general problem with the cooperation research reviewed so far: cooperation is framed in its full-blown, adult form and therefore it is difficult to see how those who do not have high socio-cognitive skills (including representing goal-directed actions) or experience could possibly cooperate. This is our main concern in the present paper.

## **COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTAL ACCOUNTS OF COOPERATION**

Defining what is to cooperate from a developmental point of view is challenging. Recent developmental research in psychology has endorsed a cognitivist account of shared cooperative activities, suggesting that a major step in children's social cognitive development occurs when, at around 12–14 months, children begin to engage with adults in cooperative activities involving an understanding of interdependent roles (Tomasello et al., 2005), and are generally motivated to help the other to accomplish her role if needed (Moll and Tomasello, 2007). Therefore, in order to cooperate, it seems that "children must be able to represent, monitor, and regulate both their own and the partner's behavior relative to their relation to a single, common goal" (Brownell and Carriger, 1990, p. 1165).

To empirically investigate early cooperative skills through abilities such as perspective taking and understanding of the other's intentions and goals, most of the studies on young children have adopted specifically designed lab tasks involving role reversal or simultaneous coordination of movements (Brownell and Carriger, 1990; Warneken et al., 2006, 2012). In the majority of these studies, successfully performed joint tasks would set the age threshold for attributing cooperative abilities and instrumental helping to children.

For example, Brownell et al. (2006) observed children at 19, 23, and 27 months of age engaging in peer cooperative problem solving tasks. In these tasks, each child had to pull simultaneously or sequentially one handle of a wooden box to activate a musical toy mounted on the box. Activating the toy by coordinating each other's timing and movements would lead to successful performance of the task. The researchers found that 1-year-old children coordinated their actions more by coincidence than in a cooperative way, whereas older children appeared to be more actively cooperating toward a shared goal. They took these results

1We will not go into the debate here about specific differences between shared or collective intentionality or other denominations as it is not relevant for our argument. For an overview of analytic standpoints on the terms, see (Schweikard and Schmid, 2013).

to confirm their view that the ability to cooperate depends on "being able to represent and to share goals and intentions with a partner" (p. 806); an ability that, according to the study, could only be seen over the second and third years of life. Another example is a study in whichWarneken and Tomasello (2007)investigated instrumental helping and cooperation in 14-months-olds children. Instrumental helping was defined as providing help to people in completing a task, e.g., pick up an out-of-reach object, whereas cooperation was measured through a series of cooperative tasks to be resolved jointly, such as retrieving an object from a vertically movable cylinder embedded in a platform. Results showed that at 14 months children reliably helped a partner who could not achieve a goal, but cooperated successfully only in tasks demanding low coordination. The authors concluded that "Helping might be easier for children than cooperating because it requires the understanding of what another individual intends to do (...), whereas cooperation requires the ability to form a shared goal and to mesh plans of action toward that goal" (ibid. p. 291). In other words, helping would only require to read another's intention, whereas cooperation would also need for one's own and the other's intentions to be co-dependent and converge.

In sum, developmental research has attempted to define the beginning of cooperation by setting tasks based on similar premises, thus designing practical tasks that need not only inferring but also mobilizing well-formed intentions to be completed. These premises derive from the mainstream philosophical accounts of cooperative actions, which propose that to be engaged in a cooperative action requires possessing mind-reading abilities, and abilities to align one's own intentions and beliefs with the other's, although milder, less cognitively weighted positions have also been proposed. In the next section we will discuss what we believe are some pitfalls of both the existing theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cooperation.

## **METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL ISSUES WITH STANDARD APPROACHES**

To put shared intentionality at the very basis of shared cooperative action raises the question of how humans get to know others' intentions and goals. On the standard accounts, this is done by use of a theory of mind or a simulation mechanism, which is "any cognitive system ... that predicts or explains the behavior of another agent by postulating that unobservable inner states particular to the cognitive perspective of that agent causally modulate that agent's behavior" (Penn and Povinelli, 2008, p. 394). This cognitive system is often thought to be supported by the so-called social brain (Frith and Frith, 2003; Frith, 2007).

## *If intentions are hidden, are joint intentions hidden too?*

Within mind-reading approaches, social understanding requires, among other things, being able to get access to another's intentions, or more in general, contents of the mind. The "problem" of understanding others' minds is based on the premise that intentions are hidden and private, that is, that others' intentions (like thoughts, ideas, beliefs) need to be inferred through complex representational operations (Apperly, 2011). Now, how are such intentions shared? On standard representationalist accounts, this is often

proposed to happen through some forms of mental alignment, for instance by simultaneous mirror system activation (Gallese, 2003; Pacherie, 2006; Sebanz et al., 2006). In this view, everyone has her own understanding of others'intentions to jointly perform an action, but how these understandings become shared remains unclear. For example,Knoblich and Sebanz (2008) have attempted to explain how people can form intentions to act together in three steps. First, they need to be able to derive the other person's intentions behind her object-directed actions or actions directed to her partner. Then, actors need to be able to keep knowledge of these intentions separate from their own intentions. Eventually, "There needs to be an intentional structure that allows an actor to relate his/her own intention and the other's intention to an intention that drives the joint activity" (Knoblich and Sebanz, 2008, p. 2025). Although it may seem very basic, this definition is still quite cognitively demanding, and does not solve the main problem of how an "intentional structure" works. Is it individual or shared, implicitly or explicitly created?

There seems to be a gap here in the form of an empty space *in between* people: these approaches have explained shared intentionality from an observer's perspective, but not from a participant's one. This is in line with criticisms of the standard approach to social cognition (e.g., Gallagher, 2001; Leudar and Costall, 2009) and with views on interpersonal alignment as primarily based on embodied engagement (Macmurray, 1991; Braten, 2003; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009; Reddy and Morris, 2009). Shotter (1983, p. 39) nicely summarized these alternative positions: "Motives, intentions, sentiments are (. . .) directly perceived by those directly involved in [a joint action] as first person actors and second person recipients in that activity. Only third person observers have to make inferences."

Another consideration is whether we need *to know* that we are cooperating in order to be able to cooperate. Often, cooperation is presupposed as something we set out to do, so that actions are either clearly cooperative or not – a separate and identificable type of action altogether. This may indeed sometimes be the case, for example when two people meet to perform a certain shared task, like bathing a very agitated dog. But taking this idea as the starting point for understanding cooperation presupposes that we already know what it is, and so we do not need to define the elements out of which it could arise. It precludes, for example, the possibility that cooperation arises without there being a predefined intention or motive to cooperate, while this may be key to understanding how people get to cooperate in the first place. Shared goals may emerge during the course of an interaction, and so participants can "roll into" cooperation without having previous awareness of it. For instance, making space for someone who enters a crowded bus is achieved by the new and old passengers together, each adjusting movements and postures. Here, a common goal emerges out of the interaction and in the context of a small space to be shared as smoothly as possible. Understanding this emergent kind of phenomenon will give us further insights into what cooperation is and how it works.

## *Where is development?*

We may question to what extent we can explain the role of cooperative actions in children's development if we conceive of cooperation as heavily relying on high cognitive skills, and a long experience with social interactions. As Butterfill (2012, p. 24) wrote:

If the leading account were the whole truth about joint action, engaging in joint action would presuppose, and therefore not explain, much of the development of reasoning about others'mental states. (. . .) We need a further account of joint action, one that is compatible with the premise that joint action plays a role in explaining how humans develop abilities to think about minds.

Furthermore, developmental research on cooperation is based on a rather restricted pool of tasks, which are designed to assess cooperative problem solving and related abilities like role reversal, perspective-taking and joint attention. These do not necessarily cover the whole range of possible cooperative interactions in a child's life, as there are many situations (some of which we discuss below) in which a clear, explicit division of roles and statement of goals is not needed. Furthermore, the structure of these tasks implies a"pass or fail" evaluation and seems therefore more appropriate to detect when cooperative skills are already present, rather than telling us how they emerge or develop in time (Thelen and Smith, 1994).

Which view on cooperation one adopts is likely to have rather serious consequences when studying cooperative exchanges in typical and atypical development. This is, for example, the case with research on cooperation in autism. Studies on cooperation in autism that are based on mind-reading and perspective-taking abilities2 find that children with autism are less successful than children with developmental delay (Sally and Hill, 2006; Liebal et al., 2007). However, this does not mean that they are completely incapable. For instance they seem able to help an adult as needed (Liebal et al., 2007), particularly when they understand the other person's goals toward an object (Aldridge et al., 2000; Carpenter et al., 2001). Liebal et al. (2007) explained these findings in terms of a specific impaired understanding of the partner's role within the cooperative task that would not apply when the situation does not require knowledge of and agreement on each partner's role. Thus, it may be that children with autism can succeed in cooperative tasks, if they do not entail an explicit understanding and prior agreement on each partner's role. Similarly, if they are given appropriate interactive support, e.g., if they are helped with being aware of the other person in the interaction, they can cooperate in a dual-control technology task (Holt and Yuill, 2014).

In conclusion, to study cooperation as it develops and in conditions implying impairments in social skills we need to investigate it at a more basic level than has been done so far. In the next section, we put forward our proposal, which looks at cooperative interactions from the point of view of what is at stake for the individuals participating in them, and the organization of cooperative interaction processes. For doing this, we will use the concepts

and research tools of *enaction*, a specific approach to cognition within the embodiment movement in cognitive science (Varela et al., 1991; Thompson, 2007; Di Paolo et al., 2010).

# **THE ENACTIVE PERSPECTIVE ON SENSE-MAKING AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS**

Enaction is a non-reductive naturalistic approach that proposes a deep continuity between living and cognitive processes. It is a scientific program that explores several phases along this life-mind continuum, based on six mutually supporting, operational concepts: *autonomy*, *sense-making*, *embodiment*, *emergence*, *experience*, and *participatory sense-making* (Varela et al., 1991; Thompson, 2005, 2007; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Di Paolo et al., 2010). Here, we first introduce two of its main concepts: *sense-making*—the enactive notion of cognition in general; and *participatory sense-making*—enactive social cognition. In section 3, we start applying these ideas to understanding cooperation.

## **SENSE-MAKING**

For enaction, "the mind is seen not as inhering in the individual, but as emerging, existing dynamically in the relationship between organisms and their surroundings (including other agents)" (McGann et al., 2013). Or, as Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 430) already put it:

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

In this view, the paradigmatic cases of cognizers are living organisms (Varela, 1997; Thompson, 2007). One of their crucial properties is their constitutive and interactive *autonomy*, which is defined as a network of dynamical processes (metabolic, immune, neural, sensorimotor, etc.) that actively generates and sustains an identity under precarious conditions (Di Paolo, 2005). An autonomous system constantly produces itself physically, and regulates its interactions with the world to satisfy the needs created by its precarious condition (Di Paolo, 2005). The living organism spontaneously generates its own goals and responds to the environment (McGann, 2007), in accordance with its selforganization. The cognizer is therefore always situated in a world that is significant for it, based on this perspective based on need. Its world is not pre-given but largely *enacted*, i.e., shaped as part of its autonomous activity. For the enactive approach, cognition is *embodied*, meaning that a cognizer's activity depends non-trivially on the body. The body is more than just anatomical or physiological structures and sensorimotor strategies; it *is* the precarious combination of various interrelated self-sustaining identities (organic, cognitive, social), each interacting with the world in terms of the consequences for its own viability (Di Paolo, 2005).

These ideas together ground the enactive characterization of cognition as *sense-making*: a cognizer's adaptive regulation of its states and interactions with the world, with respect to the implications for the continuation of its own autonomous identity. The concept of sense-making describes the relation between an autonomous agent and the world of significance it enacts. It therefore does not conceive of cognitive processes as

2Mainstream accounts of autism have long proposed that people with autism have difficulties in mind-reading (Baron-Cohen, 1989; Dinishak and Akhtar, 2013), joint attention (Loveland and Landry, 1986), or impairments in turn-taking skills (McEvoy et al., 1993), although these findings are not uncontroversial, and even primary proponents recognize that there is always a number of participants who do pass the tests (Happé, 1994; but see also Boucher, 1989, 1996, 2012; Gernsbacher et al., 2008).

representational and avoids the known problems of cognitivism. Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations whose significant value is to be added later. Natural cognitive systems participate in sense-making as a relational and affect-laden process grounded in biological organization (Jonas, 1966; Varela, 1991, 1997; Weber and Varela, 2002; Di Paolo, 2005; Thompson, 2007). Sense-making, thus, is *valued* or *concerned* acting and interacting, leaving no gap between affect and cognition they are one in the relation of significance between cognizer and world.

## **PARTICIPATORY SENSE-MAKING**

Having briefly explained what enactive cognition is, and sensemakers' inherently meaningful perspective on and interactions with the world, let us now take a closer look at social encounters, the second main element in our enactive sketch of cooperation. The enactive approach considers sociality in its broadest form, namely as*intersubjectivity*, or the meaningful engagement between subjects (Reddy, 2008), in which three aspects are crucial: engagement, meaning, and subject. Meaning and subjectivity have been explained above in terms of sense-making, namely as the way living (cognizing) systems always meaningfully engage with their environment, because they are self-organizing and self-maintaining. In this section, we turn our gaze on engagement between such concerned subjects.

Crucial to the enactive approach is the focus on *social interaction processes*, which are complex phenomena involving different dimensions of verbal and non-verbal behavior, varying contexts, numbers of participants and technological mediation. They impose strict timing demands, involve reciprocal activity, exhibit a mixture of discrete and continuous events at different timescales, and are often robust against external disruptions. Essential to interaction is that it involves *engagement* between agents. Engagement (Reddy, 2008; Reddy and Morris, 2009) captures the qualitative aspect of social interactions once they start to "take over" and acquire a momentum of their own. It also reflects the way this experience is described in everyday language (e.g., "being in sync with someone"). Experientially, engagement is the fluctuating feelings of connectedness with one another, including that of being in the flow of an interaction.

In order to capture this taking-over aspect of engagement, enaction defines social interaction in terms of the autonomy (as defined above) of the interaction process and that of the individuals involved, as:

a co-regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where: (i) the co-regulation and the coupling mutually affect each other, constituting an autonomous self-sustaining organization in the domain of relational dynamics and (ii) the autonomy of the agents involved is not destroyed (although its scope can be augmented or reduced; De Jaegher et al., 2010, pp. 442–443; also De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007, p. 493).

Apart from each agent involved in such a coupling contributing to its co-regulation, the interaction process itself also self-organizes and self-maintains. To illustrate this, think of how sometimes, when you encounter someone coming from the other direction in a narrow corridor, you end up in front of each other, then each step

aside, moving to the same side at the same time, preventing both of you from continuing on your way. This simple example shows how the interaction process can become autonomous or "take on a life of its own." At the same time, the interactors also maintain their autonomy as participants. This is a necessary condition for calling an interaction social, because if one of the participants loses their autonomy, for the other it would be like interacting with an object or a tool, and thus not a social interaction anymore (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007).

Social interactions are sustained by processes of embodied coordination, including its breakdowns and repairs (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012). Coordination does not necessarily require cognitively complicated skill. Analyses of social interactions and conversations in social science show that participants can unconsciously coordinate their movements and utterances, and this is already the case in mother-infant interactions (Condon and Sander, 1974; Stern, 1977/2002; Condon, 1979; Scollon,1981; Davis,1982; Tronick and Cohn,1989; Kendon,1990; Grammer et al., 1998; Malloch, 2000; Jaffe et al., 2001; Issartel et al., 2007; Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009). With the concept of coordination and other dynamical systems tools, interaction dynamics can be measured (see e.g., Kelso, 2009). Moreover, they can be related to neural activity (see e.g., Lindenberger et al., 2009; Dumas et al., 2010, 2012; Cui et al., 2012; Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012; Konvalinka and Roepstorff, 2012; Schilbach et al., 2013).

Based on this definition of social interaction, and the notions of sense-making and coordination, we can now characterize social understanding as *participatory sense-making*: If, as indicated above, we make sense of the world by moving around in and with it, and we coordinate our movements with others when interacting with them, this means that we can coordinate our sense-making activities. That is, we literally *participate in each other's sense-making activities*. Thus, on the enactive account, social understanding is understood as the generation and transformation of meaning together in interaction (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; De Jaegher, 2009; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009). Participants co-create the interactive situation, *but also* the interaction process as such influences the sense-making that takes place. If a social interaction is as characterized, then people can act together, also for no apparent end or purpose of their own, or even against their individual ends (e.g., the corridor encounter). Even without a shared intention to start with or when entered into against their will by the participants, interacting can change or affect one's ends or purposes.

This has an interesting consequence for understanding intentions, namely they are truly generated and transformed interactionally, and interacting with each other opens up new domains of sense-making that we would not have on our own. This contrasts with the way intentions are conceived in cognitivist approaches to cooperation, as introduced above, namely as hidden, and only shareable by high-level cognitive mechanisms. On our account, intentions do not first arise or are first made individually, but they emerge as the interaction goes on (Di Paolo, under review). Therefore, intentions are visible and understandable by each participant, also in cooperative interactions, as they are contextualized and stemfrom that specific ongoing interaction.

This makes understanding and aligning with the other's intentions un-mysterious: it happens in doing things together, which is moving together, since movements are already and always imbued with meaning for sense-makers (Johnson, 2007; Sheets-Johnstone, 2011; Merritt,2013). On the basis of this, we can see how intentions can evolve in their jointness, meanings and specificity for those involved throughout interaction, including cooperative ones.

## **COOPERATION AS A PROCESS**

Here, we start from the most rudimentary or minimal form of cooperation, in order to make it understandable from a developmental point of view. With the enactive concepts of sense-making and participatory sense-making in hand, let us now look again at cooperation, starting from its basic definition as "(i) acting or working together and (ii) a common or the same end or purpose" (Tuomela, 2000, p. 3). Now, considering social interactions as already cooperative in a basic sense (in line with our enactive approach), we want to characterize our approach to cooperation starting from this definition by Hubley and Trevarthen (1979, p. 58):

cooperation means that each of the subjects is taking account of the other's interests and objectives in some relation to the extrapersonal context, and is acting to complement the other's response."

In our view, "taking account of the other's interests and objectives" does not need inferencing, as we argued, but happens through embodied interactions that are meaningful in the given situation and in the interactional history. These actions are complementary in that they fit each other in some form. This is not only the case for positive co-operations but also for situations in which we argue and disagree about something, where some complementarity is still needed in order for the disagreement even to be played out. This means that there are different forms, layers, and aspects of cooperation: embodied, in time, in space, in topic, imitative or complementary, etc. The fact that we are interacting guarantees that some basic cooperative layer is present (e.g., in the corridor situation, we cooperate to stop cooperating) and therefore, every time we interact, we cooperate, in a basic sense. Also, since sense-making always involves affect, this view of cooperation becomes less intellectualistic and begins to investigate how affective processes may be involved in cooperation. Then, the challenge is to investigate what further levels of cooperation are present in a specific interaction or situation, over and above the basic interaction process. This can involve different, increasingly more complex levels of sense-making.

Like the enactive approach, interactionist approaches such as ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have also based their empirical program on a theory of social interaction as a dynamical constructions and a view of others' intentions as mutually accessible and accountable for. Ethnomethodology was originally developed by Garfinkel to "discover the methods that persons use in their everyday life (. . .) in constructing social reality" (Psathas, 1968, p. 509), and thus study how this reality is constructed, produced and organized in social encounters. Derived from phenomenology, it shares with it an interest in exploring the participants' embodied experience of being engaged in mundane interactions; the latter are seen as phenomena in

their own right, yet situated in specific cultural contexts and practices (see, for instance, the work of Schütz, 1967/1932). Inspired by ethnomethodology and by Goffman's (1983) work on the interaction order, Conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974; Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2007) investigates the systematic features of naturally occurring conversations. In a large body of work now spanning over five decades, it has revealed the fine, moment-by-moment coordination of speakers, and the sequential structuring that enable the orderly participation of different interactors across turns-at-talk and within complex activities. Central in this approach is a view of human communication as multimodal, where different but integrated communicative resources (verbal and non-verbal) contribute to establishing the interactional context, anticipating, co-constructing, and if necessary repairing the emergent definition of what is going on (Kendon, 1990; Streeck et al., 2011; Tulbert and Goodwin, 2011). Thus, interactions are always cooperative, inasmuch as participants orient to, monitor and support the interlocutors' understanding and act so as to enable their successive moves (Goodwin, 1995, 2013).

Intentions and goals are not searched before or behind the communicative action as its "cause," but manifest in speakers' behavior, shaped and adjusted as the interaction unfolds. Within this framework, and in convergence with enactivism, cooperating is possible even for those – like young children – who do not possess a robust capacity to "read" others' intentions or plans, but can nevertheless participate in joint, situated interactions (Forrester, 2008; Lerner et al., 2011; Mehus, 2011).

## **COOPERATION IN INFANCY**

We can now ask what this view implies for understanding cooperation in infancy. Since infants cannot remain alive alone, they need others to help them with nourishing, shelter, hygiene, and social interaction. On our account, it is to be expected that infants contribute actively to this caring, because they are themselves sense-makers, generating and maintaining their own living identity, and also, quite possibly, already their social identity (Stern, 1985/2000; Delafield-Butt and Gangopadhyay, 2013).

Hubley (1983) defined cooperation in infancy as the joint management of objects, actions or ideas to fulfill a purpose that two interactors share. She identified some minimum requirements for cooperative actions in infancy, which are (1) a shared plan of action within mutual orientation, with the infant attending to and acting with reference to the partner's indicated purposes; (2) active contributions to a single coordinated event, which, on the infant's part, is seen as a clearly identifiable and oriented action to influence the behavior of the partner and then mesh with the partner's action to complete a shared purpose; (3) willing participation. On the one hand, such a definition seems fitting with the infant's limited communicative resources as it does not imply that the partners should verbally agree on a shared plan or goal. However, it presupposes that some shared plan has been somehow established, and requires that each partner understands the interest or purposes of the other regarding the shared action. As we already argued, such an explicit agreement may not be required in all forms of cooperative interactions.

The fundamental contribution of past developmental research has been to reveal how early communicative interactions are created out of contributions of both the infant and the caregiver (Hubley and Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen, 1979). Bruner (1977) recognized shared reference and role-taking as cooperative features in communicative interactions involving giving and receiving objects before 1 year of age. More recent observations have demonstrated how, since very early in life, infants adjust and facilitate actions directed to them, especially in daily routines such as when the caregivers pick them up, change their nappy, or play a social game with them (Service, 1984; Nomikou and Rohlfing, 2011; Reddy et al., 2013; R¸aczaszek-Leonardi et al., 2013; Fantasia et al., 2014). Under a perspective that considers social interactions as basic forms of cooperation by participating in shared, meaningful interactions, infants practice their ability to make sense of and coordinate with the caregiver's action, becoming increasingly skilled in their social participation.

One of the criticisms we made of existing studies was that they measured children's cooperative ability when they successfully performed a joint pre-fixed task; regarding cooperation as a cognitive skill that can be switched on and off means neglecting the importance of learning processes that sprout *from* and *within* cooperative interactions. In contrast, in a here and now perspective the process of cooperating enables children to build up their actions moment by moment through a sequence of relational adjustments and (dis-)engagements toward a joint goal. Thanks to its structuring and structured nature, cooperation may be seen as a framework in which development occurs and at the same time as a mode of being with others learnt during development. If we take seriously what was proposed so far – that any interaction requires some basic cooperation, followed, in some cases, by a process of co-negotiation toward a more or less explicit goal that matters to those who are involved in that process – then we may also explain how it develops. And, at the same time, we may be able to see how participating in goal-directed joint actions supports and shapes infants' development.

# **COOPERATION IN AUTISM**

A different theoretical perspective may also open up new possibilities for investigating cooperation in autism. As reported above, empirical findings suggest that some children with autism (at different chronological ages) perform poorly in high-level cooperative tasks and in other correlated abilities, such as joint attention, imitation, perspective taking, and role-reversal (see Colombi et al., 2009). Yet, performing "poorly" does not mean that the capacity is absent, and indeed some children with autistic spectrum condition (ASC) do pass the cooperative tasks. This result is not consistent with the theoretical premises informing the design of the tests and the difficulties of children with autism, classically understood. One way to explain this (controversial) evidence may lie in changing the premises we start from, instead of *post hoc* adjustments to the interpretation.

Studies of the verbal production of children with autism that do not start from a deficit but try to understand the children's spontaneous interactional behavior, can help to illustrate and support this shift of perspective. Conversation analysis studies, for example, allow to observe how even echolalic productions (the repetition of utterances with no apparent relation to prior talk from other speakers), often seen in children with autism, are in fact responsive moves (Loca and Wootton, 1995; Wootton, 1999; Stribling et al., 2005/2006; Sterponi and Shankey, 2014). The repetition of available utterances helps children to stay in the conversation despite their difficulty with improvising a newly designed turn. Sometimes these stereotypical contributions can take the form of questions and feed the progression of an interaction, supporting the child's continued participation in a social exchange (Sterponi and Fasulo, 2010).

Dickerson et al. (2007) also show that observing what children actually do reveals capacities for cooperation that cannot emerge in pre-defined tasks, for sometimes the ways in which children find solutions for their difficulties are not incorporated into the tasks. They investigated classroom interactions between two autistic children and their tutors. The children were asked to answer questions, using answer-cards. During the session, each of the children tapped the answer-cards, an action which at first sight seemed meaningless. However, using conversation analysis, Dickerson et al. (2007) could show that the children tapped on the cards just before they started answering, and sometimes continuing into their answering. This seems to indicate that the tapping is a way of engaging and of "projecting a relevant forthcoming response on the part of the child" (Dickerson et al., 2007, p. 297). In other words, the children found means to signal their ongoing engagement when the timing of their verbal production was delayed, thus cooperating to the maintenance of the interactive plane.

Using fine-grained observational methods, the actions of all participants can be studied and analyzed in interaction, making it possible to pick up the forms of cooperation that infants and people with autism are capable of (see also Stribling et al., 2009). These examples demonstrate how the use of non-verbal and non-vocal resources for building up a co-participatory model of how the child and teachers work together becomes possible thanks to transcripts of the interactions. In this way, not only the participants' talk, but also a number of non-verbal activities that are salient for the interaction are acknowledged. These results fit well with the Vygotskian idea that collaborative work leads to learning (Vygotsky, 1978; see also Goodwin, 2013). Furthermore, these studies suggest that ways to observe cooperative interactions in autism exist, if only we consider interactions and autism from a different perspective. During everyday interactions at home or school, in the car or at the park, children with autism are involved in many simpler, not-always-explicit cooperative exchanges. Not only are the children part of these exchanges, but they also grow into them; namely, they learn to be active partners out of everyday cooperative interaction, just like every other child does. This is not to say that there are no difficulties or differences, but social understanding in autism may be more fruitfully studied from thebasic and positive perspective we put forward here.

# **IMPLICATIONS**

In summary, the perspective shift we propose has implications for understanding development as well as autism. Firstly, our approach supports a developmental stance on cooperation in that

it explores how we become cooperative interaction partners in the first place. If we assume high-order mental skills (or a great deal of "social experience") to be prerequisite for cooperating, we would not able to see how infants can grow into social interactions and gradually learn to engage with the social world around them, but rather wait until much of the development has already happened. If, on the other hand, we propose that cooperation is a form of interacting and understanding each other, it does become possible to investigate how cooperation can emerge and be learnt even in early interactions. In this perspective, cooperation in infancy is a product of development, as well as a process in which development occurs.

An interesting aspect to consider regarding development is how to conceive of cooperation in asymmetrical interactions. Infants seem to be able to cooperatively coordinate with caregivers since very early (see e.g., Reddy et al., 2013; Fantasia et al., 2014), but they may not do it with peers until later on, as suggested by some research (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006, 2007). From an enactive point of view, it is not surprising that infants are better able to cooperate with a caregiver than with a peer, since the presence of someone with more interactive experience makes the overall interaction more competent. This is related to Vygotsky's (1978) notion of the zone of proximal development, where it is possible to scaffold someone in interaction to be jointly more capable of activities they cannot yet do alone. What is needed for an interaction to be cooperative if the relation is asymmetric? If we think of a pick up situation, we know that the adult is doing the major part by actually holding the infant and lifting her up. Yet, infants are not passively waiting for it to happen. They make specific preparatory body adjustments that facilitate the mother's movements, and thus, the pick up sequence (Service, 1984; Reddy et al., 2013). At the same time, when the adult fails to complete the expected pick up sequence, infants seem to stop being cooperative by dropping their body tension and participation (Fantasia et al., 2014). In this case, although the mother has the main role in making the pick up sequence effective, the infant's role is essential in its being clearly oriented toward the joint achievement of the interaction. Obviously, asymmetry may or may not play a strong role depending on the task.

As a second point, if we are to understand autism in general, and specifically people with autism's capacity to cooperate (which is firstly a particular form of social interaction) the change of perspective we propose here may also be helpful. We may try to forsake a typical-development perspective and, as Petra Björne and other authors have already suggested, reverse our glasses, paying more attention to what people with ASC can do and the way they describe their own experiences (Björne, 2007; Robledo et al., 2012; De Jaegher, 2013; Donnellan et al., 2013). As shown by the studies on autism presented in the previous section, if we consider actions in their interactional context and in their significance for all participants, it becomes possible to understand the emergence of cooperation also in the interactions of and with people with autism. Exploring cooperation in children with autism from an observer or third-person perspective not only fails to take into account the child's experience of cooperating as an engaged partner; it also cuts out how the other person is feeling or experiencing the child as a partner. In cases like autism, in which social interactions run a different course, in which jointly attending to an object may not be at the core of the interaction, approaching cooperation from a second person perspective can make all the difference.

We thus suggest that future studies on cooperation and autism should include more ecological observations and parental reports. We expect to gain more detailed knowledge about what infants and children with autism can do cooperatively in early goal-directed interactions from taking an enactive approach. This involves: finely studying the interaction (e.g., through ethnomethodology or conversation analysis), taking into account the context or the environment (using, for instance, parental reports or ecological observations), and studying what is at stake for the individuals involved (i.e., asking how they make sense in and of the interaction).

# **CONCLUSION**

We hope to have shown that it is possible to encompass a wider range of cooperative interactions, not only those in which interactors explicitly agree upon and set rules and roles for a specific shared task to be performed. This is not to neglect that in some particular scenarios participants do need to make efforts to make sense of the other's intentions, and indeed goals need to be set out and agreed beforehand. Only, this is not always the case, as cooperation is a multi-layered process that may take different forms. In this perspective, we share Tollefsen's view that intentions-inaction can emerge out of ongoing interaction (Tollefsen and Dale, 2012), with the minimum requirement that interactors share an interactional space. Cooperation is a form of participating in each other's sense-making, in which we may form a goal or purpose together while interacting. It is not a skill that can be lacked but rather a way of being with others that is possible to learn. Learning to cooperate then becomes understandable as an important aspect of typical and atypical development. For this reason, we think that future developmental research on cooperation (and social cognition in general) could benefit from more ecological observational methods and less adult-centric approaches (Donaldson, 1978). As the adult's way of cooperating is an already fully blossomed one, one in which the picture is complete (and intentions can be easily inferred if needed), we need instead to observe infants and their daily living and discover the basic, emerging ways in which cooperation develops.

# **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

We are greatly thankful to Alan Costall, Beatriz López, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Vasu Reddy, Stephen Butterfill, the two reviewers and the researchers who attended the presentation of this paper at the Children and Technology Lab, Developmental and Clinical Psychology Group, University of Sussex for their suggestions, support and inspirational discussions. This work is supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, "TESIS: Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity" (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828)."

## **REFERENCES**

Aldridge, M. A., Stone, K. R., Sweeney, M. H., and Bower, T. G. R. (2000). Preverbal children with autism understand the intentions of others. *Dev. Sci.* 3, 294–301. doi: 10.1111/1467-7687.00123

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 13 May 2014; accepted: 22 July 2014; published online: 08 August 2014. Citation: Fantasia V, De Jaegher H and Fasulo A (2014) We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation. Front. Psychol. 5:874. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00874 This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in*

*Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Fantasia, De Jaegher and Fasulo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited andthatthe original publication inthis journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Going along with or taking along with: a cooperation continuum in autism?

# *Nicola Yuill\**

*ChaTLab, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK \*Correspondence<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
## *Edited by:*

*Ezequiel Alejandro Di Paolo, Ikerbasque - Basque Foundation for Science, Spain*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Alessandra Fasulo, University of Portsmouth, UK*

**Keywords: cooperation, development, autism, social interaction, collaboration**

## **A commentary on**

**We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation**

*by Fantasia, V., De Jaegher, H., and Fasulo, A. (2014). Front. Psychol. 5:874. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00874*

We welcome Fantasia et al.'s (FDF's) embodied perspective on cooperation and agree that the definition and varieties of cooperative activities need unpicking. We commend FDF's multidisciplinary approach, offering diverse methods and standards of support, from controlled experimental set-ups and ethological observations to rich descriptions of interaction. Can these approaches work together, or are they incommensurable? We think work in technology-supported collaboration in autism offers new insights.

FDF argue that autistic children are involved in many cooperative exchanges and suggest working from these "positive" perspectives. We propose distinguishing such "cooperative" exchanges from the carefully-constructed cooperative tests used in research with toddlers, by drawing on research which compares different designs of collaborative technology. Such technology is nothing artificial or exotic, just a means of understanding and altering environments to make it easier or harder for organisms to engage in cooperative interactions, e.g., co-working with an interactive surface placed horizontally vs. vertically. Studying people's interactions with different designs tells us about human interactional capacities and processes.

FDF define cooperation broadly, e.g., including echolalic productions and everyday interactions in autism. They claim that such behaviors show "ways of engaging" or signal ongoing engagement. Do we take these behaviors as deliberate signals of engagement, or as merely interpreted by the other as engagement, which might then bootstrap the development of intentional engagement in the child (a strong tradition in developmental psychology: Kaye, 1982)? A useful heuristic is seeing cooperation on a continuum between "going along with" and "taking along with"—committing to considering the interaction, rather than the individual, as unit of analysis.

FDF suggest children with autism are involved in cooperation in everyday social interactions. There just *is* a degree of cooperation between parent and child: it might be difficult to get your child through the regimented routine of a school day, but it would be impossible if the child offered no cooperation. Parents and schools typically work hard to scaffold this basic cooperation, e.g., using visual timetables representing each step, or shaping behavior through reward regimes. But these examples of cooperation, which we term "going along with," are asymmetrical, with the child often required to comply with the needs of the adult world, rather than having shared goals. An example at the other end of the continuum lies in therapies such as Intensive Interaction, which focus on an adult following and adapting to the child's actions, in the hope of the child recognizing the therapist's behavior as a response contingent on the child's behavior: the child is given the power of eliciting such responses, "taking the adult along with" them. The fact that these interventions produce "engagement" by observer judgment (Escalona et al., 2002) suggests that cooperation (=taking along with) is possible for many autistic children. Synchronization is primarily therapist-driven, but the direction is determined more by the child.

The facet of cooperation that involves engaging the other in joint action seems minimal or absent, both in experimental studies of cooperation in autism and in descriptions of everyday behavior of children with autism. We could interpret this as being a "deficit" of autism, lacking spontaneous intrinsic social motivation, unlike typically-developing children, who quickly adopt ideas about what role the other should play in an interaction, and enforce even relatively novel norms of behavior (Schmidt and Tomasello, 2012). Cooperative novice-expert interactions are typically smooth, but their mechanics can be revealed by observing breaches, e.g., still-face paradigms, participants with autism. This should help in investigating dynamical "taking along with," given novice-expert pairings work together so invisibly smoothly. Our (Holt and Yuill, 2014) studies of paired children *both* on the autism spectrum enabled us to address both "going along with" and "taking along with," given that the children have to collaborate with each other, rather than with a compliant and stronglyscaffolding other. We demonstrated contingent action between such pairings using a dual-control game that stalled progress until participants' responses matched. Active other-awareness occurred here, but not in a similar setting without constraints to support contingency. Thus, the children showed collaborative capacity only in environments constrained to support it. Subsequent work-in-progress with touch-technology further clarifies three prerequisites for any collaboration to occur: understanding the activity (i.e., criteria for performing tasks), coordinating action with the partner (going along with), and fostering coordination of the other's activity with their own (taking along with). For pair success, both children must understand the goal of the activity itself and at least one child must be able to coordinate his behavior with the partner's, even if the partner cannot reciprocate. Thus, children could successfully play together if just one child could follow or match his behavior to that of a lessable child not displaying any contingent behavior. However, a more complex form of collaboration is required if there is a further constraint, of shared solutions being correct. With such a constraint, then at least one partner needs to realize this and to bring his partner along to the right solution, necessitating "mutual engagement*...* in a coordinated effort" (Roschelle and Teasley, 1995, p. 70).

We argue that "going along with"/"taking along with" marks a useful *gradation* in cooperation, encompassing both FDF's "everyday cooperative interaction" and the more structured requirements of lab-based cooperative tasks. A sharp dichotomy between the broader idea of engagement as a prerequisite of cooperation and the narrower focus on agreed, planful, outcome-directed joint working, loses the benefit of the enactive approach in uniting literature across paradigms and blurring the classical motivation–cognition divide. We must reconcile top-down theoretical claims about prerequisites of "true" collaboration with questions driven by observation of everyday behavior, to consider similarities and differences in cooperative encounters in different groups of participants (e.g., toddlers, people with autism) and to characterize the place, in collaborative activity, of a sense of joint engagement, from second- and third-person perspectives. The debate underlines the need, in studying cooperation, to consider the behavior of both participants in relation to each other; it is the interaction that is cooperative, not only the participants.

# **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

I am grateful to members of the ChaTLab for useful suggestions and very stimulating discussions about this response.

# **REFERENCES**

Escalona, A., Field, T., Nadel, J., and Lundy, B. (2002). Brief report: imitation effects on children with autism. *J. Autism Dev. Disord.* 32, 141–144. doi: 10.1023/A:1014896707002

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 19 September 2014; accepted: 19 October 2014; published online: 05 November 2014.*

*Citation: Yuill N (2014) Going along with or taking along with: a cooperation continuum in autism? Front. Psychol. 5:1266. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01266*

*This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Yuill. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Jointly structuring triadic spaces of meaning and action: book sharing from 3 months on

#### *Nicole Rossmanith1 \*, Alan Costall 1, Andreas F. Reichelt 2, Beatriz López 1 and Vasudevi Reddy1 \**

*1 Centre for Situated Action and Communication, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK 2 Cognition and Action Lab, Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada*

## *Edited by:*

*Ezequiel Alejandro Di Paolo, Ikerbasque - Basque Foundation for Science, Spain*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Jonathan T. Delafield-Butt, University of Strathclyde, UK Patricia Zukow-Goldring, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Kaya De Barbaro, Medical Research Council, UK*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Nicole Rossmanith and Vasudevi Reddy, Centre for Situated Action and Communication, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, King Henry Building, King Henry 1st Street, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO1 2DY, UK e-mail: nicole.rossmanith@ port.ac.uk<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
This study explores the emergence of triadic interactions through the example of book sharing. As part of a naturalistic study, 10 infants were visited in their homes from 3–12 months. We report that (1) book sharing as a form of infant-caregiver-object interaction occurred from as early as 3 months. Using qualitative video analysis at a micro-level adapting methodologies from conversation and interaction analysis, we demonstrate that caregivers and infants practiced book sharing in a highly co-ordinated way, with caregivers carving out interaction units and shaping actions into action arcs and infants actively participating and co-ordinating their attention between mother and object from the beginning. We also (2) sketch a developmental trajectory of book sharing over the first year and show that the quality and dynamics of book sharing interactions underwent considerable change as the ecological situation was transformed in parallel with the infants' development of attention and motor skills. Social book sharing interactions reached an early peak at 6 months with the infants becoming more active in the coordination of attention between caregiver and book. From 7 to 9 months, the infants shifted their interest largely to solitary object exploration, in parallel with newly emerging postural and object manipulation skills, disrupting the social coordination and the cultural frame of book sharing. In the period from 9 to 12 months, social book interactions resurfaced, as infants began to effectively integrate manual object actions within the socially shared activity. In conclusion, to fully understand the development and qualities of triadic cultural activities such as book sharing, we need to look especially at the hitherto overlooked early period from 4 to 6 months, and investigate how shared spaces of meaning and action are structured together in and through interaction, creating the substrate for continuing cooperation and cultural learning.

**Keywords: infant development, intersubjectivity, triadic interaction, action coordination, joint-attention, participatory sense-making, picture book, longitudinal studies**

# **INTRODUCTION**

How do we arrive at a shared world? We jointly act in, communicate about, transform and co-create our world. In the process, we smoothly navigate and build complex networks of meaningmaking involving persons, objects, and symbols. How do children grow in and into culture? How do they become competent participants in cultural practices, in networks of meaning-making including people and artifacts?

Researchers interested in cultural and social learning mostly start looking from the end of the first year, a period often characterized as a major shift, even revolution ("secondary intersubjectivity" Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; "9 month revolution" Tomasello, 1999) in development, when infants engage in a number of qualitatively new ways of interacting such as jointly labeling things, following instructions, imitating acts on objects, or frequent gaze checking with their parents. At this point infants are credited with engaging in true triadic interactions, and are considered capable of coordinating for the first time their engagements with objects and their engagement with people. The transition is often seen as the convergence of two lines of development considered to be separate before this point: dyadic infant-caregiver communication and infant-object interaction. This convergence is supposedly mediated by a newly emerging capacity for visual joint attention only then giving rise to conventional labeling and language use, conventional object use and symbolic activities in general, often associated with cultural learning. Interestingly, the seminal studies which constitute much of the empirical basis of this developmental narrative (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; Hubley and Trevarthen, 1979; Bakeman and Adamson, 1984), document early modes of combined social and object engagement termed joint praxis and passive joint engagement, respectively. Looking at the data reported, the studies actually show a gradual rather than revolutionary shift toward active triadic engagement on the part of the infant. Hubley and Trevarthen describe how caregivers first introduce their own body (games of the person) and later objects (marking and animating them) as a third pole into their social engagement with their infants. Adamson and Bakeman (1984) document how caregivers change their marking of objects over the course of the first year toward more conventional forms. These data have begun to be picked up on only very recently (De Barbaro et al., 2013; Nomikou et al., 2013; see also Moro and Rodríguez, 2004; Zukow-Goldring, 2012) The standard narrative has also recently been challenged by experimental studies documenting aspects of labeling, and joint attention in infants already at 6 months (Striano and Reid, 2009; Bergelson and Swingley, 2012).

Here we take book sharing as a model activity to explore the development of triadic infant-caregiver-object interactions. In a longitudinal study looking at infants' everyday life activities from 3 to 12 months, this activity turned out to be one of the earliest social interactions involving a complex object, occurring from as early as 3 months.

This early occurrence raises the question: how can infants who are preverbal, do not yet understand the referential character of pictures, and—supposedly—do not have command of joint attention, meaningfully participate in a book sharing activity? As one of the earliest jointly practiced cultural object routines, book sharing provides an excellent model for exploring (1) how a joint object activity is practiced and sustained between asymmetric interaction partners; (2) as an inherently semiotic activity, involving the guiding and mutually orienting of attention, and shared meaning, it allows us to explore how triadic interactions involving mutual coordination and orientation toward common points of reference develop over the first year of life.

While there is an extensive literature on picture book sharing, most studies start looking toward the end of the first year (Ninio and Bruner, 1978; Fletcher and Reese, 2005; but see Van Kleeck et al., 1996), and primarily focus on educational achievements associated with the cultural technology of book reading such as labeling and word learning, picture understanding, and literacy skill.

Here we focus on how the activity of book sharing unfolds, how caregiver, infant, and book respectively guide, sustain, and constrain the unfolding interaction. Taking the interaction as our level of analysis, we draw—in addition to approaches from developmental psychology—on concepts from embodied, situated, dynamical and enactive cognitive science (Fogel, 1993; Thelen and Smith, 1994; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2008), adapt methods from ethnography, conversation and interaction analysis (e.g., Goodwin, 2000; Alac, 2005; Streeck et al., 2011; Deppermann, ˇ 2013) and use qualitative micro-analysis to explore how, from the interplay of multiple modalities, shared spaces of meaning and action are created around objects and change over time.

# **MATERIALS AND METHODS**

The book sharing activities documented in this paper have been collected as part of a naturalistic longitudinal study investigating the development of triadic infant-caregiver-object interactions over the first year of life especially focusing on conventional practices and encounters with everyday objects. Ten infants were visited in their homes once a month from 3 to 9 months of age and 7 of them up to the age of 12 months. A smaller pilot study with 6 infants at 3, 4, 5 as well as 9 months of age (3 located in Vienna, 3 in the UK, 4 girls, 4 first ones, 2 of them girls) was conducted in advance of the main study.

## **PARTICIPANTS**

Of the 10 families participating in the study, 7 were from the UK and 3 from Austria. They were recruited from a wider circle of friends and family acquaintances, from mother and infant groups, as well as through word of mouth and flyers. All infants were living in middle class households with two caregivers and were raised in a monolingual (English or German) environment except one boy raised bilingually in German and Russian. The primary caregivers (mothers in all cases) all had tertiary education and took an active interest in supporting the infant's education. Six of them (all in the UK) returned to either part time or full time work during the course of the study. Of the 10 infants 5 were female and 3 (2 boys and 1 girl) were first born. None of them had medical or cognitive problems.

## **HOME VISIT OBSERVATION PROCEDURE AND DATA COLLECTION**

A typical home visit lasted 3–4 h, spanning 1–2 sleep-wake cycles of the infants. One to two observers accompanied infants and caregivers with a video camera (Panasonic HC-V500 in iframe format: 960 × 540 pixels resolution, 25 frames per second) documenting their everyday activities as they unfolded. For static situations a tripod camera mount was used, though for a large number of cases we switched to a handheld camera approach to capture dynamic scenes especially after infants became mobile. Also, field notes were taken detailing the behavior of the infants, caregivers and siblings, including object and socially directed behavior, layout of the environment, and availability of objects such as toys and tools. In addition, reports from parents were collected giving additional background information on object use. The study was approved by the Psychology Research Ethics Committee of the University of Portsmouth, and was conducted in accordance with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and the Code of Human Research Ethics of the BPS. Parents provided written informed consent for the study.

## **DATA MANAGEMENT AND ANALYSIS**

From these raw data, 300+ hours of video recordings, a video library was constructed in Final Cut Pro X (Apple Corporation). Episodes were tagged with keywords organizing activities into basic ecological activity categories, including *(breast) feeding, diaper change, "witnessing," soothing, social and/or object play, book sharing, sibling interaction, watching TV*. In addition, infantcaregiver-object interactions as well as mutual coordination and orientation episodes were marked. For the purposes of this paper, "book sharing" was selected as a model activity for investigating the development of participation in joint cultural activities and coordination of triadic engagements.

In total 124 book interaction episodes (excluding 15 infantresearcher interactions) were identified and described. For an episode to be counted as a book interaction infants needed to be engaged with a book for at least 30 s. If after a period of disengagement—seen here as an integral part of (especially joint) activities (Stern, 1971; Brazelton et al., 1974; Tronick, 1989; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007)—re-engagement did not occur within 30 s, the book interaction was considered to have ended at the point of disengagement. For all episodes, the actors (infant, mother, father, sibling, . . . ), actions and objects used (types of books), as well as spatial configuration were cataloged.

We distinguished between 2 different types of book interactions: (1) social book sharing (72 episodes), and (2) solitary book exploration (52 episodes). For a book interaction to count as social book sharing the participants each had to be engaged with the book (via gaze or other book oriented actions, e.g., grasping, pointing to, or verbally referencing a page) and to coordinate their engagement, that is, to adjust their behavior in response to and in anticipation of each other's—book or partner directed—actions (Bühler, 1927/2000; Fogel, 1993; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). For each type of book interaction, the number of occurrences and duration of the episodes was determined across ages and families, and basic analysis and visualization was performed using Python (numpy, scipy, and matplotlib packages, free software).

## **QUALITATIVE MICRO-ANALYSIS OF SELECTED EPISODES**

Of the 72 social book sharing episodes, 20 episodes were selected for further qualitative analysis using the following criteria: (a) only caregiver-infant interactions without siblings to reduce complexity, (b) sampling of interactions from every age group, and (c) richness of interactions including attention and action coordination and communication. These selected episodes were transcribed and analyzed drawing on methods from conversation analysis and interaction analysis, adapted to the study of preverbal infants, with a special focus on embodiment and multimodality (Goodwin, 2000; Alac, 2005; Demuth, 2012; Deppermann, ˇ 2013). The analysis was performed in ELAN (free software, The Language Archive, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen Brugman et al., 2004) with audio pitch and intensity extraction performed in Praat (free software, by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, University of Amsterdam).

The videos were repeatedly viewed and described in an iterative process looping back and forth between video and transcript (using ELAN), including gross description, and particular tiers for vocalization, audio pitch and intensity, action and gaze of caregiver and infant. Thus a multi-tiered, parallel record of the episode was constructed and visualized similar to a music score sheet, mapping a range of descriptors to the video stream and relating them to each other in time. Using these visualizations, we analyzed the sequential organization of the actions and how the various strands of an action, spanning multiple modalities, relate to each other and play together in the coordination of action. Transcripts were compared across infants and ages. Some transcription and video stills from ELAN are also used for purposes of illustration.

# **RESULTS AND DISCUSSION**

# **GENERAL RESULTS: POPULATION LEVEL RESULTS, THE "UMWELT" OF THE INFANTS AND THREE BOOK SHARING EXAMPLES**

# *Population level results*

Book sharing was practiced in all 10 participating families (ranging from 2 to 20 episodes per infant). We documented the activity from as early 3 as months (4 families) right from the beginning of the observation period, and no later than by 6 months for all families. To our knowledge, this is the first time book sharing interactions at this early age have been described in the literature.

Social book sharing provided the context for infants' first encounters with books. Later, in the second half of the first year, they also began to approach and interact with books on their own in solitary book exploration. **Figure 1** (top) shows the number of occurrences of book interaction episodes for all infants observed in the longitudinal study, by age group and type (social or solitary). Note that we include these data to give an overview of the distribution of episodes forming the basis for the qualitative study. Also note the overall small sample size and that key variables such as the frequency of book sharing offers, and presence and comparability of books in the environment were not controlled for in the naturalistic study as would have been the case in an experimental study. Throughout we focus on two relatively robust measures to complement insights about the changing nature of book interactions gained from qualitative analysis: (1) the relative prevalence of social vs. solitary book interactions, and (2) the changes in mean episode duration over the course of the first year. While social book sharing interaction occurred from as early as 3 months, solitary book exploration episodes started to occur at around 6 months, displacing social book sharing as the dominant type of interaction at 8–9 months. From around 10 months on, social book sharing interactions became dominant again until a balance was reached at 12 months. **Figure 1** (middle) shows the mean durations (in seconds) of book sharing episodes for all infants, by age group and type. Starting from durations of around 2 and a half minutes at 3 months, mean durations increased considerably from 4 months reaching a peak of over 6 min at 6 months. From 7 months on, mean durations showed a sharp decrease, as book sharing interactions dropped by more than half to around 3 min duration and then stayed relatively constant. Social and solitary book interactions accounted for from around 1% (at 3 months) to around 5% (at 6 months) of the total recorded time that infants were awake on average at each month as shown in **Figure 1** (bottom), with their distributions largely reflecting the overall trend from social to solitary to balanced book interaction and the reduction in mean episode duration after 6 months.

# *The "Umwelt"1 of infants at 3–4 months of age*

Before turning to the book sharing interactions in detail, we provide a sketch of the larger context of everyday life with a 3–4 month old infant as it presented itself in the study and is described in the literature. How do infants engage with their world at 3– 4 months and what does their world look like at this age? At 3 months of age, infants are getting more and more interested in their surroundings. They have good control over their gaze (with a well developed oculomotor system) and increasingly look at and track objects in their environment (Von Hofsten and Rosander,

1Notion by Jakob von Uexküll (Uexküll, 1921; Uexküll et al., 1956). An interpretation in contemporary terms: *Umwelt* refers to those aspects of the environment an organism can interact with—i.e., effectively perceive, distinguish and act on (= the sum of prospective functional action-perception cycles)—and which hence constitute the organism's meaningful world. This world is subjective, different organisms/subjects who have different histories and possibilities of interaction live in/enact different worlds.

1997) Apart from that, however, their possibilities for effectively interacting with their world are quite restricted: they are able to hold and move their head, but are not yet able to support their body, turn or move about. Accordingly, the infants in the study at this age spent a lot of time either in a supine position, lying on their backs, or in a reclined sitting position with their backs supported in a baby rocker. In accordance with their postural capacities, they were able to perform coordinated whole body movements, reach toward and start hitting objects, but were not yet able to effectively grasp, mouth or manipulate objects (for a review of the developmental trajectories of motor skills see Adolph and Berger, 2011).

At 3–4 months infants are, however, already fluent conversation partners: by then, they have already actively participated in dyadic proto-conversations with their caregivers for several weeks, fully utilizing and practicing all their capacities including gaze and facial expressions, vocalizations, and rhythmic coordinated whole body movements (Trevarthen, 1974; Bateson, 1975, 1979; Snow, 1977; Bullowa, 1979; Masataka, 2003). Not only are they aware of the dialogical, mutual give-and take character of the interaction—getting upset when the mother's face became unresponsive (Tronick et al., 1978) or when confronted with a friendly but non-contingent (playback) response (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985)—but they are able to regulate their own state of arousal as well as the course of the interaction by turning their gaze and head toward or away from the caregiver (Stern, 1971) and even seem to be able to place their own vocalization exactly at the right time and place at the right pitch in jointly created vocal phrases (Malloch, 2000; Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009).

As infants now take a wider interest in their surroundings (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978),—in tandem with their increased waking and attentional periods—while still lacking the means to pursue their active interests, to explore or manipulate the world on their own—they pose a new set of challenges and opportunities to caregivers. Therefore, at this stage a large part of caregiving activities observed in the longitudinal study—apart from feeding, diaper change and putting them to bed—was to keep infants content and "entertained": the caregivers in the study responded to this challenge both by taking the infant to the world and by bringing the world to the infant. They did the former by taking the infants along with them, when doing their daily chores, e.g., placing them in a baby rocker, so they had a good view of the activities, regularly addressing them and bringing household objects or food items to their attention (e.g., rhythmically moving and labeling them) and occasionally also within their reach. They did the latter through presenting, looming and animating everyday life objects as well as specifically designed toys. Caregivers also placed them in specifically designed environments such as activity mats and baby-gyms where they were able to interact with objects dangling from toy bars. In contrast to their previous exposure to only a small range of objects, a whole range of new and manipulable objects now enter the infant's world.

Thus infants were introduced to objects very early at 3–4 months in the context of social interactions. This was also the context in which infants first encountered picture books and book sharing, which took 2 different forms: (1) Their caregivers directly engaged them with books, often specifically designed for young infants. (2) They took part in the picture book reading activities of older siblings and caregivers.

# *Three examples of early book sharing interactions*

**Figure 2** shows three instances of very early book sharing with 3-month-olds.  In the second example, B, a mother is rustling the crinkly pages of a brightly colored book to soothe her crying 3-month-old daughter. As the infant abruptly stops crying, she begins to engage her daughter in more conventional book sharing, drawing attention to pictures, turning pages, and inviting participation. The infant now and again grasps, holds onto, and crumples the soft pages producing more crinkling noise. In example C, after demonstrating page turning as an action of suspense and release—when a new page is revealed—the book is presented and held in place within the reach of the infant. The book with its rigid pages, solidly bound together at one end, provides a stable structure to interact with that is still highly flexible with easily movable parts along a single degree of freedom. This allows the infant not yet able to properly grasp an object to nevertheless effectively turn pages, thus exerting control over his sensory stimulation.

These three book sharing episodes are examples of early infant-caregiver-object interactions in everyday life, where the object—the book—plays a central role in the interaction. These books have been specifically designed to meet the infants' needs: their physical properties are adapted to the infants' perceptual capacities (high contrast patterns, crinkly pages), and serve as a scaffold for their rudimentary motor skills (rigid pages). In contrast to conventional books, this design emphasizes the effective interaction with the medium, the physical properties of the book and pragmatic actions performed on them. The specifically designed books serve as a bridge between the capacities and needs of infant and caregiver, as well as between caregiving and the cultural practice of reading. Indeed, in all three examples specific material aspects present in the book also capture and afford some of the general, mainly pragmatic aspects of conventional book reading: the format of the book itself is present, as is the format of the activity that has a definite beginning and end

**FIGURE 2 | Three examples of book sharing with books specifically designed for young infants. (A)** Visually engaging a 3-month-old with high contrast patterns. **(B)** Soothing a 3-month-old with crinkly pages. **(C)** Scaffolding a 3.5-month-old's motor skills with rigid pages.