Social interaction in the emergence of toddler's mealtime spoon use

Intentional Understanding Through Action Coordination in Early Triadic Interactions

The ability to understand the behaviour of other people in intentional terms has been traditionally explained by resorting to inferential mechanisms that would allow individuals to access the internal mental states of others. In recent years, the second-person perspective has established itself as a theoretical alternative to traditional models. It argues that intentional understanding is an embodied, natural, and immediate process that occurs in situations such as face-to-face early dyadic interactions between adults and infants. In this article, we argue that the way in which the second-person perspective regards body and object is problematic. Based on psychological evidence that demonstrates the constitutive role of the body and objects for cognitive development, we propose the foundations of an ecological-enactive, semiotic and pragmatic model of intentional understanding. We argue that intentional understanding should be conceived as the skilful coordination of behaviours that subjects come to enact in interactive settings, following the dynamics of bodily and material practices that have acquired normative force over time.

The road to conventional tool use: Developmental changes in children's material engagement with artifacts in nursery school

The development of tool use in early childhood is a topic of continuing interest in developmental psychology. However, the lack of studies in ecological settings results in many unknowns about how children come to use artifacts according to their cultural function. We report a longitudinal study with 17 sociodemographically diverse children (8 female) attending a nursery school in Madrid (Spain) and their two adult female teachers. Using mixed-effects models and Granger causality analysis, we measured changes in the frequency and duration of children's object uses between 7 and 17 months of age and in the directional influences among pairs of behaviors performed by teachers and children. Results show a clear shift in how children use artifacts. As early as 12 months of age, the frequency of conventional uses outweighs that of all other types of object use. In addition, object uses become shorter in duration with age, irrespective of their type. Moreover, certain teachers' nonlinguistic communicative strategies (e.g., demonstrations of canonical use and placing gestures) significantly influence and promote children's conventional tool use. Findings shed light on how children become increasingly proficient in conventional tool use through interactions with artifacts and others in nursery school.

When do toddlers point during mealtime?: Pointing in the second year of life in everyday situations

The present study aimed to gain insight into the development of the infant's awareness of others' attention that takes place in everyday contexts. We examined the relation between the toddler's pointing, the toddler's visual attention to the caregiver, and the context of the action of the caregiver in the same child-caregiver dyads at two time points (13 and 17 months of age) during lunchtime at a Japanese daycare center, in which toddlers ate lunch with the help of caregivers. Specifically, we focused on the question of whether the timing of the toddler's pointing reflected the ongoing context of the action of the caregiver, based on the analysis of what the caregiver was doing when a toddler exhibited pointing behavior. Our analysis revealed several interrelated results. First, the toddler's pointing behavior was related to the visual exploration of the face of the caregiver at 17 months of age, which was not obvious at 13 months of age. Second, toddlers were more likely to point when the caregivers were just looking at them without being engaged in other salient goal-directed activities. Third, toddlers were less likely to exhibit pointing behavior when the caregivers were manipulating objects or feeding the toddlers. Taken together, the results suggested that toddlers were increasingly aware of the dynamic context of social partner's engagement, differentiating the right time to modulate the attention of others by pointing in everyday situations. The present study supplemented the existing knowledge about pointing and the development of shared intentionality based on controlled experiments by providing a description of the context in which toddlers tend to point in the naturalistic situation of lunchtime within a specific cultural setting during the second year of life.

Against free energy, for direct perception

We question the free energy principle (FEP) as it is used in contemporary physics. If the FEP is incorrect in physics, then it cannot ground the authors' arguments. We also question the assumption that perception requires inference. We argue that perception (including perception of social affordances) can be direct, in which case inference is not required.

Alternative Object Use in Adults and Children: Embodied Cognitive Bases of Creativity

Why does one need creativity? On a personal level, improvisation with available resources is needed for online coping with unforeseen environmental stimuli when existing knowledge and apparent action strategies do not work. On a cultural level, the exploitation of existing cultural means and norms for the deliberate production of novel and valuable artifacts is a basis for cultural and technological development and extension of human action possibilities across various domains. It is less clear, however, how creativity develops and how exactly one arrives at generating new action possibilities and producing multiple alternative action strategies using familiar objects. In this theoretical paper, we first consider existing accounts of the creative process in the Alternative Uses Task and then present an alternative interpretation, drawing on sociocultural views and an embodied cognition approach. We explore similarities between the psychological processes underlying the generation of new uses in the Alternative Uses Task and children’s pretend play. We discuss possible cognitive mechanisms and speculate how the generation of new action possibilities for common objects in pretend play can be related to adults’ ability to generate new action strategies associated with object use. Implications for creativity development in humans and embodied artificial agents are discussed.

Activation of stance by cues, or attunement to the invariants in a populated environment?

While I agree with the distinction between expedient and proper ways of action, I find Jagiello et al.'s account of “stance switching” debatable. Fundamental to theories of cultural evolution is the fact that the shared environment is indefinitely rich, in which individuals are provided with opportunities for learning to tune themselves to specific affordances that are relevant to emerging situations.

Comparison of Japanese and Scottish Mother-Infant Intersubjectivity: Resonance of Timing, Anticipation, and Empathy During Feeding

Feeding involves communication between mothers and infants and requires precise synchrony in a special triadic relationship with the food. It is deeply related to their intersubjectivity. This study compared the development of mother-infant intersubjectivity through interactional synchrony in feeding between 11 Japanese and 10 Scottish mother-infant dyads, observed at 6 and 9 months by video. Japanese mothers were more deliberate in feeding at an earlier age, whereas Scottish mothers were significantly more coercive than Japanese mothers at an earlier age. Japanese mothers brought the spoon to infants with a pause to adjust the timing of insertion to match their infants' readiness, whereas this pause was not observed in Scottish mothers. Isomorphic mouth opening between mothers and infants was observed. This empathic maternal display is an important element of intersubjectivity in infant feeding that differed between Scottish and Japanese mothers. Scottish mothers' mouth opening always followed their infants' mouth opening, but about half of Japanese mothers preceded their infants. Further, the mouths of Scottish infants and mothers opened almost at the same time as spoon insertion. In contrast, Japanese mothers' mouth opening did not co-occur with the insertion but was close to spoon arrival, a subtle but important difference that allows for greater infant autonomy. The time structure of Scottish mother-infant interactions was simpler and more predictable at 9 months than in Japan, where the structure was more variable, likely due to a stronger regulation by Scottish mothers. In conclusion, Scottish mother-infant intersubjectivity is characterized as more maternally reactive and mother-centered, whereas Japanese mother-infant intersubjectivity is characterized as more maternally empathetic and infant-centered. Cultural differences in intersubjectivity during feeding between Japan and Scotland are further discussed in relation to triadic relationships and parenting styles.