Participation over observation: The roots of action understanding in attunement

Katrin Heimann and Sebo Uithol Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013 For personal use only -- not for reproduction Participation Over Observation The Roots of Action Understanding in Attunement Comment on Reddy’s ‘Joining Intentions in Infancy’ In her pertinent call for an account of action understanding that is based on engagement rather than intention reading, Reddy (this issue) argues that most studies about action understanding start with the implicit assumption that intentions are mental representations and as such unavailable to perception. Any ‘understanding’ of these hidden entities must therefore rely on inference, which is usually equated with ‘mentalizing’. As these mentalizing capacities are assumed to be absent in early infancy, this line of reasoning leads most scholars to neglect early engagements of infants in actions of adults directed towards them. However, in this early engagement infants show clear signs of anticipation and understanding of the adult’s actions. Reddy emphasizes the importance of investigating these prementalizing forms of understanding of actions directed at them. In particular, she describes three examples of this kind of engagement in the first year of infancy: 1) anticipatory adjustments to being picked up by 2- to 4-month-old infants; 2) the recognition of and compliance Correspondence: Katrin Heimann, Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Parma, Italy. Email: katrinheimann@gmail.com Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22, No. 1–2, 2015, pp. 45–8 Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 46 K. HEIMANN & S. UITHOL to verbal directives by infants from six months on, and 3) teasing of infants from about seven months on. We strongly agree with Reddy’s claim that we need to direct our attention to these phenomena when we really want to understand how the capacity to understand others’ actions develops. However, we think her flashlight on these early phenomena needs an embedding of second-person engagements in a theoretical framework of action engagement and its development, that neither Reddy’s findings nor her interpretations provide as such yet. We share the intuitive assumption that there is something undeniably special about actions directed at you compared to actions you observe from a third-person perspective, but what makes it special? Is being engaged in an action only of importance because it renders the observed actions more salient, thus enhancing perceptual experience in infants? Or are early attunement processes driven by a more fundamental process of engagement of which action observation is but a small part? And how does this process further develop? One way to start investigating the exact relation between secondperson and third-person action understanding would be to compare the same actions described by Reddy experienced by infants from a second- and a third-person perspective. Based on Reddy’s own examples of picking up: is there predictive gaze present when an infant observes a mother approaching another infant in such a way that it is clear that the infant will be picked up? If yes, from what age on? And how do observing infants of different ages react if the infant to be picked up does not respond with the usual body adjustments or to an approaching mother? If such traces of early understanding can be found in a third-person setting close to their occurrence in a secondperson setting, it could be argued that it is likely to be mere experience that is responsible for the acquired skill (cf. Van Elk et al., 2008; Sommerville, Woodward and Needham, 2005). If instead a clear difference in age between one and the other capacity can be observed it can be concluded that there is indeed something special about engaging in actions, compared to merely observing them, as Reddy suggests. This would open the door to a set of new research projects investigating the trajectory from second-person action engagement to third-person action observation: what is special about second-person engagement in action? What are crucial factors for commitment (proximity, sociality, directedness, experience)? When and under which conditions can action engagement processes be applied to a third-person context? Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013 For personal use only -- not for reproduction PARTICIPATION OVER OBSERVATION 47 Next, we applaud Reddy’s departure from an ‘intentions-as-internal-plans’ approach (see also Uithol, Burnston and Haselager, 2014; Schurger and Uithol, in press), but believe that the implications of such a departure deserve a more thorough elaboration. Most importantly, what does it mean for the notion of action understanding? A first thought would be that understanding an action is nothing but being able to predict the course or end point of an action, or to generating an appropriate response. ‘Intentions’ in this framework have thus to be identified as explanations, making this prediction or reaction intelligible. These descriptions might in fact owe their intuitive appeal to the fact that they themselves can play back into the interaction processes as additional factors co-determining the further course of actions. We believe that Reddy’s findings allows for taking this framework even further: action understanding, at its fundamental level, is neither about inferring mental states nor predicting actions. It is about performing actions, thus involving in constant loops of action, prediction, and response that generate — rather than describe — an outcome. Caregiver and infant are participants in an action dialogue, which is skill-based rather than knowledge-based. In this framework, acquiring knowledge about and forming predictions of observed actions in this dialogue is only important to the extent that it allows the observer to respond appropriately and continue the dialogue. This reconceptualization suggests that, instead of focusing on mentalizing or predicting capacities, research into the basis of action understanding should involve investigating skills needed for action attunement such as motor and fine-grained perception skills and the course of the development of such attunement skills with reference to first and progressed signs of action understanding. It also suggests interpreting cases of action understanding later in development as processes of attunement as well, if not involving direct touch then possibly to be described in bodily postures, gaze, voice, vocabulary, etc. Most importantly it suggests interpreting third-person action understanding — currently the main focus in social cognitive development — as at best probing a much more fundamental skill of engaging in joint action. To conclude, we share Reddy’s dissatisfaction with the mindreading framework of action understanding, and believe that her findings and her interpretation of them opens the door for a framework that is radically different from the ‘mentalizing’ approach. The novel framework will emphasize engagement and synthesis rather than action observation and analysis. 48 K. HEIMANN & S. UITHOL References Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013 For personal use only -- not for reproduction Reddy, V. (2015) Joining intentions in infancy, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22 (1–2). Schurger, A.A. & Uithol, S. (in press) Nowhere and everywhere: The causal origin of voluntary action, Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Sommerville, J.A., Woodward, A.L. & Needham, A. (2005) Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions, Cognition, 96 (1), B1–B11. Uithol, S., Burnston, D. & Haselager, W.F.G. (2014) Why we may not find intentions in the brain, Neuropsychologia, 56, pp. 129–139. Van Elk, M., Van Schie, H.T., Hunnius, S., Vesper, C. & Bekkering, H. (2008) You’ll never crawl alone: Neurophysiological evidence for experience-dependent motor resonance in infancy, NeuroImage, 43 (4), pp. 808–814.