The role of shared practice in the origins of joint attention and pointing
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The infant's participation in sequences of joint activity that require visual attention, or what is often called joint attention (e.g., gaze following, social referencing, pointing), is usually argued to be an outcome of and evidence for the existence of particular psychological competencies on the part of the infant. This convergence in opinion occurs, I contend, because social developmental theory is predicated in large part on a causal-psychological-representational picture of meaning and mind. In a review of the relevant literature I suggest that what is presupposed or at least underappreciated in most theories of joint attention is the role of social practice in the understanding of other minds. Rather than assuming that these joint activities requiring attention reveal psychological competencies, I argue that: (a) it is with recourse to such practices that researchers theorize about the infant's understanding of mind in the first instance, (b) the mind is not some entity that is separable from human activity, (c) knowledge of such practices is what the developing agent requires to come to an understanding of other minds, and (d) because non-language using agents do not understand mental states, young babies, a fortiori, do not understand their own attention or that of others. I then focus on a single infant activity typically thought to reveal a leg hold on other minds (i.e., pointing) and I report two empirical studies of its development. In the first I evaluate theories of the emergence of pointing by investigating the ways in which infants first get into shared activities involving pointing. In the second I investigate the development of pointing within mother-infant interaction. In neither study do I find support for the position that pointing gestures emerge as a result of some conceptual revolution on the part of the infant.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it