The role of shared practice in the origins of joint attention and pointing
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.DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my wife, Corinna Salvail, and to my children, Ellis, born four months before I started my M.A., and Thea, born a month before I started my Ph.D. My children are fortunate that they have no sense of what life might be like had their father not been interested in trying to answer his questions about the mind and the ways in which in children might develop an understanding of such a multiplicity of social situations.Their poor mother has no such good fortune and may also have a much better imagination.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".