Interaction theory

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Interaction theory (IT) is an approach to questions about social cognition, or how one understands other people, that focuses on bodily behaviors and environmental contexts rather than on mental processes. IT argues against two other contemporary approaches to social cognition (or what is sometimes called ‘theory of mind’), namely theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST). For TT and ST, the primary way of understanding others is by means of ‘mindreading’ or ‘mentalizing’ – processes that depend on either theoretical inference from folk psychology, or simulation. In contrast, for IT, the minds of others are understood primarily through our embodied interactive relations. IT draws on interdisciplinary studies and appeals to evidence developed in developmental psychology, phenomenology, and neuroscience.

Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, knowledge, etc. — to oneself, and to others, and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own. Theory of mind is crucial for everyday human social interactions and is used when analyzing, judging, and inferring others' behaviors. Deficits can occur in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, cocaine addiction, and brain damage suffered from alcohol's neurotoxicity. Although philosophical approaches to this exist, the theory of mind as such is distinct from the philosophy of mind.

Simulation theory of empathy is a theory that holds that humans anticipate and make sense of the behavior of others by activating mental processes that, if carried into action, would produce similar behavior. This includes intentional behavior as well as the expression of emotions. The theory states that children use their own emotions to predict what others will do. Therefore, we project our own mental states onto others.
Simulation theory is not primarily a theory of empathy, but rather a theory of how people understand others—that they do so by way of a kind of empathetic response. This theory uses more biological evidence than other theories of mind, such as the theory-theory.

Contents

Origins

According to Michael et al (2013), [1] “The recent surge of interactionist approaches to social cognition can be traced back to Shaun Gallagher’s proposal for a new approach to social cognition, which he labeled ‘interaction theory’. [2] Gallagher argued that mainstream mindreading approaches neglect the interactive contexts in which social cognition is embedded, and thereby overlook embodied and extended processes that are engaged in interactions, and which are important components of social cognition.”

Shaun Gallagher American philosopher

Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher who works on embodied cognition, social cognition, agency and the philosophy of psychopathology. Since 2011 he has held the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation (2012-2018). Since 2014 he has been professorial fellow on the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He has held visiting positions at Keble College, Oxford; Humboldt University, Berlin; Ruhr Universität, Bochum; Husserl Archives, ENS, Paris; École Normale Supérieure, Lyon; University of Copenhagen; and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University.

The basic ideas of IT can be traced back to the work of Colwyn Trevarthen, [3] who coined the term ‘primary intersubjectivity’ to refer to early developing sensory-motor processes of interaction between infants and caregivers. Other work in developmental psychology by Daniel Stern, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Peter Hobson, Vasu Reddy, and others, provides important evidence for the role of interaction in social cognition. Similar insights can be found earlier in the work of the phenomenologists, like Max Scheler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. IT has also motivated a rethinking in the methods for studying social cognition in neuroscience. [4]

Colwyn Trevarthen is Emeritus Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh.

Daniel Stern (psychologist) American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist

Daniel N. Stern was a prominent American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a number of books — most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985).

Andrew N. Meltzoff is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation greatly advanced the scientific understanding of early cognition, personality and brain development.

Primary and secondary intersubjectivity

Colwyn Trevarthen [3] coined the term ‘primary intersubjectivity’ to refer to early developing sensory-motor processes of interaction between infants and their caregivers. Important cues for understanding others are provided by their facial expressions, bodily posture and movements, gestures, actions, and in processes of neonate imitation, proto-conversations, gaze following and affective attunement. "In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person’s intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person’s mind. What we might reflectively or abstractly call their belief or desire is expressed directly in their actions and behaviors." [5]

Intersubjectivity, in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, is the psychological relation between people. It is usually used in contrast to solipsistic individual experience, emphasizing our inherently social being.

Sometime during the first year of life infants also start to enter into joint attention situations and begin to pay attention to how others act and what they do with objects in everyday contexts, and this also provides a way to understand their intentions and contextualized actions. This is referred to as ‘secondary intersubjectivity’, which highlights the fact that interactions often take place in cooperative contexts. [6] During most interactions, intentions are apparent based upon the pragmatic context of the situation in which they are occurring. We can instantly see what the other “intends” or “wants” based upon their actions and the current context; we do not need to infer their intentions as if they are hidden away. There is a “shared world” that we live in where we intuitively and instinctively perceive others as minded beings like ourselves.

Joint attention When two people focus on something at once

Joint attention or shared attention is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. It is achieved when one individual alerts another to an object by means of eye-gazing, pointing or other verbal or non-verbal indications. An individual gazes at another individual, points to an object and then returns their gaze to the individual. Scaife and Bruner were the first researchers to present a cross-sectional description of children's ability to follow eye gaze in 1975. They found that most eight- to ten-month-old children followed a line of regard, and that all 11- to 14-month-old children did so. This early research showed it was possible for an adult to bring certain objects in the environment to an infant's attention using eye gaze.

Direct perception

Interaction theory supports the notion of the direct perception of the other's intentions and emotions during intersubjective encounters. Gallagher [7] [8] argues that most of what we need for our understanding of others is based on our interactions and perceptions, and that very little mindreading occurs or is required in our day-to-day interactions. Rather than first perceiving another’s actions and then inferring the meaning of their actions (as in TT), the intended meaning is perceptible in the other person’s movements and contextualized actions. Differences in a person’s intentions show up as differences in perceptible kinematic properties of action movements. [9] A person’s emotions are not only expressed on their faces and in their postures and gestures, but these perceptible embodied aspects help to constitute what the emotion is. Mental states (like intentions and emotions) are therefore not hidden away from view, they are, IT claims, in fact, and at least in part, bodily states that are apparent in the action movements that constitute them. For example, as phenomenologists from Max Scheler to Dan Zahavi point out, upon seeing an angry face an observer does not first see a face that is contorted into a scowl and then infer that the target is angry. The anger is immediately apparent on the face of the other. The overwhelming majority of interactions in our daily lives are face-to-face so it makes sense that our primary way of understanding one another is from a second-person perspective rather than from the detached, theoretical, third-person perspective described by TT and ST.

Max Scheler German philosopher

Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Scheler developed further the philosophical method of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and was called by José Ortega y Gasset "Adam of the philosophical paradise." After his death in 1928, Martin Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as "the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such." In 1954, Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, defended his doctoral thesis on "An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler."

Dan Zahavi Danish philosopher

Dan Zahavi is a Danish philosopher. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford.

Narrative competency

In addition to primary and secondary intersubjectivity, and the contributing dynamics of interaction itself to the social cognitive process, [10] IT proposes that more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of others are based, not primarily on folk psychological theory or the use of simulation, but on the implicit and explicit uses of narrative. [11] [12] IT builds on the notion that the pervasiveness of narratives in most cultures, from the earliest nursery rhymes to the performances of theater, film, and television, expose us to a variety of characters, situations, and reasons for acting in certain ways. These, combined with personal narratives, provide the background knowledge that allows us to implicitly frame the actions of others in understandable narratives, providing a fallible and revisable sense of what the other is up to.

Related Research Articles

Cognitive science interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. The fundamental concept of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

Francisco Varela Chilean biologist

Francisco Javier Varela García was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.

In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is a human capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental state of other people. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure, excitement, and anxiety use common linguistic terms as opposed to technical or scientific jargon.

Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.

A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate species.

Alvin Ira Goldman is an American philosopher who is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.

Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that our environment is one which we selectively create through our capacities to interact with the world. "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.

The concept of motor cognition grasps the notion that cognition is embodied in action, and that the motor system participates in what is usually considered as mental processing, including those involved in social interaction. The fundamental unit of the motor cognition paradigm is action, defined as the movements produced to satisfy an intention towards a specific motor goal, or in reaction to a meaningful event in the physical and social environments. Motor cognition takes into account the preparation and production of actions, as well as the processes involved in recognizing, predicting, mimicking and understanding the behavior of other people. This paradigm has received a great deal of attention and empirical support in recent years from a variety of research domains including developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social psychology.

Wolfgang Prinz German cognitive psychologist

Wolfgang Prinz is a German cognitive psychologist. He is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and an internationally recognized expert in experimental psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. He is the founder of the common coding theory between perception and action that has a significant impact in cognitive neuroscience and social cognition.

The sense of agency (SA), or sense of control, is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world. It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In normal, non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SO) for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency (SA).

Vittorio Gallese Italian physioloigst

Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London, UK (2016-2018). He is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, including action understanding, empathy, language, mindreading and aesthetic experience.

Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness) and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism.

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. was a Psychology professor and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests are in the fields of experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive science. His work concerns a range of theoretical issues, ranging from questions about the role of embodied experience in thought and language, to looking at people's use and understanding of figurative language. Raymond Gibbs research is especially focused on bodily experience and linguistic meaning. Much of his research is motivated by theories of meaning in philosophy, linguistics, and comparative literature.

Intention is a mental state that represents a commitment to carrying out an action or actions in the future. Intention involves mental activities such as planning and forethought.

Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.

References

  1. ↑ Michael, J., Christiansen, W., and Overgaard, S. (2013). Mindreading as social expertise. Synthese. DOI 10.1007/s11229-013-0295-z
  2. ↑ Gallagher, S. (2001). The practice of mind: Theory, simulation, or primary interaction? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (5–7): 83–107
  3. 1 2 Trevarthen, C. B. 1979. Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. In M. Bullowa (ed.), Before Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  4. ↑ Schilbach, L.,Timmermans, B., Reddy, V., Costal, A., Schlicht, T. and Vogeley, K. 2013. Toward a second-person neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(4): 393-414.
  5. ↑ Gallagher, S. & Hutto, D. (2008). Understanding others through Primary Interaction and Narrative Practice. In T. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha, & E. Itkonen, The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity (pp. 17–38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins
  6. ↑ Trevarthen, C. and Hubley, P. 1978. Secondary intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year. In A. Lock (ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language (pp. 183-229). London: Academic Press.
  7. ↑ Gallagher, S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press/Clarendon Press
  8. ↑ Gallagher, S. 2008. Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition 17: 535–543
  9. ↑ Becchio C., Manera V., Sartori L., Cavallo A., Castiello U. (2012). Grasping intentions: from thought experiments to empirical evidence. Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, 6, 117
  10. ↑ De Jaegher, H., Di Paolo, E. & Gallagher, S. (2010). Can social interaction constitute social cognition? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14 (10), 441-447
  11. ↑ Gallagher, S. & Hutto, D. (2008). Understanding others through primary interaction and narrative practice. In T. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha, & E. Itkonen, The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity (pp. 17–38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins
  12. ↑ Hutto, D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
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