Structured ecologies for social and linguistic development

This is a joint work of two labs that offers a perspective ondevelopment and learning, which complements theconference’s focus on “changes in representation andprocessing abilities in development”. Strong background inecological psychology allowed us to recognize the richnessand multilayered structuring of infants’ environment, whichactively engages them and to which infants tune their action-perception. We conceptualize this environment as reliable“social physics”, constituted of predictable, enacted socialevents, in which infants learn to participate. Using bothtraditional (qualitative and quantitative) and dynamicalsystems methods, we show the structuring of such events onmultiple timescales and levels and how participating in themsculpts the child’s agency in the social world. We show howthis background allows a fresh look on language acquisitionand how it informs computational modelling of languageemergence and models of human-robot interaction

Taking Up an Active Role: Emerging Participation in Early Mother–Infant Interaction during Peekaboo Routines

Dynamical systems approaches to social coordination underscore how participants' local actions give rise to and maintain global interactive patterns and how, in turn, they are also shaped by them. Developmental research can deliver important insights into both processes: (1) the stabilization of ways of interacting, and (2) the gradual shaping of the agentivity of the individuals. In this article we propose that infants' agentivity develops out of participation, i.e., acting a part in an interaction system. To investigate this development this article focuses on the ways in which participation in routinized episodes may shape infant's agentivity in social events. In contrast to existing research addressing more advanced forms of participating in social routines, our goal was to assess infants' early participation as evidence of infants' agentivity. In our study, 19 Polish mother–infant dyads were filmed playing peekaboo when the infants were 4 and 6 months of age. We operationalized infants' participation in the peekaboo in terms of their use of various behaviors across modalities during specific phases of the game: We included smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to cover and uncover themselves or their mothers. We hypothesized that infants and mothers would participate actively in the routine by regulating their behavior so as to adhere to the routine format. Furthermore, we hypothesized that infants who experienced more scaffolding would be able to adopt a more active role in the routine. We operationalized scaffolding as mothers' use of specific peekaboo structures that allowed infants to anticipate when it was their turn to act. Results suggested that infants as young as 4 months of age engaged in peekaboo and took up turns in the game, and that their participation increased at 6 months of age. Crucially, our results suggest that infants' behavior was organized by the global structure of the peekaboo game, because smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to uncover occurred significantly more often during specific phases rather than being evenly distributed across the whole interaction. Furthermore, the way mothers structured the game at 4 months predicted infant participation at both 4 and 6 months of age

Levels of Coordination in Early Semantic Development

In this paper, we show that early interaction can be seen as comprising of strands of coordinated activity on multiple levels and timescales. In tracing the development of such multilayered organization from an embodied and situated perspective, we underscore the role of the reliable presence of the structured environment, an enacted niche, supporting the segregation and integration of participatory interaction strands. This perspective allows us to study the development of social coordination not only in terms of development of individual skills but, crucially, as a change of participatory emergent patterns, a transformation in engagement. We illustrate this approach with some results from the collaborative research project on Early Semantic Development (EASE). Using qualitative microanalysis combined with quantitative dynamical time series analyses, we were able to demonstrate several layers of such organization: from local forms of coordination, such as basic informational coupling within a modality, and the emergence of specific social affordances, to more global co-action structures such as affect imbued ‘action arcs’ – dynamic action contours with a beginning, build-up, climax and resolution, co-enacted by participants. Pointing to future work, we underscore the potential of these global structures to contribute to the emergence of more complex interactions, such as composite activities within ‘pragmatic frames’, narratives, or language

Putting interaction center-stage for the study of knowledge structures and processes

Humans are social animals. Human cognition evolved in a social context. Human cognition develops in a social context. Thus, both the internal mechanisms of cognition and the information we use are social. In this workshop, we aim to extend the boundaries of cognitive sciences beyond individual minds. Following the lead of Dingemanse et al. (2023), we put interaction in focus as a complementary starting point for the study of human cognition

Beyond single‐mindedness:a figure‐ground reversal for the cognitive sciences

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists

Beyond single-mindedness: a figure-ground reversal for the cognitive sciences

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists