Can a Robot Hear Music? Can a Robot Dance? Can a Robot Tell What it Knows or Intendes to Do? Can it Feel Pride or Shame in Company? -- Questions of the Nature of Human Vitality

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Theories of the development of human communication

This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement

The infant's creative vitality, in projects of self-discovery and shared meaning : how they anticipate school, and make it fruitful

This paper presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and knowing with 'human sense'. Recent research traces signs of the child's impulses and feelings from before birth, and follows their efforts to master experience through stages of self-creating in enjoyable and hopeful companionship. Sensitive timing of rhythms in action and playful invention show age-related advances of creative vitality as the body and brain grow. Much of shared meaning is understood and played with before a child can benefit from school instruction in a prescribed curriculum of the proper ways to use elaborate symbolic conventions. We begin with the theory of James Mark Baldwin, who observed that infants and young children are instinctive experimenters, repeating experience by imitating their own as well as other's actions, accommodating to the resources of the shared world and assimilating new experiences as learned ideas for action. We develop a theory of the child's contribution to cultural learning that may be used to guide practice in early education and care of children in their families and communities and in artificially planned and technically structured modern worlds of bewildering diversity

Intersubjectivity in the imagination and feelings of the infant : implications for education in the early years

This chapter presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and knowing with 'human sense'. Recent research traces signs of the child's impulses and feelings from before birth, and follows their efforts to master experience through stages of self-creating in enjoyable and hopeful companionship. Sensitive timing of rhythms in action and playful invention show age-related advances of creative vitality as the body and brain grow. Much of shared meaning is understood and played with before a child can benefit from school instruction in a prescribed curriculum of the proper ways to use elaborate symbolic conventions. We begin with the theory of James Mark Baldwin, who observed that infants and young children are instinctive experimenters, repeating experience by imitating their own as well as other's actions, accommodating to the resources of the shared world and assimilating new experiences as learned ideas for action. We argue that the child's contribution to cultural learning is a good guide for practice in early education and care of children in their families and communities and in artificially planned and technically structured modern worlds of bewildering diversity

Development of consciousness

Recent research that uses refined methods of tracing infant’s movements to determine how they are coordinated and integrated proves they are directed in selective ways to take in and adjust to information from the senses about the present environment. It shows that the circumstances and objects of the infant’s actions are evaluated by the infant as ‘good’ (attractive and rewarding or pleasurable), or ‘bad’ (frightening and avoided, or resisted). The manifestations of purposeful, expectant and evaluated consciousness are identified as proof of Self-awareness, or ‘subjectivity’. Studies of the imitative and provocative actions of newborn infants in response to the behaviours of other persons who give close attention to them prove also that there is an innate Other-awareness, or ‘inter-subjectivity’, that attends to and sympathises with expressive movements of a person (Trevarthen, 2001; Kugiumutzakis and Trevarthen, 2015)

Intersubjectivity in the imagination and feelings of the infant : implications for education in the early years

This chapter presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and knowing with 'human sense'. Recent research traces signs of the child's impulses and feelings from before birth, and follows their efforts to master experience through stages of self-creating in enjoyable and hopeful companionship. Sensitive timing of rhythms in action and playful invention show age-related advances of creative vitality as the body and brain grow. Much of shared meaning is understood and played with before a child can benefit from school instruction in a prescribed curriculum of the proper ways to use elaborate symbolic conventions. We begin with the theory of James Mark Baldwin, who observed that infants and young children are instinctive experimenters, repeating experience by imitating their own as well as other's actions, accommodating to the resources of the shared world and assimilating new experiences as learned ideas for action. We argue that the child's contribution to cultural learning is a good guide for practice in early education and care of children in their families and communities and in artificially planned and technically structured modern worlds of bewildering diversity

The ontogenesis of narrative : from moving to meaning

Narrative, the creation of imaginative projects and experiences displayed in expressions of movement and voice, is how human cooperative understanding grows. Human understanding places the character and qualities of objects and events of interest within stories that portray intentions, feelings, and ambitions, and how one cares about them. Understanding the development of narrative is therefore essential for understanding the development of human intelligence, but its early origins are obscure. We identify the origins of narrative in the innate sensorimotor intelligence of a hypermobile human body and trace the ontogenesis of narrative form from its earliest expression in movement. Intelligent planning, with self-awareness, is evident in the gestures and motor expressions of the mid-gestation foetus. After birth, single intentions become serially organised into projects with increasingly ambitious distal goals and social meaning. The infant imitates others’ actions in shared tasks, learns conventional cultural practices, and adapts his own inventions, then names topics of interest. Through every stage, in simple intentions of foetal movement, in social imitations of the neonate, in early proto-conversations and collaborative play of infants and talk of children and adults, the narrative form of creative agency with it four-part structure of ‘introduction’, ‘development’, ‘climax’ and ‘resolution’ is present. We conclude that shared rituals of culture and practical techniques develop from a fundamental psycho-motor structure with its basic, vital impulses for action and generative process of thought-in-action that express an integrated, imaginative and sociable Self. This basic structure is evident before birth and invariant in form throughout life. Serial organisation of single, non-verbal actions into complex projects of expressive and explorative sense-making become conventional meanings and explanations with propositional narrative power. Understanding the root of narrative in embodied meaning-making in this way is important for practical work in therapy and education, and for advancing philosophy and neuroscience

Studies on visual learning in split-brain monkeys

The unity of perception and its divisibility were examined by a method of double learning. Polarized light and polarizing filters were used to present monkeys with two contradictory visual tasks simultaneously, one visible to each eye. Subjects were trained after surgical division of the visual pathways at the optic chiasm, and after the cerebral cortices were separated by cutting the corpus callosum. The distribution of learning between the two halves of the brain gave information about the location of visual learning, and about the relationship between visual attention and the intention to respond with a particular limb. Two subjects learned conflicting tasks simultaneously. In many tests, however, there remained some interaction between the two halves of the brain. This led to selective learning by one eye, the other eye remaining unretentive though it was open throughout training. In tasks involving brightness and color discriminations, there was significant interocular transfer of learning in spite of the surgery. It is concluded that the two surgically separated cerebral hemispheres may function independently in memorizing a visual pattern, but that there are also avenues for their communication. The motor system remains coordinated after split-brain surgery, although there is a tendency for preferential pairing of eye and hand of opposite sides of the body after surgery. Some visual tasks were found to involve interhemispheric processes to a higher degree than others. Visual recognition of comparative size, requiring interocular comparison, was found to survive chiasm and callosum section