Human infants do not seem to be born with concepts of self or joint attention. One basic goal of Agency and Joint Attention is to unravel how these abilities originate. One approach that has received a lot of recent attention is social. Some argue that by virtue of an infant's intense eye gaze with her mother, she is able, by the age of four months, to establish a relationship with her mother that differentiates between "me" and "you." At about twelve months, the infant acquires the non-verbal ability to share attention with her mother or other caregivers. Although the concepts of self and joint attention are nonverbal and uniquely human, the question remains, how do we establish metacognitive control of these abilities? A tangential question is whether nonhuman animals develop abilities that are analogous to self and joint attention.
Much of this volume is devoted to the development of metacognition of self and joint attention in experiments on the origin of consciousness, knowing oneself, social referencing, joint action, the neurological basis of joint attention, the role of joint action, mirror neurons, phenomenology, and cues for agency.
Contributors ; Introduction ; Herbert Terrace ; Chapter 1 ; Becoming Human: Why Two Minds are Better Than One ; Herbert S. Terrace ; Chapter 2 ; How Joint Is The Joint Attention Of Apes And Human Infants? ; Malinda Carpenter and Josep Call ; Chapter 3 ; The Comparative Delusion: The 'Behavioristic'/ 'Mentalistic' Dichotomy in Comparative Theory Of Mind Research ; Derek C. Penn and Daniel J. Povinelli ; Chapter 4 ; Behavior-Reading Versus Mentalizing In Animals ; Logan Fletcher and Peter Carruthers ; Chapter 5 ; On Knowing and Being Known in the 4-Month Origins of Disorganized Attachment: An Emerging Presymbolic Theory Of Mind ; Beatrice Beebe, Sara Markese, Lorraine Bahrick, Frank Lachmann, Karen Buck, ; Henian Chen, Patricia Cohen, Howard Andrews, and Joseph Jaffe ; Chapter 6 ; Gaze Following And Agency In Human Infancy ; Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks ; Chapter 7 ; Ostensive Communication and Cultural Learning: The Natural Pedagogy Hypothesis ; Gyorgy Gergely ; Chapter 8 ; Embodied Attention in Infant Pointing ; Fabia Franco ; Chapter 9 ; Understanding the Structure of Communicative Interactions in Infancy ; Athena Vouloumanos and Kristine H. Onishi ; Chapter 10 ; Cognition in Action: A New Look at the Cortical Motor System ; Vittorio Gallese and Corrado Sinigaglia ; Chapter 10 ; Early Sensitivity to Emotion Cues - Precursors of Social Referencing? ; Stefanie Hoehl ; Chapter 11 ; Linking Joint Attention and Joint Action ; Anne Bockler and Natalie Sebanz ; Chapter 12 ; Do You See What I See? The Neural Bases of Joint Attention ; Elizabeth Redcay and Rebecca Saxe ; Chapter 12 ; Linking Joint Attention and Joint Action ; Anne Bockler and Natalie Sebanz ; Chapter 14 ; 'Knowing' That the Self is the Agent ; Janet Metcalfe ; Chapter 15 ; Cues To Agency: Time Can Tell ; Robrecht Van Der Wel and Gunther Knoblich ; Chapter 16 ; The Meaning of Actions: Crosstalk between Procedural and Declarative Action Knowledge ; Wolfgang Prinz, Christiane Diefenbach, and Anne Springer ; Chapter 17 ; The Three Pillars of Volition: Phenomenal States, Ideomotor Processing, and The Skeletal Muscle System ; Ezequiel Morsella Tanaz Molapour, and Margaret T. Lynn ; Chapter 18 ; The Function of Consciousness in Controlling Behavior ; Sara Steele and Hakwan Lau ; Chapter 19 ; Sense of Agency: Many Facets, Multiple Sources ; Elisabeth Pacherie
