No cognition without development and a social setting

Can we grasp the mechanism of social interaction? Theory of mind and simulation theory, the two most important theories for explaining social cognition at the moment, are under fire. Their accounts of social ability are both considered too abstract, too retreated from the real world interactions that characterise the social stage.

So what is happening in social interaction? Social cognition takes place between persons, in intersubjectivity, not purely in the heads of the people engaged.

Normal infants already have intersubjectivity, but people with autism often lack it. It is a capacity that enables us to move fluently and easily among each other and in the social world (most of the time at least).

I propose that it resides in a perceptual capacity, a capacity to pick up rhythms, to interlock our own rhythm with that of our conversational partner (conversation in the widest sense of the word), and that people with autism have a different rhythm.