Perception, Intersubjectivity and Development

Friday 24^th June 2005

Provisional Programme

10:00 – 10:45 Opening: Steve Torrance & Hanne De Jaegher

Enactive perception and the experience of autism

10:45 – 12:00 Peter Hobson & Jessica Meyer:

If social perception entails interpersonal engagement... How, and so what?

12:00 – 12:15 break

12:15 – 13:15 Eva Loth

Adding culture to embodied cognition: perspectives from typical development and autism

13:15 – 14:15 lunch

14:15 – 15:15 Fabia Franco:

Action and perception in joint attention: the case of infant pointing

15:15 – 16:00 Ezequiel Di Paolo & Hanne De Jaegher

Inter-action matters: Sketches of a radical enactive approach to social understanding.

16:00 – 16:15 break

16:15 – 16:45 Erik Myin

Enactive perception and beyond

16:45 – 17:45 Discussion

17:45 Close

Abstracts

p Steve Torrance & Hanne De Jaegher

Enactive perception and the experience of autism

Within the enactive approach, a cogniser is a mind embodied in a self-organising and self-maintaining biological organism. Cognition is meaning-generation and arises from the embodied, sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, including the social environment. The organism’s experiential awareness of its self and world is a central feature of its lived embodiment in the world. We discuss the enactive approach in general. Then we propose to look at autism through an enactive lens. We discuss some work already done in this area. Then we discuss two outcomes of this proposal: (1) An enactive approach to autism deepens the enactive view itself, through an examination of the close interrelation between social and perceptual capacities. (2) The enactive view has potential for shedding new light on autism and on explanatory theories of the latter, by taking seriously a participative method of investigation centred on experience.

p Peter Hobson & Jessica Meyer

If social perception entails interpersonal engagement… How, and so what?

We shall present some published and as-yet unpublished studies involving children with and without autism, along with theoretical reflections that we hope might contribute to thinking about the structure and developmental implications of interpersonal engagement. The empirical focus is on person-perception and specific aspects of imitation, especially the imitation of 'style' and self-orientation, but also upon sharing forms of joint attention.  The theoretical perspective is one that highlights the operation of what we believe to be a species-specific psychological process, that by which one individual identifies with another.  We would especially value discussion on the plausibility of our view that the human capacity to share experiences with others - even, perhaps, as early as the first quarter of the first year of life - entails this propensity to identify with other people.

p Eva Loth

Adding culture to embodied cognition: perspectives from typical development and autism

In this talk, I will try and relate the notion of perception and cognition as situated activity, guided by agents’ purposeful engagement with the world, with a cultural psychology perspective. In the first part, I will argue that diverse socio-perceptual and cognitive processes enable children to participate directly and vicariously in the culture they live and to form socially shared cultural representations. In people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), distinct abnormalities in these skills alter moment-to-moment experiences and create barriers for the acquisition and representation of cultural knowledge. I will present recent studies showing distinct patterns of event script abnormalities in high/low-functioning people with ASD, and that these relate to both i) specific social/cognitive abnormalities/ biases and ii) severity of behavioural abnormalities in real life. The second part will focus on the role of cultural knowledge in modulating perception, attention and memory in a context-sensitive manner. Preliminary findings of two novel memory tasks suggest that in norm-IQ boys with ASD cognition may be more in the service of accuracy than context-sensitive adaptation. Questions for future research will be discussed.

p Fabia Franco

Action and perception in joint attention: the case of infant pointing

In this talk I will analyse the research strategy used in my studies of the development of the pointing gesture in infancy. This strategy is based on the manipulation of the joint attentional demands of communicative contexts designed to facilitate the production of proto-declarative pointing. It will be argued that pointing is a gesture specialised in the non-verbal manipulation of others' attention, which serves primarily reference, emotion and information sharing functions.

p Ezequiel Di Paolo & Hanne De Jaegher

Inter-action matters: Sketches of a radical enactive approach to social understanding.

In most psychological approaches to social cognition the focus of research is on the individual cognitive capabilities. The problems of social understanding are often recast as problems of individual cognition of a special and complex kind. In this talk, we explore the limitations of methodological individualism. We propose instead to centre on the social interaction as a dynamical process with generative and formative aspects and derive the implications of this focus shift. We argue that this is a promising direction for elaborating an enactive theory of social cognition. We discuss specific aspects of social interactions such as flexible timing, breakdowns, the dynamics of meaning generation, and the long-term individual and relational effects. Some of these aspects can be used to question whether recent approaches to social understanding (i.e., Gallagher’s) are properly interactive.

p Erik Myin

Enactive perception and beyond

Abstract

Erik Myin has worked with Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë to produce a number of key papers on the enactive sensorimotor account of perception. He is based at the University of Antwerp (Center for Philosophical Psychology) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science).

Hanne De Jaegher is a DPhil candidate in the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Sussex, and Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Science at Middlesex University.

h.de.jaegher@sussex.ac.uk

Ezequiel Di Paolo is Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems in the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex.

ezequiel@sussex.ac.uk

Fabia Franco is Senior Lecturer in the School of Health and Social Sciences at Middlesex University.

F.Franco@mdx.ac.uk

Peter Hobson is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Tavistock Clinic and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at University College London and Director of the Unit for the Study of Lifespan Development.

r.hobson@ucl.ac.uk

Eva Loth is Research Fellow at the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, London.

E.Loth@iop.kcl.ac.uk

Jessica Meyer is at the Behavioural and Brain Sciences Unit, Institute of Child Health, University College London.

jmeyer@ich.ucl.ac.uk

Erik Myin is based at the University of Antwerp (Center for Philosophical Psychology) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science).

Erik.Myin@ua.ac.be

Steve Torrance is Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Health and Social Sciences at Middlesex University, and Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex.

S.Torrance@mdx.ac.uk