Purpose
The goal of the workshop is to bring together scientists from philosophy, psychology, and social neuroscience in order to advance our understanding of the status, structure, cognitive demands, and underlying neuronal mechanisms of joint attention and its function for social interaction and cognition.
Joint attention is the cognitive capacity to engage in triadic intentional relations, manifested, say by two people intentionally directing their attention toward an object, being mutually aware of this object being “shared” by attending to it. From the perspective of developmental psychology, joint attention plays a crucial role in the cognitive and social development of infants. At the age of around nine months, children show completely new intentional behaviors such as gaze following, pointing and trying to direct the attention of others – sometimes interpreted as precursors of social understanding and as important gateways for language development.
From a philosophical point of view, joint attention can be understood as one significant and complex form of intentionality as the general feature of being directed towards some object. There are simpler, merely dyadic forms of thus being directed, such as perceiving or grasping an object, and there are cognitively more demanding ones, especially the explicit directedness towards the mental representations of others, commonly called ‚mentalizing‘ or ‚theory of mind‘-capacity. Joint attention raises epistemological questions concerning (a) the kind of knowledge a child possesses and brings to bear in these situations, (b) the kind of mutual awareness in play, and (c) the emergence of mental capacities in the context of social interaction more generally.
From the perspective of the social cognitive neurosciences, joint attention is of particular interest with respect to the investigation of the underlying neuronal mechanisms, which enable us – as essentially social creatures – to engage in skillful social interactions with other human beings. While the relevant mechanisms of the primate visual system have already been investigated extensively, our understanding of the specialized neural systems demarcating and enabling joint attention is still at its initial stage. At the workshop, experimental data about the specific neuronal mechanisms underlying joint attention will also be presented and discussed.
