Chapter 29: Thinking and Feeling: Social-Developmental View

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive, where we take complex, challenging research and turn it into actionable, fascinating insights, specifically tailored just for you.

Today, we are undertaking a deep dive into one of the most fundamental questions in human development.

How do we become creative, flexible thinkers?

Where does that capacity for symbolic thought, for concepts, for language, for reflection, where does it actually come from?

In the answer, which is drawn from this really surprising intersection of developmental psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it challenges pretty much everything we assume about the mind.

Our mission today is to trace the development of symbolic thinking over, really, just the first two years of life.

And we're going to make the argument that this capacity is utterly inseparable from our earliest, most primal, emotional, and social relationships.

Wait, hold on.

So you're telling me that the root of really abstract thinking,

like conceptualizing infinity or writing a complex novel, that it actually lies not in some internal logic circuit, but in my ability to share a simple smile or a wince with another person when I was two months old.

That's it.

That's the shocker.

That feels huge.

It is.

That is precisely the thesis we're exploring.

The central argument is that to think symbolically,

a human being must first coordinate their experiences on what the author calls a non -inferential effective basis.

Okay, non -inferential, meaning?

Meaning you don't calculate what another person is feeling.

You don't run an algorithm.

You have a direct feeling -based capacity to identify with the attitudes of others.

It's a process of, you know, feeling your way into a shared reality, not computing it.

So if that's the case, then our traditional cognitive models, the ones that often treat the mind as an isolated CPU just processing inputs, they must be, well, fundamentally flawed.

They are, according to this material.

This framework is a perfect illustration of the core principles of 4 -E cognition, that the mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended.

We're moving so far beyond the idea of an isolated brain.

We're showing that thinking is fundamentally embedded in these dynamic social relations that actually transcend the individual.

It literally happens between people.

And the enacted part.

The enacted component means we don't just passively receive information from the world.

We actively create meaning through our engagement and interaction with it and with others.

The paper's whole conclusion is that the very nature of flexible thinking is just far more dependent on this feeling -imbued social relatedness than many traditional views have ever appreciated.

Okay, so let's unpack this enormous idea.

Let's start at developmental ground zero.

The author borrows this premise from the philosopher Martin Buber.

In the beginning is relation.

What does that first sentence tell us about how an infant's mind starts its journey?

It tells us we have to completely abandon the idea of the individual, isolated brain as our starting point.

When an infant is born, they aren't some collection of separate building blocks.

A little bit of motivation here, a bit of pure thought over there.

Their entire initial world is defined by their relation to their caregiver.

That engagement is, from the start, a whole dynamic system.

And this leads us right to a really crucial conceptual distinction that the source material warns us about.

The difference between aspects versus components.

I think this is where a lot of theories go wrong.

Oh, absolutely.

We have to be extremely careful not to commit what the author calls the danger of analytic dissection.

It's a bit like a Lego analogy.

If you try to analyze an infant's early engagement, you can't assume it's built from these discrete little Lego -like components of motivation, feeling, and thought.

They're not separate bricks you can click together.

Not at all.

Think of a single object, say a piece of fruit.

Its mass, its form, its color, its temperature.

Those aren't separate building blocks.

They're inseparable aspects of that one single thing.

You can't separate the sweetness from the texture without destroying the integrity of the fruit.

They're all part of the same whole.

Let me make sure I have that.

So if we can't dissect an infant's mind into these separate motivational, effective, and cognitive units,

how do we study it at all?

I mean, isn't science all about dissecting things?

That is the challenge, right.

But the insight here is that the infant's early relations have all these aspects at the same time.

They have cognitive, co -native, which is motivational and effective aspects simultaneously.

They register information that's cognitive.

They seek or avoid things that's motivational.

And they express pleasure or distress, which is effective.

So they're all blended together.

Exactly.

And the critical insight is that the relative separation of these categories, the point where thought becomes cool and detached from feeling,

that is not the starting point.

It is a developmental achievement yet to come.

We start unified.

We achieve separation later.

That immediately makes me think of Vygotsky.

He faced the exact same problem, didn't he?

Finding the right scale for analysis without just destroying the very thing you're trying to study.

He absolutely did.

Vygotsky argued so forcefully that when you're analyzing complex psychological wholes, you shouldn't break them down into elements that lose the wholes' basic properties.

He insisted we have to use a unit of analysis that retains all those basic properties.

And for our deep dive today, that unit is.

That unit is defined as the mode of relatedness.

And using that unit automatically demonstrates this unity of the effective and the intellectual.

They're not separate.

He gave us that beautifully evocative phrase for this inseparable link, the transmuted effective attitude.

Can you simplify that term?

It's a bit dense.

What does it mean for an attitude to be transmuted?

Okay, think of it this way.

Every idea, every single concept you hold contains an intrinsic and essential link with an effective attitude toward the reality it refers to.

The original emotion is transmuted or refined, but it's not destroyed.

So it's still in there somewhere.

It's baked in.

The idea of fairness, for instance, isn't just a dry definition in a dictionary.

It's an intellectual concept that's built out of the feeling of being wronged or that feeling of satisfaction when justice is served.

So if a concept emerges from our effectively charged relationship with the world, the feeling is literally part of the concept's DNA.

That's a perfect way to put it.

Ideas are not pure cold logic dropped in from space.

They are distilled out of our relations with the environment that were effectively configured from the start.

This makes the emergence of symbolic representations an effective process.

Later on, sure, high -level thought might become relatively emancipated from its original intense feeling, but that thought is still embedded in what started as feeling.

This grounding in early emotional engagement naturally brings in the idea of embodiment,

that thinking literally starts physically.

Werner, writing way back in 1948, really pushes this physical connection.

He does.

Werner proposed that our early awareness of objects depends essentially on the extent to which they can be responded to in motor -effective behavior.

Motor -effective, so moving and feeling.

Exactly.

This means the child's initial knowledge of the world is structured by what they do to and feel about objects.

This aligns with Piaget's sensorimotor origins of thinking, but Werner really emphasizes the critical role of affect and attitude in structuring that behavior.

So how does that motor -effective behavior eventually lead to true, flexible conceptual thinking?

Well, it creates this really important distinction between what we can call primitive grouping and true conceptual abstraction.

In primitive abstraction, things are grouped by their equal effective value for the subject.

So, you know, everything that feels comforting goes in one pile, and everything that makes me frustrated goes in another.

It's all about me.

It's concrete and egocentric, but conceptual abstraction is something else entirely.

It requires a deliberate ability to detach a specific quality, like roundness, and isolate it mentally, regardless of the object's context or its personal value to you.

That sounds like it requires a really radical shift in perspective.

It is.

Conceptual abstraction requires flexibility in how you categorize the world, and that means shifting your points of view.

If I can only see a lemon as sour food, I'm stuck.

But if I can mentally shift perspectives and see it also as yellow or round, or even something I could roll, then I've achieved cognitive flexibility.

So the acquisition of abstract thought relies on acquiring and understanding multiple perspectives.

Which, by definition, have to originate socially.

And that takes us right back to Vygotsky's most famous principle, the social origin of higher functions.

Right.

Vygotsky famously asserted that every higher function, whether it's voluntary attention, logical memory, or forming concepts, it appears first on the social level, what he called the interpsychological, so between people.

And only then does it move inside the child to become intrasychological inside the child's own mind.

So my ability to, say, focus my attention internally started as me responding to an adult's instructions or gestures to focus on something outside of myself.

Precisely.

High -level thinking originates as actual dynamic relations between human individuals.

The goings -on between two people become internalized features of individual intelligence.

This is the very definition of cognition being embedded in a social context and then extended through cultural tools, which start fundamentally as communication.

Now, Werner and Kaplan, they detail the mechanics of how this symbolic process evolves from those initial shared infant caregiver transactions.

How do they describe that move from immediate feeling to an abstract symbol?

They describe it as a process of progressive distancing or polarization.

Initially, the interaction is purely sensory motor effective, but through these transactions with the caregiver, something uniquely human emerges, the sharing of experiences.

The earliest paradigm for this is that non -reflexive smile of an infant in response to the mother's smile.

It's a mutual, reciprocal, effective exchange.

And that initial sharing then starts to polarize, to separate out.

Yes.

This distancing occurs progressively.

You get separation between the person and the object, between the person and the symbol, the symbol and the object, and critically between the addresser and the addressee, the people who are communicating.

That shared experience creates the necessary gap for abstraction to happen.

This brings us to the difference between just simple communication and true symbolic thought.

When an infant points at something, that's communication, right?

But Werner and Kaplan argue it's not yet symbolization.

And that's a crucial distinction.

Pointing is just reference.

It's the indication, the denotation of a concretely present object.

And it remains stuck in that concrete situation.

If I point to a dog, I'm stuck with that dog right now.

Okay.

So what's symbolization then?

Symbolization involves differentiation and integration.

It involves lifting out the characteristic features or the connotations of the object and realizing them in a whole other medium, a word, a sound or a gesture.

So the word acts as the kind of lever detaching the idea from the immediate sensory experience.

It creates the mental space we need for flexible thought.

And we see this developmental endpoint in the language of toddlers.

Names, which are just concrete designators linked to action like mummy, doggy, they become genuine words, which are semantic contrasts located in a whole linguistic field.

And when a toddler manages a two word utterance like ball gun, they're making explicit the differentiation between the referent, the ball, the topic, and the attitude that it is gone, the comment.

This topic comment structure in language perfectly mirrors the underlying ability to separate an object from a perspective on that object.

Okay.

So we've got this process of distancing and polarization,

but we still need the how.

How are these essential acts of sharing and distancing and lifting out?

How are they actually made possible in a non -inferential way?

To figure that out, we have to borrow a key mechanism from philosophy.

Precisely.

Because if we accept that symbolic thought originates in social relations, we can't rely on already developed thinking like inference or calculation to explain the origin of that thinking.

That would be circular.

We need a mechanism that doesn't involve the infant being some little scientist running a complex theory of mind experiment on their caregiver.

So the origin has to be rooted in something more primitive, more direct, more feeling based.

That's right.

It requires a non -intellectual, non -inferential mode of pre -understanding others.

And this is where the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein becomes absolutely indispensable.

He grounds our understanding of other people's minds not in complex intellectual deliberation, but in our shared spontaneous forms of life.

He just strips away the need for abstract calculation entirely.

He does.

Consider his assertion.

My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.

I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.

Now, that is a profoundly important statement.

Okay, that sounds pretty abstract.

Break that down for us.

It means our relation to others isn't an interpretation.

I don't infer that you have feelings by observing your behavior and comparing it to my own.

Instead, our relation to others is fundamentally direct and responsive.

We don't believe another person is feeling.

We spontaneously respond to their expression of feeling.

And the philosopher Norman Malcolm backs this up, right?

He says we shouldn't even try to philosophically justify this bedrock level of human engagement.

We don't argue that we pity an injured man because we believe he has pain.

The fact is, we pity him.

The action precedes the thought.

That spontaneous, non -inferential engagement is the bedrock.

Our responsive engagement with other people gives us direct, primitive access to their subjective lives.

But Wittgenstein goes even deeper, pointing to a primitive human ability to assume the actions and expressions of others without even planning it.

You mean like that classic thought experiment about the child who wants to touch a dog but doesn't dare.

How do we instantly see that hesitation, that inner conflict?

Well, Wittgenstein asks if this seeing is an interpretation or if it's direct perception.

And he suggests that to understand the expression, we remember our basic human capacity to mimic that specific human being.

There's something primitive about the ability to transpose what we perceive in someone else's expression to our own bodily expression and activity.

So the very fact that we could mimic that hesitant behavior is part of how we understand it in the first place.

Exactly.

It makes perfect sense.

It's like when you involuntarily mirror someone yawning or you wince when they hit their knee.

You haven't consciously thought about their pain.

Your body just, it just went there for a second.

You've adopted their stance.

And this capacity to transpose, to momentarily step into the other's effective stance is the developmental mechanism that the author calls identification.

That sounds almost Freudian.

It is.

This capacity is what Freud called identifying with.

The potential to assimilate the stance of someone else so that it becomes a potential stance for yourself.

This explains how you can mimic that hesitant child even if you don't actually follow through.

The psychologist Stuart Hampshire called this the primitive faculty of imitation.

And it serves as this essential background for communicating feeling.

I need to clarify something really crucial here.

If this is about identification,

is the infant just merging with the caregiver?

Are they losing their self -boundaries?

No, absolutely not.

And the sources are very careful to distinguish identifying with from merging.

It's not a loss of self.

Identifying with involves the individual adopting an other person -centered stance in relation to a shared world.

So you're seeing from their point of view, but you're still you.

Precisely.

And it's the very act of adopting this specific temporarily alternative stance that creates the potential for the individual to shift into what he or she registers of that stance later on.

This constant shifting between my stance and the other stance is what ultimately fuels self -other differentiation and, crucially, perspective -taking.

Okay, so the foundation for flexible thought is built on this non -inferential effective capacity to adopt and shift across alternative person -centered stances.

Now we need to link that mechanism back to our definition of language and symbolic thought.

What exactly does a symbol do?

So we can turn back to some classic definitions.

Ogden and Richards, defining symbols nearly a century ago, they stress that symbols are inextricably tied to attitudes and to social factors.

When a speaker uses a symbol, its power is caused not just by the object it refers to, but also by the speaker's own attitude toward that object and the proposed effect on the listener.

That just solidifies the idea that the emotional context is literally woven into the thought.

It's not just, you know, sticky taped on afterward.

Exactly.

When we hear symbols, they don't just prompt an act of reference.

They also cause us to assume an attitude that is similar to the speaker's.

A symbol carries the originator's way of thinking about and their effective attitude toward the referent.

The philosopher Suzanne Langer clarified this beautifully.

She said, symbols are not proxies for their objects.

They are vehicles for the conception of objects.

That's a really powerful distinction.

It separates a signal like a scream, meaning danger now, from a symbol like the word ghost, which refers to something that isn't physically present at all.

Precisely.

Langer said words, let us develop a characteristic attitude toward objects in absentia, which is called thinking of or referring to what is not here.

A symbol is coupled with a conception that fits an object or event.

And the connotation of the word is the conception it conveys.

The ability to refer to things in absentia is the hallmark of true abstract thought.

But the social loop has to be closed for this to become truly meaningful communication.

We need to move from an individual just using a word to an individual understanding the social power of that word.

And that's George Herbert Mead's rigorous requirement for what he called true significant symbols.

Mead insisted that to employ such symbols, an individual requires a degree of self -reflective awareness.

You have to recognize that your gesture or your sound means the same thing to the listener as it means to you.

So the key is anticipating the response.

Yes.

The key action required is an arousal in the individual himself of the response he's calling out in the other individual.

It's a taking of the role of the other.

You must, in essence, listen to your own word through the other person's ears.

And that's where K connected the dots, right?

The infant anticipates how the symbol will be interpreted because they've already experienced that symbol from the perspective of the listener.

It grounds the meaning in these shared reversible roles.

That reciprocal structure is what moves the whole development of language and thought forward.

And this also applies directly to the fundamental structure of thought, specifically the subject predicate distinction that thinkers like Hamlin championed.

For a thought to be genuine, it has to be about something, the subject and something else has to be thought about that something, the predicate.

Like the ball subject has gone predicate or the attitude.

Exactly like that.

The infant comes to realize that attitudes have aboutness.

They are directed toward things in the world.

The child discovers that communicative acts, which are structured as subject predicate, convey specific attitudes about the shared world.

And this realization of shared directed attitudes is what profoundly affects their ability to think abstractly and flexibly.

OK, so we have the theory.

Flexible thought requires this non -inferential identification with the attitudes of others.

Now, let's look at the evidence that this actually happens in early development.

Let's start with the very first months of life.

If we look at a two month old infant, we see what the researcher Colwin Trevertham called primary intersubjectivity.

It's this highly fluid coordinated exchange of expressions, vocalizations and gestures between the caregiver and the child.

They are just deeply connected, responding instantly to each other's emotional cues.

It's not two separate individuals.

It's a single shared emotional system.

And the clearest, most powerful demonstration that the child's mind has already embedded in the social relationship has to be the infamous still face demonstration.

The conantronic procedure from 1983 is essential here.

The experiment is so simple, yet it's devastating.

A mother engages joyfully with her two month old and then on cue, she adopts a still blank, unreactive face while continuing to look right at the infant.

The infant's reaction is instantaneous and dramatic.

How does the baby respond to that sudden emotional vacuum?

Their behavior shifts immediately.

They lose their infectious smile and their characteristic smooth flowing movements.

Their body language becomes uneasy, restless and jerky.

Their bright protracted gaze, which was fixed on the mother, is replaced by these brief, anxious checking glances as if they're trying to figure out what just went wrong.

And then they start what the source calls bids.

They actively try to restore the interaction.

Yes, they try to fix the system.

It's amazing.

They produce these forced smiles and deliberate gestures attempting to elicit or return to that joyful exchange.

This complex sequence of distress and active repair shows the child is an active participant in an enacted system and they're deeply dependent on the reciprocal, effective attitude of the other person.

The profound insight here is that sharing an experience isn't just me having my own experience and then adding yours to it.

It's a qualitatively new form of experience where you register your own subjective state and something of the other's attitude conjointly.

The other person's bodily expressiveness, their effective behavior, it's not just noise.

It's vital for structuring the whole dyadic exchange.

And this interdependence, it sets the stage for the next major developmental shift, which happens towards the end of the first year of life.

The end of the first year is a true watershed moment.

We see the emergence of joint attention and that's not just looking at what the adult looks at.

It's reflecting an awareness, though not yet a full conceptual one of the adult's point of view.

Can you give us a detailed example of what that joint attention looks like?

Certainly.

Consider a 13 month old girl described in the research.

When an adult tester looks and points to an object across the room, the child doesn't just look at the hand.

First, she looks back at the tester's face to ascertain the intent and the emotional orientation and only then does she shift her gaze to the target beyond the finger.

So she's checking in first.

The key is that she is moving through the other person's orientation to achieve that shared reference.

The adult's point isn't just a signpost.

It's an orientation that draws the infant into alignment with the other's perspective on a shared world.

And this mechanism is shown even more clearly in the social referencing studies.

The classic visual cliff experiment seems tailor made to illustrate this.

The source at all study from 1985 on the visual cliff is a perfect empirical validation of this non -inferential effective grasp.

So 12 -month -olds were placed before a visual cliff.

It's a drop off covered by clear plexiglass that looks dangerous but is actually perfectly safe.

When the infants reached the ambiguous edge, they'd pause and look to their mother for guidance.

And the mother was instructed to show one of two distinct attitudes.

Yes.

When the mother looked at the cliff with a smile or encouragement, the majority of the infants tentatively proceeded across the glass.

But when the mother showed fear or distress or hesitation,

none of them crossed.

Not one.

Wow.

So the physical reality of the cliff was constant, but its meaning was entirely dependent on the mother's attitude.

Exactly.

The infant's attitude toward this ambiguous environment was altered by appraising the parent's effective stance.

The cliff became an object of fear or an object of safety through the mother's effective attitude directed toward that specific part of the environment.

This just confirms the infant is effectively grounded in these self -other relations embedded in a shared world.

And that establishes the precise conditions for conceptual understanding.

So this intense non -inferential responsiveness must be the engine for that distancing that Werner and Kaplan were talking about.

It is the key move.

By the end of the first year, the infant achieves self -other differentiation precisely because this non -inferential responsiveness establishes the conditions for distancing.

Because the infant is constantly being moved across these distinct person -anchored stance attitudes perspectives toward the same object.

Mommy is happy about the toy.

Daddy is neutral about it.

The child discovers that a single object can have multiple meanings for different people and for themselves.

And that's the distancing.

That is the distancing required for simple reference to transform into complex representation.

And this capacity just blossoms into the self -reflective awareness we associate with toddlerhood.

The second year of life is characterized by true self -reflective awareness.

You see self -descriptive language like my book.

You see compliance, coordinated role -responsive interactions, and the onset of symbolizing in play.

Think of the Marcy example.

The 20 -month -old who wanted her sister's toy horse.

She didn't just physically fight for it.

She went over, climbed on the horse and cried, nice horsey, nice horsey.

She was using emotional and symbolic role -taking.

She was adopting her sister's attitude of affection toward the horse to manipulate the situation That is flexible, intelligent thought in action.

She transcended her immediate desire for the object and manipulated the attitude around it.

And we see this powerful mechanism perfectly reflected in language acquisition specifically with personal pronouns based on Charney's 1980 observation on the use of the word my.

Tell us more about that.

How does the word my prove this role -taking mechanism?

Charney observed that nearly all of the first uses of my by toddlers occurred when the child was grabbing or claiming an object, often one that wasn't actually theirs.

But crucially, the child learned the word not by hearing an adult neutrally describe ownership, but by hearing someone else use the word my while simultaneously appropriating something often from the child themselves.

Wait, so they learned the possessive word anchored in the other person's attitude of possessiveness,

an attitude they didn't necessarily like.

Exactly.

Through non -inferential identification and assimilating that linguistic term into the attitude of appropriation, the child came to express the same attitude with the same word.

This is reversible role -taking in miniature.

The symbol anchors and evokes these person -centered attitudes.

The ability to apprehend and be moved by the subjective states of others in relation to the world is what creates the mental space for negotiating attitudes and meanings, which is the essence of generating symbolic meaning.

So of everything we just discussed, joint attention, distancing, reversible role -taking, if that's the necessary social engine for flexible thought, then if an individual struggles with this initial identification,

they should struggle specifically with creative, conceptual, flexible thinking later on.

And the case of autism provides the tragic, that compelling counterpoint that validates this entire theory.

We can look at the classic historical descriptions of children with autism spectrum conditions, like the case of L, who was studied by Scheerer, Rothman, and Goldstein way back in 1945.

L was identified as having severe learning difficulties and an IQ of around 50.

But he also had these amazing splinter skills.

Yes, his limitations were offset by an exceptional rote memory.

He could recount the exact day and date of his first visit to a place or instantly recall names and birthdays.

However, his social and cognitive limitations were severe and very specific to our argument.

He showed no interest in social surroundings.

He lacked spontaneous imitation.

And crucially, he was utterly unable to create imaginary situations or engage in pretend play.

He just couldn't sustain a reciprocal conversation.

And his concept formation was stuck.

It was completely concrete.

The examples of his rigid thinking are so deeply illustrative.

His definitions were entirely egocentric and situation bound.

When he was asked to define an orange, he defined it as that I squeeze with.

An envelope was something I put in with.

When asked the difference between an egg and a stone, he defined it relationally to himself.

I eat an egg and I throw a stone.

He just could not abstract properties like shape, material or edibility in a flexible way.

He was incapable of conceptual abstraction because he couldn't shift his perspective beyond his own immediate interaction with the object.

That rigidity, that stuckness in the concrete situation, that's the key feature.

It is a profound inability to transcend immediate reality.

And it is intimately linked to his lack of self -consciousness and his inability to engage with others' feelings or perspectives.

His cognitive limits are rooted in his severe deficits in communicative and social -emotional relations.

And empirically we see that children with autism struggle with those crucial early building blocks.

Research by people like Sharman and Sigmund confirms that long before they could be expected to conceptualize minds, children with autism are atypical in their relative lack of engaging in those sharing forms of joint attention and social referencing.

The very person -with -person exchanges, we argue, are the source of later conceptual thought.

This makes a developmental hypothesis highly plausible.

Let's zoom in on the precise nature of this social developmental limitation in autism.

The source defines it as a restricted propensity to identify with the attitudes of others toward a shared world.

That precise phrase is the proposed final common pathway that leads to the clinical features of autism.

It means the individual fails to apprehend and respond to the other person -centered source of attitudes.

They're not effectively engaged with or caring about the other person's feelings as the others.

They might recognize the behavior, but they don't spontaneously share the stance.

This distinction is so critical because it explains why therapeutic approaches that just try to teach high -level thoughts about feelings often hit a wall.

Exactly.

The source material reviews research on social emotions, a study by Hobson and others in 2006.

When parents of children with and without autism were interviewed about their children's emotional life, the parents of autistic children recognized basic emotions like anger, fear, pride, jealousy.

But in shop contrast, they rarely reported that their children showed more person -focused emotions or qualities of relatedness like guilt or empathic concern.

And guilt and empathic concern require that spontaneous, effective stance -shifting, seeing the world through the eyes of the person you wronged or the person who is suffering.

The findings suggest the issue isn't a generalized emotional deficit, but specifically a failure of emotions related to shared perspective and reciprocal stance.

The feeling aspects are constitutive of the thought about persons that truly make a difference.

Simply acquiring coherent thoughts about feelings, pure cognition is often insufficient because the effective component that non -inferential identification is missing from the intellectual framework.

This mechanism, the inability to spontaneously shift stances, is beautifully and simply tested in the sticker test.

The Hobson and Myers sticker test from 2005 is a perfect demonstration of this fragility of stance -shifting.

Children were asked to tell another person in the

where on their body to place a sticker badge.

Now, if you are relying on spontaneous, reversible role -taking, you naturally use your own body as a proxy for the other person's body.

Okay, so a typical child, if they were asked where to put the sticker on the investigator's shoulder, would instinctively point to their own shoulder.

They would.

And the majority of typical children did just that.

They pointed to a site on their own bodies, anticipating that the other person would identify with that gesture and transpose it to themselves.

The children with autism rarely communicated this way.

Instead, the vast majority of them pointed directly to the investigator's body.

They bypass that crucial self -as -other mechanism that underpins flexible thought.

And this simple difference suggests a profound fragility in the basic self -other connectedness and the effortless stance -shifting that's required for flexible thinking.

It confirms that the non -inferential differentiation and connectivity that underpin things like the still -face response and social referencing are fundamentally impaired.

And that leads directly to the rigidity we saw in Elle's case study.

We established earlier that symbolic play is the clearest behavioral test of applying alternative meanings of generating representations in absentia.

So how do these core deficits in autism manifest when it comes to play?

Children with autism are known to be limited in their creative and spontaneous representational play.

However, many of them can achieve the mechanics of play.

They can make one thing stand for another or represent an absent property.

This raised a really interesting question.

Is the quality of the symbolic thinking the same as that of typical children?

What did the Hobson -Lee and Hobson study from 2009 find about the qualities of symbolic play when they compared the groups?

They carefully compared matched groups and found that while the groups were similar in the basic mechanics, the cognitive act of making A stand for B, the children with autism were significantly different on several key effective measures.

They showed less creativity, less fun, less investment in the new meanings, and they were less aware of themselves as the initiators of those new meanings.

So the pleasure, the creative ownership, and the effective motivation to invent a new meaning were all diminished or even absent.

That is the critical conclusion.

The authors argue that for typical children, the fun and the effective investment are intrinsic to symbolic thinking.

They reflect its rootedness in these interpersonal transactions.

If thinking is rooted and identifying with, then the act of generating new meanings should be effectively charged.

When that effective charge is missing, the thinking becomes rigid, mechanical, and much less generative.

OK, now let's turn to the last and perhaps most fascinating piece of evidence,

the case of congenital blindness,

which serves as a sort of natural experiment on the importance of embodied and embedded social geometry.

Our theoretical starting point was that vision affords two things that are absolutely essential to identifying with.

First, the perception of effective expressions that belong to embodied individuals.

And second, the experience of the directedness of another person's attitudes toward visually specified shared objects.

So without vision, the blind child can't easily navigate the geometry required for these emotionally structured child adult world transactions.

That's the hypothesis.

It must be extremely difficult without vision to register those spontaneous shifts from one person -derived take to another.

The lack of opportunities to experience movement to different person -anchored stances limits the discovery that a given something can be construed in more than one way.

And that severely hinders the essential distancing required for representation.

And do the empirical findings actually support this major theoretical risk?

Was there a clinical overlap between profound visual impairment and the social cognitive deficits we see in autism?

A substantial overlap.

A study by Brown and others in 1997 documented that clinical features highly similar to autism are highly prevalent among congenitally blind children.

Approximately half of the children in their study met the full criteria for the syndrome autism and many others displayed similar features.

Half.

That suggests the visual component of social interaction, seeing the orientation and the directedness of the other person's body and face is far more central to typical effective and conceptual development than we previously assumed.

And crucially, the findings reinforced the central link.

The most socially impaired blind children, the ones who were least able to engage socially, were also the most limited in their creative symbolic play.

This just strengthens the core argument.

The capacity for flexible thought is built on the embodied experience of shifting effective perspectives in a shared, visible world.

Wow.

This has been a massive deep dive, moving from Buber to Wittgenstein to empirical studies on infants and children with developmental differences.

What is the fundamental contribution this body of work makes to our understanding of the human mind?

It tells us that the forms of abstract attitude, things like shifting perspectives, reflection upon oneself, and conceptual creativity are precisely those for which appropriately patterned intersubjective experience is necessary.

The abstract mind is forged in the fire of interpersonal emotional relations.

So the growth in self -reflective awareness, the realization that I am a self with my own take on the world, and the ability to think symbolically are really two sides of the same coin.

Absolutely.

They both require the grasp of alternative, person -anchored perspectives on a shared world.

The specialness of human sharing is grounded in this propensity to spontaneously identify with and dwell in the experience of the other.

The conclusion is that role -shifting, flexibility, and creativity and thinking are structured and motivated by the social developmental process of identifying with others' attitudes.

Which means our thinking is profoundly embedded in dynamic social relations, and its fundamental nature is far more dependent on feeling -imbued social relatedness than traditional cognitive science ever gave it credit for.

The lesson is that relations among cognition, motivation, and effect, they evolve over infancy.

But in early life and beyond, the structure of our emotional relations seems far less dependent on cold cognition, and the nature of our high -level thinking is far more dependent on feeling and social relatedness.

Which leaves us with a truly provocative thought for you to consider, building on this deemed dive.

If the fundamental capacity for flexible thought, the ability to detach, to shift perspective, to generate creative new meanings, is rooted in the primal, non -inferential act of identifying with another person's embodied, effective stance.

What does this imply about the future development of truly flexible, creative artificial intelligence?

Can you have genuine perspective shifting without a biological basis for effective identification?

It's a question that redefines the very nature of intelligence itself.

Indeed.

Thank you for diving deep with us into the social origins of thinking and feeling.

We will see you next time.