Chapter 23: Why Engagement? Second-Person Social Cognition

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive.

Today we're undertaking a really critical mission, diving deep into the foundations of social cognition.

We're focusing on a fascinating chapter by Fazuti V.

Reddy from the Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition.

That's right, and the central question, I mean the thing we're really tackling here is all about developmental priority.

Okay.

Why is direct mutual, you know, emotional engagement, why isn't it just some helpful background context?

Like a nice -to -half.

Exactly.

Why is it the absolute crucible for social cognition?

We're exploring the argument that the experience of being addressed as you is, well, it's developmentally primary.

Okay, let's unpack that immediately, starting with the big picture.

When we talk about 4E cognition that's embodied and acted, extended and embedded, we're already sort of predisposed to move away from that brain in a vat model.

Exactly.

The core thesis here is to take that 4E perspective and apply it rigorously to social development.

We're arguing that the social is not merely supporting or, you know, permitting cognition like older internalist views would suggest.

It is fundamentally constituting it.

So it's building it.

It's literally building it.

Cognition develops in relation, and those relations are defined by active second -person engagement.

So if the mind is extended and embedded, then that emotional connection isn't just a filter on the incoming data.

It is the data.

It's shaping the architecture.

Precisely.

And Reddy emphasizes this in a developmental, almost a genealogical sense.

Social cognition, she argues, originates in and is perpetually sustained by what she calls second -person engagements.

Okay, 2P engagement.

Right, 2P.

These are interactions that just irresistibly involve the participant, and crucially they change not only the individual's capacity to cognize, but also what develops to be cognized.

It's the emotional force of being addressed directly, that feeling of being seen as a person.

That's the main engine.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of what that looks like in, you know, an infant, we need to set the historical stage.

This isn't the first time psychologists have argued for a social foundation, is it?

Not at all.

The author identifies two pretty significant historical movements that tried to pull the focus away from the solitary mind.

Okay.

The first move, well, it happened back in the 1960s and 1970s.

This was a necessary intellectual rebellion against what were then the dominant paradigms.

So we're talking about Piaget.

We're talking

Chomsky.

These were highly individualistic, internalist and acontextual approaches.

Okay, we need to nail those terms down for our listener.

When we say a theory is internalist and acontextual, what specific assumptions are being challenged here?

Internalism implies that the central mechanisms of mind,

the rules, the structures, the processing power, are all housed inside the individual brain, isolated from the world.

Like a computer processing data without really caring where it came from.

That's a perfect analogy.

And acontextuality means these mental structures are thought to develop and operate divorced from the immediate relationship or the specific situation, the cultural context where they're actually used.

So Piaget's stages suggested logic develops inside the child, whether they're talking to a person or just watching balls roll down a ramp.

Yes.

And Chomsky proposed the language acquisition device, the LAD, as this innate internal mechanism that just needed a little bit of input to kick off.

An internal grammar machine.

Exactly.

And the first move,

trying to push back against this isolationist view, you had scholars like Jerome Brunner introducing the LAS, the language acquisition support system.

Right, the social support.

He argued the internal LAD was basically useless without the external social structure provided by the caregiver.

And similarly, you had Margaret Donaldson emphasizing human sense,

arguing children's performance on Piagetian tasks was profoundly better when the logic was embedded in meaningful human social context.

Not just abstract object.

No.

And then the discovery of the social baby in the 1970s really cemented this shift.

Okay.

What did that discovery entail?

Well, the work by researchers like Treverthen and Tronick, they demonstrated that infants are socially oriented, active participants in interaction from the moment they're born.

So they're not just reacting to stimuli.

Not at all.

They're ready for dialogue.

So this first move established the social world as an important context.

Okay.

So that was the first great effort.

Where does the current, the second movement stand, the one Reddy is part of?

The current move is, it's visible across fields today, neuroscience, developmental psychology, cognitive science, but it has a narrower focus.

It's specifically on social cognition,

understanding other minds.

But there's a paradox here.

There is.

Reddy points out that while everyone now agrees the social world matters, the terminology is, well, it's a mess.

We hear terms like interaction, engagement, shared engagement, second person.

Extensive cues, interactive brain.

It does sound a bit like academic chaos.

If everyone agrees, why is the terminology a problem?

Because, and this is Reddy's powerful argument,

this current wave risks unwittingly continuing the very old internalism and a contextuality that the 60s and 70s tried to displace.

How so?

Many contemporary theories claim sociality is foundational, but they interpret it as just data input as cues or information that an isolated internal processor can then use to build an abstract theory of mind.

Okay.

So they might say, yes, the social world provides the stimuli, but they're still imagining the little cognizer sitting inside, just analyzing the stimuli from a distance.

Precisely.

If we fail to fully embrace the fundamental emotional and mutual role of direct address, if we treat engagement as just a more vivid form of data, we've just repackaged the old idea of the isolated cognizer.

So Reddy's mission is to show that the interaction is not just contextual.

It's constitutive.

It makes the capacities themselves.

The very definition of engagement has to capture this emotional world changing quality.

That sets up our central task perfectly.

If we're aiming for definition that avoids treating social interaction as mere data input, what exactly distinguishes engagement from mere interaction in Reddy's framework?

The distinction lies centrally in the emotional core

and the acknowledgement of the other's person -ness.

Okay.

Think of simple transactional interactions, what we might call IIT interactions.

You buy a newspaper, you show a bus driver your pass, you absentmindedly pass a colleague in the hall.

Right.

These are interactions, but they are devoid of the necessary emotional investment, that true spark, a genuine shared smile, flash of surprise, heartfelt gratitude that marks engagement.

Engagement requires this significant level of emotional involvement.

And this emotional component isn't just a bonus.

It's not just nice to have.

It's what provides the meaning.

It is the transformative power.

The significance of emotional involvement is immense in everyday life.

It's what gives meaning to our existence.

It correlates strongly with higher academic performance in children.

It powerfully drives how we form and recall our own autobiographical memories.

And it's used in everything from therapy to marketing.

Right.

It's strategically targeted everywhere.

Reddy argues for the term engagement precisely because it captures these essential emotional and effective qualities far better than the cold functional term interaction.

Okay.

So let's unpack the first conceptual complexity of that.

If emotional involvement is the key, does that make engagement a fixed category?

You know, in either situation?

That's a crucial question.

And initially, it does sound categorical.

Either you're emotionally involved or you're not.

However, Reddy argues that engagement operates as a continuum.

A spectrum.

A spectrum.

Can any interaction truly be devoid of effect or attention?

Even the most minimal transactional interaction like being dimly aware of the cashier's expectant look as you fumble for your change requires some degree of interest, attention, and awareness.

So even at the very low end, there's always a minimum level of processing happening.

Yes.

A minimal level of activity is always present.

Often it's in the form of what Daniel Stern called vitality effects.

Vitality effects.

Yeah, these aren't the big categorical emotions like joy or anger.

They're the feeling states associated with movement, rhythm, intensity.

The shape of an interaction.

Like a vibe of a room.

Sort of, yeah.

The perception of an interaction's rhythm, even if you are just a participant in a crowd,

falls under this umbrella.

So since most interactions involve some minimal effective connection, they follow along a vast spread of varying degrees of emotional involvement.

Engagement is a continuum.

That helps clarify the degree of engagement.

Now let's move from degree to domain.

Is engagement a singular focused experience, or can we be engaged in multiple ways at the same time?

Oh, it is emphatically multiple, which is where researchers run into huge methodological problems.

Just like consciousness itself, engagement occurs across different domains simultaneously.

The author gives some great examples.

You might be intensely relishing the warmth and comfort of a hot shower, a physical engagement, while at the same time you're absorbed in the mental task of solving a stubborn work problem.

Or the more profound example she gives.

Weeping over a tragedy you see on the news, so you're fully emotionally engaged with the suffering, while at the same time you're planning the logical logistics of how you could help, treating the disaster like a functional, mundane problem to be solved.

That combination perfectly illustrates the point.

To speak of engagement as a single focused thing, even in a single moment, is inherently limiting.

We only simplify it in academic discourse.

We say a child is engaged in a puzzle, because grasping and measuring that full multiple complexity is, as the chapter notes, an incredibly difficult almost Herculean task for research.

The next complexity then is the boundary between people and things.

In the context of 4E cognition, does engagement only happen with persons, or does it happen with objects too?

Reddy argues we have to accept engagement with objects.

We have to be very wary of a rigid person -object dualism.

Why is that?

Well first, if we try to draw an absolute line, we risk ignoring the material reality of human bodies.

Persons are objects in a physical sense.

But second, and more importantly for the 4E framework,

human beings constantly personalize the material world.

Artifacts are not neutral.

They are structured by human intelligence, our bodies.

Our desires.

They're embedded with social meaning.

Precisely.

The object world is always introduced to us through a cultured, in -person reality.

The fork you eat with, the phone you hold.

They are extensions of human intent and history.

And we see this from the very beginning.

From the very beginning.

Developmentally, newborns show intense interest and emotionality toward objects.

Vaude Hausten's research, for instance, showed intense visual attention and these rough emotional swiping motions toward objects placed near them.

They show an openness to engage even with the inanimate material world.

So the key difference isn't the target, whether it's a person or an object, but the potential for mutuality.

Exactly.

While object engagement lacks the rich, unpredictable mutuality you find with animate, responding beings,

both are fundamentally engagements.

And the infant's exploration of the object world is colored by the social reality that introduced those objects in the first place.

Okay, finally, let's turn to the role of action.

We can be intensely engaged mentally watching a movie or thinking through a puzzle without any obvious action.

What makes active engagement so vital?

While internal engagement is real, active engagement, reaching out, turning away, vocalizing, making a face, is far more impactful and consequential for development.

Why?

Because manifest action leads not only to an internal change of state, but critically, it changes the external world.

It elicits responses from others, and those responses elicit further responses from us.

This sounds a lot like an action.

It is the essence of an action.

Active engagement allows mutuality to thrive.

It enables the unscripted developments and open -ended consequences that characterize social life.

It expands or curtails or fundamentally colors the potential of the relationship itself.

So action isn't just a readout of an internal state.

Not at all.

It's a means of changing the relationship dynamic.

So while engagement is a continuum of effective states,

active engagement, especially with another person, is the most powerful catalyst for developing social cognition.

We've established that engagement is complex, continuous, and spans everything from slight effective awareness to intense mutual connection.

If engagement is such a messy continuum, why introduce the seemingly categorical distinction between second -person and third -person relations?

Why add more terminology?

That's a crucial challenge, and Reddy introduces this distinction because the development of social cognition really hinges on a specific high -intensity form of engagement.

Which is?

The experience of being addressed as you.

Now, we can operationally define the difference structurally.

2P is a dyadic, face -to -face interaction.

3P is observing a dyad.

But the substantive difference comes from an irreducible emotional source.

This is where we get into the philosophical underpinning from Martin Buber's, the I -you -and -I distinction.

Indeed.

The second person, or I -you relation, is defined by the experience of being addressed by another, of being seen and acknowledged as a unique you.

And the resulting mutuality that's generated by seeing the other as you in turn,

it's characterized by absolute openness and presence.

You're open to being changed by the interaction.

Yes.

Conversely, the third person, the I -it relation, is a more detached observational analytic stance, seeing the other as a he or she, a predictable object of study.

This is marked by closeness.

But wait a minute, if I'm physically sitting across from someone face -to -face, isn't that automatically a 2P interaction?

Not necessarily.

And this is where the depth of the critique really lies.

The physical structure of the situation does not guarantee the stance.

Closeness, or adopting a third -person perspective, can happen even in a dyadic interaction by mentally filtering the other.

So what are the common contexts of this closeness, of treating a you like an it?

Oh, we see it everywhere.

One context is categorizing or objectifying, filtering the person through a rigid label.

Oh, she's just a bureaucrat.

He's just another customer.

Or they are simply a member of group X.

You stop seeing the individual.

Right.

Another powerful form is adopting an analytic stance, thinking about the person in detached generalized terms, like a clinician viewing a patient primarily through a list of symptoms, rather than through their shared humanity.

And the third one, which is maybe the most common filter, is the having another agenda context.

Yes.

If you approach an interaction with a goal that prevents genuine expressiveness, or the possibility of being genuinely surprised by the other person, you create closeness.

The example of the caregiver.

If a baby cries and the parent immediately searches for the reason.

The checklist.

Are they hungry?

Do they need a diaper?

Right.

Approaching it like a checklist problem, they might miss the opportunity to simply relate to the crying as crying, as a form of communication that deserves a mutual emotional response.

That agenda prevents mutuality.

The crucial marker, then, is the state of openness and presence.

Exactly.

It's a multi -layered continuum.

But the core distinction is vital.

Are you addressing a subject, a you, who can change you, or analyzing an object, an it, that you seek to control or predict?

This distinction sounds highly functional for development, yet the chapter tackles several academic objections, arguing against even making a distinction between 2P and 3P.

Let's look at those.

Ready addresses three major academic challenges.

The first is the no real difference objection from Barizzi and Moore.

Their view suggests that all social cognition, including face -to -face interaction, is ultimately just a form of detached observation and inference.

So they assume there's always a gap between minds that has to be bridged intellectually.

Yes.

Meaning the other is always fundamentally a third person you analyze.

The interaction just provides richer data, but the processing mechanism is the same as if you were watching two other people talk.

And Ready's counter to that.

Her powerful counter is that this objection fails entirely to account for the emotional engagement and mutual experience.

Being addressed as you generates a qualitatively different, more fundamental experience, one of immediate shared affect and presence, than merely watching two others interact.

It's an experience that comes before intellectual analysis.

Okay, what about the second critique, which leverages the complexity we were just talking about?

That's the graded difference objection from De Bruyn and his colleagues.

They argue that since the distinction between active engagement and passive observation is gradual a continuum, as we establish, it undermines the claim that 2P interactions have this unique developmental primacy.

If it's just a difference in degree, why treat it as fundamentally different?

It's a logical point.

If you can't draw a hard line, maybe the distinction is moot.

Ready's counter is pragmatic.

The claims don't need to be categorical to be functionally distinct.

The fact that the distinction is graded doesn't negate the fundamentally different crucial developmental effects that result from being at the high involvement end of the spectrum versus the low involvement end.

High emotional involvement changes the developmental path.

And finally, the concern that this distinction requires creating two separate cognitive theories, which just sounds inefficient.

That's the can't have two separate theories objection from Shonair.

They argued that real world contexts shift too rapidly for us to need separate mechanisms or theories of mind for 2P and 3P interactions.

The brain likes to be efficient.

Exactly.

Also, if you can infer someone's mental state while observing them, which is 3P, why would you need a different mechanism when you're talking to them, which is 2P?

It seems like a drive for theoretical parsimony, trying to simplify the brain's toolbox.

It is, but Ready's reply hits the core of her thesis.

The argument is not that 2P relations build parallel, separate theories of mind.

Instead, they yield different foundational experiences of others.

For the pre -theoretical infant, the developing mind,

the experience of emotional mutuality and direct connection in 2P relations is developmentally critical because it creates the subjective and objective world.

It's an experience that is fundamentally different from observation.

The power, then, is the shift in subjective experience, a suspension of separateness.

Yes.

Being addressed as a you and addressing the other as a you arouses and modulates emotional responses differently than just watching.

It enters your consciousness fundamentally.

It makes the other a person to you.

This is why it matters on the ground, regardless of the theoretical debates.

So how does that connect to something like learning?

Well, Ready sells a review by Schneidman and Woodward, who noted that while child -directed acts might not speed up, say, word learning content, they are far more salient.

They command attention.

This emotional salience, driven by the act of direct address, is what sets the stage for developmental transformation.

This brings us to the evidence that the power of you is a real neurological and developmental phenomenon, starting with studies on adults.

What data do we have showing that being addressed activates unique processing pathways?

We have some really compelling neural evidence.

It shows that being directly addressed or seen as a you activates distinct neural processes and enhances sensory awareness.

For example, neural imaging studies show that simply hearing your own name or seeing direct gaze activates brain areas associated with mentalizing,

thinking about other minds.

And this activation occurs independent of general arousal or the content being processed.

It suggests there are dedicated pathways for recognizing direct address.

And there's specific evidence relating to the second person pronoun itself, the word you.

Absolutely.

ERP studies, which measure brainwaves in milliseconds to see when information is processed, show that the pronoun you is processed preferentially and significantly earlier than first or third person pronouns.

It's a profound finding.

It demonstrates that a direct address commands an internal automatic attentional priority.

The brain pays attention to you before it even processes the content of the sentence.

And the connection between direct gaze and enhanced self -awareness further reinforces this.

Yes.

If you look at research using still photographs,

even the simple act of a photograph featuring eyes looking directly at the participant compared to an inverted gaze enhances self -awareness.

How so?

Participants in these studies were more accurate in their self -reports of arousal to emotionally stimulating images if they were preceded by a direct gaze photograph.

Now, if this powerful involuntary attention enhancement holds true in infancy, then early 2P engagements are fundamentally enhancing the infant's awareness of self and other.

So let's translate this foundational power of you to the infant world.

What are the three essential requirements Ready proposes for establishing these successful 2P relationships in infancy?

Ready outlines the developmental triad.

First, the infant needs to be open to engagement.

They have to show interest and possess the basic ability to act towards others.

Second, they require others who recognize them as persons, who address them as you, and respond genuinely.

And third, the infant must be able to recognize the recognition of the other and respond to it, pursuing these mutually responsive contingent engagements.

Let's start with the evidence for the first requirement, infant openness.

The evidence for innate social predispositions is just overwhelming.

From birth, infants show a specific predisposition for looking at human faces and face -like stimuli.

This isn't random attention.

It allows for greater tracking accuracy of faces over non -faces.

And they prefer direct gaze.

They prefer direct gaze within days of birth, which enhances their directional visual movements.

They are born ready to engage, not just to observe.

And we have modern neurological markers for the selective attention directed at the self.

Yes.

Using techniques like EEG and NIRs, studies show that direct gaze results in different gamma band oscillation in 4 -month -old infants, suggesting distinct neural processing.

By 5 months, being called by their own name correlates with direct gaze, indicating a powerful selective attention bias toward communication directed at them.

So this builds over time.

It does.

By 6 months, we know that mutual gaze enhances visual tracking and contributes to later word learning.

We can't talk about early openness without mentioning the famous neonatal imitation studies.

Right.

Melsoff and Moore's work, despite ongoing debates about the exact mechanism,

powerfully demonstrates the infant's initial openness.

Within minutes of birth, neonates look with intense interest at directed facial and manual actions and attempt to respond themselves.

So they're trying to have a conversation from the very start.

It implies a sustained, effortful, and fundamentally open disposition.

What Brazelton described as being free of distrust and distress, they are ready to be conversational beings.

Okay.

Moving to the second requirement.

Others who recognize them as persons.

How do we measure that from the caregiver side, beyond just providing food and warmth?

Recognition of personhood is measured by three critical caregiver behaviors.

First, the use of direct dialogic addresses,

treating the infant as a conversational partner, using turn -taking structure, even before the infant can speak.

And second.

Effective attunement.

This means matching, complimenting, or subtly tuning into the infant's mood, their rhythm, their vitality effects.

And third, sensitivity to changing initiatives, listening and responding to the infant's expressions, even if they're surprising or unexpected, treating them as intentional communication.

That requires tremendous emotional flexibility from the adult.

It does, and Reddy acknowledges this varies culturally and individually.

Parents who exhibit high effective attunement, good mirroring, help establish different communicative expectancies in their infants, compared to those who are less attuned.

So it makes a real difference.

A huge difference.

We know, for example, that maternal depressiveness alters communication patterns, leading to less responsive, less synchronous interactions.

Having one's communicative initiatives and emotionality responded to,

confirms the infant as an expressive emotional being whose expressions matter.

This leads perfectly into the third and most crucial requirement.

The ability to recognize others recognition, the detection of mutuality or contingency.

How early does the infant prove they recognize the relationship dynamic?

Contingency detection is advanced remarkably early.

Infants can detect contingencies between their own actions and the effects of those actions by four weeks.

By two and three months, they are sophisticated enough to differentiate a live responsive partner from a replayed video of the same partner.

How can they tell the difference?

They're demonstrating an ability to perceive the timing and the relevance of the other's response to their own actions.

But the truly devastating evidence, the proof that this relationship matters, comes from when that contingency stops.

Exactly.

The most critical evidence is the infant's profound distress at the lack of response,

which is a recognition of the absence of recognition.

This is shown vividly in the classic still face studies pioneered by Conantronic.

Right.

In these experiments, the caregiver is instructed to suddenly adopt a neutral unresponsive still face.

The infant's reaction is not just confusion.

No, it's a profound emotional protest.

Can you describe that sequence of events in the still face procedure?

It's highly detailed.

It is.

Initially, the infant will intensify their bids for attention.

They'll smile bigger, coo louder, maybe point.

They're trying to re -engage the adult using their familiar social strategies.

And when that fails?

When that fails, they quickly enter a state of protest.

They frown, they vocalize distress, they might shift their body away.

If the still face period continues, the infant eventually enters a state of withdrawal and helplessness.

They look away, their posture collapses, and they exhibit signs of internal disorganization.

The fact that they go through that whole sequence, trying to repair the relationship, protesting the failure, and then withdrawing, proves they know the norms of mutuality have been violated.

It is the strongest proof that the infant knows when they are being treated as something other than a conversational being.

It confirms they possess the ability to recognize both the presence and the absence of recognition.

Okay, so circling back to the 4E framework,

why is it so difficult for older cognitive theories to accept this early recognition of mind and mutuality?

It stems from the meta -theoretical assumption that the mind is inherently opaque and must be inferentially constructed.

Meaning you have to guess what's going on inside someone else's head.

Right.

If the task of the infant is always seen as inferring hidden mental states, beliefs, desires, then the claim of immediate early recognition becomes difficult to sustain.

The only way to know the other is to observe external behavior and calculate what must be happening internally.

It's like trying to understand a computer software just by watching the screen.

That's a great way to put it.

You're forever locked out of the operating system.

But recent evidence strongly supports the embodiment and perceptual availability of many mental states, a key tenet of an action.

So the mind isn't opaque?

No.

Mind is the way the body expresses its attention, intention, and emotion during interaction.

While conceptualizing the abstract notion of belief is a late achievement, perceiving attention, intention, and emotion is simple within a mutual engagement.

You don't need a theory to see attention.

You perceive it directly in the body's posture, gaze, and expression.

So these early 2P engagements set the stage.

Let's now explore how the infant develops awareness of others' attention.

Reddy proposes a critical developmental sequence that radically alters the timeline of social cognition.

Yes.

The sequence is the core insight for attention.

The trajectory starts with attention directed to the self, moves to attention directed to the infant's actions, and only then expands to attention directed to distal objects in space.

Approximal to distal path, driven by emotional response.

Exactly.

And we see that emotional response immediately.

Gaze to the self is interesting, but it can also be distressing if the infant can't disengage.

But by the second month, gaze onset evokes positive affect, smiling.

Let's start with the first evidence point for attention directed to the self.

Koi smiles, or positive shyness, at three and four months.

Koi smiles are incredibly rich behaviors.

They appear prominently starting in the third month, and especially with strangers by four months.

They consist of an intense smile coupled with a rapid gaze aversion or head turning.

Like you're hiding.

Yes.

Sometimes with hands or arms raised to shield the face, followed quickly by a return of the gaze.

This pattern is recognized as behaviorally similar to adult embarrassment or positive shyness.

This finding challenges decades of developmental theory.

Why is the four -month mark so critical?

Because of the timeline for self -conscious emotions.

Traditional theories of mind claim that self -conscious emotions like embarrassment or shyness require a developed concept of self, which is typically measured via mirror self -recognition.

And that doesn't happen until much later.

Right.

That cognitive achievement usually doesn't develop until the second year, around 18 months.

The presence of Koi smiles at four months suggests a fundamental shift in our understanding.

So the theoretical implication is that self -consciousness doesn't follow the cognitive concept of self.

It might actually create it.

Precisely.

Self -consciousness may begin as an effective response to attention to self.

The infant is emotionally moved by being the object of another's gaze.

This effective relational response helps to constitute the concept of self, long before the infant passes the mirror test.

And there's another piece of evidence here related to autism.

There is.

Reddy points out that these Koi smiles are often absent in children with autism, even if those children pass the mirror self -recognition task at an age -appropriate time.

This highlights that the relational effective component is distinct from, and primary to, the later cognitive self -concept.

That's a huge shift from the older models.

It confirms that continuity argument you mentioned earlier.

It does.

These emotional responses form a continuous trajectory of development over the first year, establishing the foundations of social attention long before the classic nine -month revolution, where triadic joint attention is traditionally assumed to begin.

Okay, so how does attention shift from focusing entirely on the self to focusing on the self's actions?

This is captured beautifully in the phenomenon of clowning and showing off, starting around seven or eight months.

The infant accidentally performs an action, a facial expression, a sound, a quirky movement, that leads to a strong, positive, and typically laughing response from the adult.

The infant then intentionally repeats that action to realistic the response, establishing a routine that can last for weeks.

This action, by its nature, is a perfect demonstration of emotional mutuality.

It is fundamentally mutual.

It relies on three things.

The adult, finding the action amusing.

The infant, taking pleasure in the adult's amusement.

And the infant's clear awareness of the causal link between their action and the adult's emotional response.

The infant isn't just looking for attention, they're managing the dynamic of a shared joke.

Exactly.

And the absence of this key engagement has been noted in deficits observed in preschool children with autism, highlighting its developmental role.

What new understanding of attention does this give the infant?

It reveals an expanding grasp of attentionality.

The infant understands that others attend not only to her person, but to her actions and expressions.

This constitutes a joint engagement where the infant's action becomes the shared object of attention, preceding the ability to understand attention directed toward objects located distally in space.

So the idea that infants discover attention at nine months, when they start pointing to faraway objects, is deeply flawed.

It's flawed because the foundations were established through emotional engagement directed first at the self and then at the self's actions months prior.

The chronological and potentially causal sequence,

emotionally moved by attention to self, then to their actions, and only then grasping attention to distal objects in space, makes the traditional theory untenable.

We have to recognize the emotional roots of attention in the 2p diet.

Just as attention follows the sequence of self to action to object, the chapter argues that intentional awareness follows the identical developmental path.

We start with intentions directed at the infant.

It's entirely logical.

How could an infant's awareness of intentions develop independently of the intentions directed specifically at them?

Ignoring these appropriate early anticipatory responses directed at the self is to miss the crucial embodied foundation for later action understanding.

And we have very old observations regarding the importance of this, even from Kanner back in 1943 concerning children with autism.

Yes.

Kanner noted that children with autism often showed a striking lack of anticipatory adjustments to being picked up or fed,

a lack of motor preparedness, or anticipation of actions directed toward the self.

This highlights that responsiveness to intentional actions directed at the self is a core, expected part of typical development.

Let's look at the first example of this intention awareness.

Anticipatory adjustments to being picked up at two and three months.

When a familiar adult approaches to pick up a typically developing infant, even before contact is made, the infant shows specific anticipatory motor adjustments.

Like what?

These include subtle movements like raising or tucking their legs, opening or raising their arms to receive the embrace, or raising their chin.

These adjustments become smoother by three months.

Crucially, they cease immediately if the adult delays or aborts the pickup attempt, showing they are contingent on the ongoing intentional action.

Why is this evidence so powerful?

Why can't we just explain this as a learned motor routine?

Because the two -month -old infant is not yet capable of executing a coordinated intentional reaching and grasping action of their own.

Therefore, we cannot explain these complex adjustments based on the infant's direct experience of their own actions.

This defies simple motor theories.

Instead, the infant is responding appropriately to the intentional structure of the other person's impending action.

It's an embodied unthinking mutuality.

That's right.

The action is often emotionally charged and involves an unthinking mutuality, where both people are making ongoing adjustments as the action unfolds, creating a dynamic shared experience.

These early responses to intentions directed at the self must form the fundamental basis of later more complex intentional awareness.

The body itself is responding.

The body itself adjusts and responds to the social intentional action demonstrating the inaction principle at work.

Moving along the sequence, how does the infant begin grasping intentions directed to actions rather than just actions directed at themselves?

This is seen in compliant responses to other's directives, starting in the second half of the first year.

Adults naturally, though with cultural variation,

increase the frequency of commands and requests from the middle of the first year, embedding them in frequently repeated pragmatic formats.

Give it to mommy, say bye -bye, come here.

Exactly.

And infants, starting around seven or eight months, begin showing compliance.

What's driving this compliance?

Is it just positive reinforcement?

It's more profound than simple conditioning.

The core driver is the infant's deep emotional interest in joining with the adult's intentions, because the directive comes from the adult to the infant.

It is child -directed.

The ostensic cue.

Right.

The fact that the directive is addressed directly to them signals shared relevance and commands their attention.

The instant directedness of the command is likely recognized before the verbal content is fully understood.

This challenges the later timing of intention understanding proposed by some theorists.

Yes.

It challenges the claim, often made by figures like Tomasello, that complex, communicative intentions are understood only in the second year, coinciding with the rise of language.

This gradual, continuous, and expanding process of understanding intentions, with partial but increasing fulfillment of intent in these repetitive 2p pragmatic formats,

proves that the infant is on the path to intention awareness much earlier than previously assumed.

So once again, intentional awareness follows the same path as attention.

Precisely.

The developmental scheme is mirrored.

Grasping intentions directed to self, like being picked up, moving to intentions directed to actions, like following an directive, and only later, intentions directed to objects in space, like understanding the complex intentional reasons behind why someone is stacking blocks.

And the adult's role is critical.

The role of adult sensitivity is crucial.

Both parties adjust and change as the interaction unfold, creating paths unique to that relational history.

This entire deep dive pivots on the recognition that while everyone agrees interaction is necessary, how we define that necessity is the crucial sticking point.

Reddy's work serves as a powerful critique of contemporary theories that fail to fully integrate emotional mutuality.

Let's tackle her specific critiques, starting with the ostensive cue theories.

We begin with the critique of ostensive cue theories, notably the work of Sibra and Jurgely.

Their research on ostensive cues like direct address, name calling, or infant -directed speech is hugely important.

It demonstrates that these signals activate built -in attentional biases in the infant, telling them that generalizable, relevant knowledge about the world is coming.

But Reddy argues this is still an internalist detached view.

Why?

Because Sibra and Jurgely's focus is ultimately on using the cue to activate learning about the world.

Treating the other person as a channel.

As an effective communication channel or signal.

This is a cue -based explanation, focused on information transfer.

Reddy's is an emotional involvement -based explanation.

The evidence we've seen, the self -to -action to object developmental sequence, shows that two key engagement first establishes the other person as a subject, not just a signal for external knowledge.

So it's about other awareness first.

Yes, it demonstrates the early emergence of other awareness, not just using others as conduits for understanding the environment.

This is a subtle but profound difference.

The child isn't just analyzing the teacher's pointing hand to find the object.

They are emotionally engaging with the fact that the teacher is reaching out to them to share something.

Exactly.

The emotional weight changes the quality of the knowledge acquired.

Next, let's look at the highly influential theories of Michael Tomasello and his focus on joint engagement.

What is Reddy's critique here?

Reddy offers a critique of joint engagement theories, which are central to modern social cognition research.

Tomasello's work rightly focuses on the power of joint attention.

He argues that understanding what someone else knows about an object initially requires actual joint engagement with that person and the object.

But the evidence often focuses exclusively on triadic interactions involving self, other, and an object, which only become robust after the supposed nine -month socio -cognitive revolution.

So the critique is that Tomasello's theory starts too late and misses the deep dyadic foundation.

Precisely.

Recognizing the power of earlier 2p engagements, the coy smiles, the anticipatory motor adjustments, demands that we go a step earlier.

We must understand the crucial role of the mutuality of being seen as a you by another person, and not only seeing the other as a you in relation to an object.

It's the foundation.

The foundational ability to recognize mutual recognition is what drives the 2p roots of social cognition.

This takes us back to the heart of the 4D framework.

When we talk about engagement being constitutive, what does that mean for the nature of cognition itself?

It means that we have to reject explanations that cast the infant as a detached epistemic observer or an analyst whose sole job is to infer hidden mental states.

Engagement is not merely grist for a cognitive mill to grind.

It's not just raw material to be processed internally.

And that's the critical point for 4E cognition.

Engagement creates the very relational and emotional material that we seek to understand.

Just as the structure of a financial market extends financial cognition, the structure of the 2p relationship changes the form and potential of the infant's cognitive capacities.

The essential vagueness of the term engagement, which we discussed at the start, actually becomes a virtue here.

It does.

Ready notes that this essential vagueness captures the multifaceted nature and the inherent indeterminacy of social life.

Social outcomes aren't predetermined.

At the heart of development is the ability to connect with others' emotions and recognize their recognition of us.

It involves a dynamic process.

A dynamic process of identifying with, and an essential openness to dialogue where the outcome is truly unscripted.

We have to reclaim the person in relation.

So we've seen that social cognition is not something that emerges fully formed inside the individual.

It is forged moment by moment in the emotional, mutual experience of being addressed as you, starting from the first days of life.

That mutual recognition is the beginning of the mind.

That's the entire takeaway.

And if the ability to be open to others' emotions and recognize their recognition of us is so foundational, well, think about your own daily life.

The provocative thought we want to leave you with is this.

How often in your professional and personal life are you truly open and present to others?

Allowing for genuine 2P mutuality.

And how often?

And how often are you approaching others with a closed agenda or filtering them through a detached category, treating them as an it or predictable source of information?

What kind of social realities does your chosen engagement style create for those around you?

That is certainly food for thought.

Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the roots of social cognition and the transformative power of emotional engagement, all driven by the work of Zodi Devi Reddy.

Until next time.

From the entire last minute lecture team, thank you for listening.