Abstract
It is not yet well understood how we become conscious of the presence of other people as being other subjects in their own right. Developmental and phenomenological approaches are converging on a relational hypothesis: my perception of a “you” is primarily constituted by another subject’s attention being directed toward “me.” This is particularly the case when my body is being physically explored in an intentional manner. We set out to characterize the sensorimotor signature of the transition to being aware of the other by re-analyzing time series of embodied interactions between pairs of adults (recorded during a “perceptual crossing” experiment). Measures of turn-taking and movement synchrony were used to quantify social coordination, and transfer entropy was used to quantify direction of influence. We found that the transition leading to one’s conscious perception of the other’s presence was indeed characterized by a significant increase in one’s passive reception of the other’s tactile stimulations. Unexpectedly, one’s clear experience of such passive touch was consistently followed by a switch to active touching of the other, while the other correspondingly became more passive, which suggests that this intersubjective experience was reciprocally co-regulated by both participants.
Highlights
There is growing acceptance that humans develop social awareness much earlier than had long been assumed, including suggestions of a capacity for false belief understanding even in the case of preverbal infants (Baillargeon et al, 2010)
Reciprocity implies that the participants of the interaction share their social awareness, such that one’s awareness of the other is at the same time matched by the other’s awareness of one’s self, i.e., there is a common sense that we are aware of each other. Given these considerations we propose a relational hypothesis of social perception: one’s awareness of another mind emerges in a context of co-regulated interaction and is preceded by a passive period of being the autonomous other’s object of attention
Developmental and phenomenological approaches to embodied cognition have converged on the relational hypothesis that being the other’s object of attention, as exemplified by the phenomenon of passive touch, is the most basic form of awareness of other minds
Summary
There is growing acceptance that humans develop social awareness much earlier than had long been assumed, including suggestions of a capacity for false belief understanding even in the case of preverbal infants (Baillargeon et al, 2010). Before infants can begin to theorize about another person’s minds from a third-person perspective, Transition to Conscious Social Perception or to imagine what it is like to be them from a first-person perspective, they arguably can already experience another’s presence from the second-person perspective, that is, in the context of mutual engagement (Reddy and Morris, 2004) On this expanded view, the classic mechanisms of social cognition build on and are preceded by embodied forms of social understanding, such as those realized by neural resonance in motor areas (Gallese, 2007) and by the dynamics and experience of social coordination itself (Froese and Gallagher, 2012). Development is characterized by a diversification of social capacities, and we learn to deploy a combination of both embodied and cognitive skills in a context-sensitive manner (Fiebich et al, 2016)
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