Le développement de l’intelligence sociale. Les précurseurs de l’intelligence sociale

Abstract

Precursors of social intelligence. To-date, theoretical frameworks such as those which postulate that a Theory of Mind works as a modular component of human social behaviour generate increasing focus on early social perception and more specifically on early premices of attribution of intentionality. Experimental paradigms which simulate non-contingent communication have recently shown the early expectancies for social contingency of familiar partners. Expecting contingency may be considered as a first milestone in the development of a capacity to attribute intentionality to others. We will show that two main stages may be distinguished in the understanding of persons as intentional. As early as 2 months of age, infants detect mother’s non-contingent behaviour and show concern about it, which demonstrates that they have already formed expectancies for contingent communication and that they understand contingency as an intentional parameter of communication. After 6 months, infants generalise their expectancies for social contingency to strangers : thus, human beings start being considered – even if implicitely -as ontologically intentional. Synchronic imitation and imitation recognition are other possible precursors of the understanding of intentionality, in as much as they allow nonverbal infants to alternate between expression of intentionality (“ I intend you to do like me”) and the attribution of intentionality (“ I understand that you intend me to be like you”). Finally, joint attention and “ eye reading” represent another class of prerequisites likely to provide a pathway between seeing and knowing, and between observable indices of mental states and inferences of mental states. The late access to an explicit understanding of intentionality pleads in favour of the importance of mindreading in the building of an ultimate explanation of the most complex aspects of human behaviour.