Abstract
The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, that is, on the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in sensations depend on changes in movements. This hypothesis can be extended into the social domain: perception of other minds is constituted by mastery of self-other contingencies, that is, by the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in others’ movements depend on changes in one’s movements. We investigated this proposal using the perceptual crossing paradigm, in which pairs of players are required to locate each other in an invisible one-dimensional virtual space by using a minimal haptic interface. We recorded and analyzed the real-time embodied social interaction of 10 pairs of adult participants. The results reveal a process of implicit perceptual learning: on average, clarity of perceiving the other’s presence increased over trials and then stabilized. However, a clearer perception of the other was not associated with correctness of recognition as such, but with both players correctly recognizing each other. Furthermore, the moments of correct mutual recognition tended to happen within seconds. The fact that changes in social experience can only be explained by the successful performance at the level of the dyad, and that this veridical mutual perception tends toward synchronization, lead us to hypothesize that integration of neural activity across both players played a role.
Highlights
Imagine you are going on a romantic date at the cinema
It builds on the key role of interpersonal contingencies that emerge from the coupling of human bodies Dumas et al, 2014). This aim and basis stand in sharp contrast to what has been characterized as the ‘‘methodological individualism’’ of traditional cognitive science (Boden, 2006), which in its more extreme formulations has even taken an isolated brain as the in-principle sufficient basis of all social experience (Searle, 1990)
The notion of genuine intersubjectivity is consistent with a small but growing number of psychological and neuroscientific experiments as well as agentbased simulation studies, which point to the constitutive role of social interaction for social cognition (e.g., De Jaegher et al, 2010; Schilbach et al, 2013; Candadai et al, 2019)
Summary
Imagine you are going on a romantic date at the cinema. Inside the movie theater you sit down next to your date, but it is so dark that you cannot see each other, leaving you uncertain about their presence. In line with sensorimotor theory (O’Regan et al, 2005), it has been proposed that social perception consists in the skillful co-regulation of social interaction (De Jaegher et al, 2010; Froese and Di Paolo, 2011), which involves both participants knowing how sensations caused by the other’s bodily movements would change concerning their possible bodily movements, and the mastery of these ‘‘self-other contingencies’’ thereby provides access to the other person (McGann and De Jaegher, 2009). Hypothesis 4 and 5 are aimed at supporting the concept of strong genuine intersubjectivity, i.e., that there is a single joint action giving rise to one shared moment of veridical mutual recognition that ‘‘we’’ are experiencing, based on the assumption that this fusion of individual streams of experiencing will require integration of neural activity across both participants in the time scale of seconds
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