Absent Entities Research Articles

Imaginary friend play in light of enactivism

Review of psychological data of how children engage in imaginary friend play (IFP) shows that it involves a lot of explicit embodied action and interaction with surrounding people and environments. However, IFP is still seen as principally an individualistic activity, where, in addition to those interactions, the actor has to mentally represent an absent entity in imagination in order to engage in IFP. This capacity is deemed necessary because the imaginary companion is absent or not real. This article proposes a proof of concept argument that enactivism can account for complex imaginary phenomena as imaginary friend play. Enactivism proposes thinking of IFP in a fundamentally different way, as an explicitly embodied and performative act, where one does not need to mentally represent absent entities. It reconceptualizes imagination involved in IFP as strongly embodied, and proposes that play environments have present affordances for social and normative interactions that are reenacted in IFP—there is no “absence” that needs to be mentally represented first. This article argues that IFP is performed and enacted in the world without having to be represented in the mind first, which best captures the social and interactive nature of this form of play.

Employee-Athletes: Exploring the Elite Spanish Athletes' Perceptions of Combining Sport and Work.

Researchers have studied the athletes' dual careers with the aim of helping them to combine the sport and the academic–vocational sphere. Most of this research has addressed the study–sport combination, but there is a lack of studies on the work–sport combination. The main objective of this research was to explore the subjective perceptions of Spanish elite athletes when attempting to combine their careers as professional athletes with a second profession or trade. Further, this study aims to identify the access to facilitating resources and the perception of obstacles and barriers to the development of a dual career. A qualitative approach was chosen to address these research questions. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was carried out on a sample of 18 elite athletes, and the data were collected using semi-structured interviews based on a set of superordinate and subordinate categories. The results showed that the athletes interviewed possessed valuable resources such as the transference of sports values to the work sphere. However, important barriers were highlighted such as the perception of sport institutions as absent entities in the work–sport combination. Thus, the study of this type of dual career seems to be one of the challenges facing the interested scientific community for the coming years.

Establishing joint imagined spaces in game explanations

This study builds on the observation that establishing joint imagined space is an integral part of a wide range of discursive practices, e.g. telling a story or discussing architectonic problems. Conceptualizing imagination as a co-operative and interactively organized activity that involves the participants’ embodied co-orientation to absent entities, we examine in detail how an imagined space of a game board is created in the activity of explaining a game. The analysis is based on video recordings of children with varying capabilities as they engage in game explanations with an adult. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis and Bühler’s theory of deixis, we examine how two children come to terms with the epistemic and perceptual tasks involved in establishing joint imagined spaces. Findings demonstrate that both children demonstrate considerable skills in dealing with the perceptual task, i.e. mobilizing and monitoring the addressee’s visual co-orientation. They differ, however, in how they attend to the epistemic task, i.e. take into account differential states of knowledge and reorganize the indexical ground.

Variability in toddlers’ ability to verbally update their mental representations of absent objects

Early in development children rely on other people’s verbal testimony to acquire information about things that are not available to their immediate perception. There is evidence that children as young as 22 months can use language to learn about an object that undergoes a property change (e.g., “Lucy got wet”) out of their sight. If the verbal input conveys a change in the location of an absent object (e.g., “The puppy is moved from the bag to the box”), 30-month-olds successfully use this information and find the object in its new location, whereas the majority of 23-month-olds perseverate to the object’s initial location. These findings suggest that young children’s ability to use verbal testimony to update their mental representations of absent entities shows variability within and across tasks. The goal of the current research was to replicate the pattern of performance observed in previous cross-sectional studies within the same group of children. A total of 59 2-year-olds (Mage = 26.9 months, range = 21.4–34.5) were administered two versions of verbal updating tasks: property and location change. As a group, children showed more variable performance when they learned about a change in an object’s location (58% success) than when they learned about a change in its property (75% success). Moreover, comparison of individual children’s performance across the two tasks revealed that at this age children found the location change harder to update than the property change. We discuss possible explanations for children’s differential performance on verbal updating tasks involving property and location change.

AC-Counting for Carbon Emissions: Simulating Absence through Experimental Sites of Material Politics

Purpose – Most carbon accounting consists of valuing what has not happened; such absent entities and their materialization through simulated calculations can enact political participation, however. By using Marres’s (2012) notion of an “experimental site of material politics”, this paper aims to investigate the mediating role of simulated calculations of prevented carbon emissions in deploying environmental politics’ discourses. Here, such calculations become seductive forces for public engagement and help performing engaging spaces for supporting the diffusion of innovation technologies. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical analysis concerns a simulated calculative device developed by Autos-trade, a motorway management firm, in its work to translate questions about capacity utilization, through the fluidity of traffic, into reductions in CO2 emissions. These reductions took the form of a simulation that required an apparatus to be performed and involved alternative scenarios focusing on hypothetical rather than absolute CO2 reductions. Findings – The Autos-trade case highlights how simulated calculations of absent CO2 emissions participate in the construction of a collective experience by interfacing concerns that encompass the rationalities of the domestication of technological innovation and make motorway mobility a responsible and ac-countable action. Practical implications – The paper shows how simulated and experimental calculations on absent carbon emissions act as mediators between public engagement and the deployment of environmental politics discourses. They both extend political participation and propagate and reproduce the trials, which, from time to time, challenge the enticement and forcefulness of a technological innovation. Social implications – The paper suggests a different dimension of politics that relies on material politics. Rather than considering human centric discursive acts, it looks at the power of technical objects and their augmented calculative devices in engaging the public in environmental politics. This is where absence, which is made visible and materialized through simulations, deploys affordances that re-frame power relationships. Originality/value – This is the first case study that addresses the issue of the role of accounting calculation on absent carbon emissions in enabling innovation and engaging publics in environmental politics.

Ac-counting for carbon emissions: simulating absence through experimental sites of material politics

PurposeMost carbon accounting consists of valuing what has not happened; such absent entities and their materialisation through simulated calculations can enact political participation, however. By using Marres’s (2012) notion of an “experimental site of material politics”, this paper aims to investigate the mediating role of simulated calculations of prevented carbon emissions in deploying environmental politics’ discourses. Here, such calculations become seductive forces for public engagement and help performing engaging spaces for supporting the diffusion of innovation technologies.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical analysis concerns a simulated calculative device developed by Autostrade, a motorway management firm, in its work to translate questions about capacity utilisation, through the fluidity of traffic, into reductions in CO2 emissions. These reductions took the form of a simulation that required an apparatus to be performed and involved alternative scenarios focussing on hypothetical rather than absolute CO2 reductions.FindingsThe Autostrade case highlights how simulated calculations of absent CO2 emissions participate in the construction of a collective experience by interfacing concerns that encompass the rationalities of the domestication of technological innovation and make motorway mobility a responsible and ac-countable action.Practical implicationsThe paper shows how simulated and experimental calculations on absent carbon emissions act as mediators between public engagement and the deployment of environmental politics discourses. They both extend political participation and propagate and reproduce the trials, which, from time to time, challenge the enticement and forcefulness of a technological innovation.Social implicationsThe paper suggests a different dimension of politics that relies on material politics. Rather than considering human centric discursive acts, it looks at the power of technical objects and their augmented calculative devices in engaging the public in environmental politics. This is where absence, which is made visible and materialised through simulations, deploys affordances that reframe power relationships.Originality/valueThis is the first case study that addresses the issue of the role of accounting calculation on absent carbon emissions in enabling innovation and engaging publics in environmental politics.

The social-cognitive basis of infants’ reference to absent entities

Recent evidence suggests that infants as young as 12 month of age use pointing to communicate about absent entities. The tacit assumption underlying these studies is that infants do so based on tracking what their interlocutor experienced in a previous shared interaction. The present study addresses this assumption empirically. In three experiments, 12-month-old infants could request additional desired objects by pointing to the location in which these objects were previously located. We systematically varied whether the adult from whom infants were requesting had previously experienced the former content of the location with the infant. Infants systematically adjusted their pointing to the now empty location to what they experienced with the adult previously. These results suggest that infants’ ability to communicate about absent referents is based on an incipient form of common ground.

Fourteen-month-olds' decontextualized understanding of words for absent objects.

The majority of research examining infants' decontextualized word knowledge comes from studies in which words and pictures are presented simultaneously. However, comprehending utterances about unseen objects is a hallmark of language. Do infants demonstrate decontextualized absent object knowledge early in the second year of life? Further, to what extent do words evoke strictly prototypical representations of absent objects? To investigate these questions we analyzed 14-month-olds' comprehension of labels for absent entities without contextual support. In a novel, auditory-visual priming paradigm, infants heard passages containing two target words and then saw four animations - two that matched the meaning of the target words and two they had not heard in the passages. We found that by age 1;2, spoken words evoke prototypical representations of absent entities. Additionally, our findings demonstrate a promising new method for exploring absent object comprehension in infants.

Supplemental Material for The Role of Past Interactions in Great Apes’ Communication About Absent Entities

Supplemental Material for The Role of Past Interactions in Great Apes’ Communication About Absent Entities

The role of past interactions in great apes' communication about absent entities.

Recent evidence suggests that great apes can use the former location of an entity to communicate about it. In this study we built on these findings to investigate the social-cognitive foundations of great apes' communicative abilities. We tested whether great apes (n = 35) would adjust their requests for absent entities to previous interactions they had with their interlocutor. We manipulated the apes' experience with respect to the interlocutor's knowledge about the previous content of the now-empty location as well as their experience with the interlocutor's competence to provide additional food items. We found that apes adjusted their requests to both of these aspects but failed to integrate them with one another. These results demonstrate a surprising amount of flexibility in great apes' communicative abilities while at the same time suggesting some important limitations in their social communicative skills. (PsycINFO Database Record

Communication about absent entities in great apes and human infants

There is currently debate about the extent to which non-linguistic beings such as human infants and great apes are capable of absent reference. In a series of experiments we investigated the flexibility and specificity of great apes’ (N=36) and 12month-old infants’ (N=40) requests for absent entities. Subjects had the choice between requesting visible objects directly and using the former location of a depleted option to request more of these now-absent entities. Importantly, we systematically varied the quality of the present and absent options. We found that great apes as well as human infants flexibly adjusted their requests for absent entities to these contextual variations and only requested absent entities when the visible option was of lower quality than the absent option. These results suggest that the most basic cognitive capacities for absent reference do not depend on language and are shared by humans and their closest living relatives.

Pointing to Nothing? Empty Places Prime Infants' Attention to Absent Objects

People routinely point to empty space when referring to absent entities. These points to “nothing” are meaningful because they direct attention to places that stand in for specific entities. Typically, the meaning of places in terms of absent referents is established through preceding discourse and accompanying language. However, it is unknown whether nonlinguistic actions can establish locations as meaningful places, and whether infants have the capacity to represent a place as standing in for an object. In a novel eye-tracking paradigm, 18-month-olds watched objects being placed in specific locations. Then, the objects disappeared and a point directed infants' attention to an emptied place. The point to the empty place primed infants in a subsequent scene (in which the objects appeared at novel locations) to look more to the object belonging to the indicated place than to a distracter referent. The place–object expectations were strong enough to interfere when reversing the place–object associations. Findings show that infants comprehend nonlinguistic reference to absent entities, which reveals an ontogenetic early, nonverbal understanding of places as representations of absent objects.

Pointing to an ‘empty’ space: Deixis am Phantasma in face-to-face interaction

This paper is concerned with a key phenomenon in pragmatics: deixis. It starts from a multimodal conceptualization of deixis and argues that based on our interactive practices in demonstratio ad oculos (pointing to visible entities), we likewise accomplish a shared, albeit imagined orientation in cases of Deixis am Phantasma (deixis in the imagination) (Bühler, 1965 [1934]). Based on video recordings from different settings, the paper analyzes in detail the way in which verbal deictics and visible bodily resources work together in shifting the indexical ground or origo away from the participants’ actual space of perception to an imagined space within which the speaker can orient the interlocutors’ attention to physically absent entities. The empirical investigation shows that speakers freely choose between selective deictic displacements along one or two dimensions (place, time, person) and in toto transfers of the origo from the immediate space of perception to an imagined space. The paper proposes that deictic displacements have to be conceived of as operating on a continuum ranging from very subtle origo-shiftings to entire displacements on all dimensions. In face-to-face interaction, they are instantiated both by verbal and kinesic resources and undergo continual metamorphoses in the online construction of talk-in-interaction.

Apes communicate about absent and displaced objects: methodology matters.

Displaced reference is the ability to refer to an item that has been moved (displaced) in space and/or time, and has been called one of the true hallmarks of referential communication. Several studies suggest that nonhuman primates have this capability, but a recent experiment concluded that in a specific situation (absent entities), human infants display displaced reference but chimpanzees do not. Here, we show that chimpanzees and bonobos of diverse rearing histories are capable of displaced reference to absent and displaced objects. It is likely that some of the conflicting findings from animal cognition studies are due to relatively minor methodological differences, but are compounded by interpretation errors. Comparative studies are of great importance in elucidating the evolution of human cognition; however, greater care must be taken with methodology and interpretation for these studies to accurately reflect species differences.

Case report on the iconic gestures and pointing at the at the absent entities of a one-year-old infant observed in daily-life situations

Case report on the iconic gestures and pointing at the at the absent entities of a one-year-old infant observed in daily-life situations

Facing the Boundaries of Epistemology: Kumārila on Error and Negative Cognition

Kumārila’s commitment to the explanation of cognitive experiences not confined to valid cognition alone, allows a detailed discussion of border-line cases (such as doubt and error) and the admittance of absent entities as separate instances of cognitive objects. Are such absent entities only the negative side of positive entities? Are they, hence, fully relative (since a cow could be said to be the absent side of a horse and vice versa)? Through the analysis of a debated passage of the Ślokavārttika, the present article proposes a reconstruction of Kumārila’s view of the relation between erroneous cognitions and cognitions of absence (abhāva), and considers the philosophical problem of the ontological status of absence.

Mother–Infant Conversation About Absent Things

Understanding utterances about absent entities is a pivotal developmental skill that expands communication beyond the here and now. The present study investigated whether mothers differentiated absent and present reference in their verbal and nonverbal behavior during a semi-structured free-play session with their 11-month-old infants. Infants' nonverbal behaviors were examined to investigate whether they demonstrated signs of differentiating between talk about present and absent things. The findings revealed that mothers relied on verbal cues to differentiate between absent versus present reference, and that infants showed some evidence of differentiating between such references. This research suggests that the emergence of absent reference may be supported by variations in mothers' speech.

Prelinguistic Infants, but Not Chimpanzees, Communicate About Absent Entities

One of the defining features of human language is displacement, the ability to make reference to absent entities. Here we show that prelinguistic, 12-month-old infants already can use a nonverbal pointing gesture to make reference to absent entities. We also show that chimpanzees-who can point for things they want humans to give them-do not point to refer to absent entities in the same way. These results demonstrate that the ability to communicate about absent but mutually known entities depends not on language, but rather on deeper social-cognitive skills that make acts of linguistic reference possible in the first place. These nonlinguistic skills for displaced reference emerged apparently only after humans' divergence from great apes some 6 million years ago.

The Absent Body of Girls Made Visible: Embodiment as the Focus in Education

The purpose of this article is to show the waysin which education can be centered on the bodyas the subject of experience, rather thanas an object or an absent entity. Pedagogicalpractices that emphasize a conscious awarenessof embodiment provide opportunities forstudents to learn in a holistic manner. Sincethe body is the way in which we experience theworld, mediating all processes of learning, allexperience is therefore embodied (Levin, 1985). Recognizing the body as subject of being ratherthan as object acknowledges that beneath theattempts to separate aspects of our being,which often occurs in educational settings,there exists an underlying, unified being thatis not subject to separation (Welton, 1998). The bodies of girls have traditionally beenrelegated to absent entities within thelearning environment, including in physicaleducation. A meaningful education, one thatembraces embodiment, would balance differenttypes of learning experiences, so that thevarious aspects of being are all considered andblended. Such a holistic approach to schoolingwould occur by providing an environment inwhich the needs of all students are valuedthrough efforts that defy the culturalstereotypes and preconceptions of the largersociety.

Maternal Talk About Disappearance Events

AbstractThis study examines maternal talk about events in which persons or objects are hidden, missing, or absent, and the relationship of maternal language to the child's acquisition of words for disappearance. Twelve mother-child pairs were videotaped in the home during play when the children were 12, 15, and 18 months of age. The mothers kept a diary of the children 's words. Maternal language was coded during four types of disappearance events: peekaboo, hidden object games, missing objects, and absent entities. Children who had acquiredgoneand similar terms experienced more disappearance events and heard more maternal talk about disappearance than children who had not acquired a word for disappearance.