Four issues that build on the ideas offered by Tomasello et al. are discussed: the developmental course of shared intentionality and its relation to other developing abilities and experiences, and the conceptualization of three key features of the process: motivation, plans and the development of planning, and culture.

Human action theory, with its emphasis on intentions and reasons, does little to enhance our understanding of the actions of nonhuman animals. Many animal (and human) actions are directed to objects in the world, including other animals. The notion of directedness can be analysed without attributing intentions or reasons to the agent. An action is directed to object X if and only if: (1) the agent singles out X, either by orientation or by selective performance of the (...) action in the presence of X; (2) the agent recognizes X as a suitable object; and (3) the goal of the action is that X should be in a certain relation to the agent or to some other object. The goal of an action is not necessarily attributable to the agent as the agent's goal in acting. Moreover, an agent can have a goal in acting without understanding how the action achieves the goal. The usefulness of the concept of directed action in the study of animal communication is illustrated with examples from the recent ethological literature. (shrink)

The presence of parents or other guardians (commonly termed ‘supervision’) and parental knowledge are factors that are both robustly negatively associated with a range of anti-social and risky behavioural outcomes such as adolescent crime. However, parental presence/supervision and parental knowledge are both (i) regularly used inaccurately as proxies for parental monitoring, (ii) poorly defined and operationalised, and (iii) rarely linked to negative behavioural outcomes with plausible mechanisms that adequately explain their association. These problematic aspects of the parental monitoring literature are (...) a barrier to research into adolescent outcomes and the varied role of parents. This theoretical paper facilitates solutions these problems by clarifying the concepts of parental presence, supervision and knowledge. This discussion delineates presence from supervision and knowledge from monitoring. It specifies how presence and knowledge are not parenting actions, and neither constitute parental monitoring. These concepts are clarified within the parameters of a recent framework of goal-directed parental action and parental monitoring. Doing so constitutes under-labouring that facilitates future discovery of their distinct and yet inter-related mechanisms of influence on adolescent action and development. These structured conceptual developments are also of benefit for our better future understanding of parenting and parental monitoring by providing a framework within which to re-situate existing empirical research findings. (shrink)

Human action theory, with its emphasis on intentions and reasons, does little to enhance our understanding of the actions of nonhuman animals. Many animal (and human) actions are directed to objects in the world, including other animals. The notion of directedness can be analysed without attributing intentions or reasons to the agent. An action is directed to object X if and only if: (1) the agent singles out X, either by orientation or by selective performance of the (...) action in the presence of X; (2) the agent recognizes X as a suitable object; and (3) the goal of the action is that X should be in a certain relation to the agent or to some other object. The goal of an action is not necessarily attributable to the agent as the agent's goal in acting. Moreover, an agent can have a goal in acting without understanding how the action achieves the goal. The usefulness of the concept of directed action in the study of animal communication is illustrated with examples from the recent ethological literature. (shrink)

The challenge of convincing people to change their eating habits towards more environmentally sustainable food consumption (ESFC) patterns is becoming increasingly pressing. Food preferences, choices and eating habits are notoriously hard to change as they are a central aspect of people’s lifestyles and their socio-cultural environment. Many people already hold positive attitudes towards sustainable food, but the notable gap between favorable attitudes and actual purchase and consumption of more sustainable food products remains to be bridged. The current work aims to (...) 1) present a comprehensive theoretical framework for future research on ESFC, and 2) highlight behavioral solutions for environmental challenges in the food domain from an interdisciplinary perspective. First, starting from the premise that food consumption is deliberately or unintentionally directed at attaining goals, a goal-directed framework for understanding and influencing ESFC is built. To engage in goal-directed behavior, people typically go through a series of sequential steps. The proposed theoretical framework makes explicit the sequential steps or hurdles that need to be taken for consumers to engage in ESFC. Consumers need to positively value the environment, discern a discrepancy between the desired versus the actual state of the environment, opt for action to reduce the experienced discrepancy, intend to engage in behavior that is expected to bring them closer to the desired end state, and act in accordance with their intention. Second, a critical review of the literature on mechanisms that underlie and explain ESFC (or the lack thereof) in high-income countries is presented and integrated into the goal-directed framework. This contribution thus combines a top-down conceptualization with a bottom-up literature review; it identifies and discusses factors that might hold people back from ESFC and interventions that might promote ESFC; and it reveals knowledge gaps as well as insights on how to encourage both short- and long-term ESFC by confronting extant literature with the theoretical framework. Altogether, the analysis yields a set of 33 future research questions in the interdisciplinary food domain that deserve to be addressed with the aim of fostering ESFC in the short and long term. (shrink)

The present theory section deals with learned helplessness produced by pervasive experiences of failure or negative events, leading to decreased motivation and risk for depression. In their target article, Boddez, van Dessel, and de Houwer apply this concept to different forms of psychological suffering and propose a goal-directed mechanism –generalisation over similar goals. Duda and Joormann define goal similarity by action-outcome contingencies and highlight individual differences in attribution styles. Brandstätter proposes incentive classes as the organising principle for goal similarity (...) and explores outcomes such as deterioration of cognitive ability. Mikulincer and Lifshin focus on differences between goals and introduce the notion of motivated helplessness, serving as an anxiety buffer in uncontrollable life settings. Finally, potential contributions from emotion science are outlined, in particular individual differences and biases in appraising goals and coping potential likely to produce negative emotion dispositions. In conclusion, the need to elaborate a more comprehensive theoretical framework for helplessness that can guide empirical studies using multifactorial and longitudinal designs is emphasised. Given the strong increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide, better understanding of predispositions and eliciting factors is needed for early diagnosis and the development of intervention programmes to reduce psychological suffering. (shrink)

Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. According to a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining human action, our actions are, essentially, events (and sometimes states, perhaps) that are suitably caused by appropriate mental items, or neural realizations of those items. Causalists traditionally appeal, in part, to such goal-representing states as desires and intentions (or their neural realizers) in their explanations of human actions, and they take accept-able teleological (...) explanations of our actions to be causal explanations. Some proponents of the view that human actions are explained teleologically resist this. They regard the causal approach as a rival. I dub this position “anticausalist teleologism,” or AT, for short. I favor the causal approach, but I will not directly argue for it here. My aim is more modest. I will develop a serious problem for AT that strongly suggests that teleologists need causalism; and I will rebut a style of objection to the project of providing a causal analysis of acting in pursuit of a goal that recently resurfaced in the literature on teleological explanations of action, a style of objection featuring a certain kind of causal deviance. (shrink)

Argues for a constraint on a proper theory of motivation – namely, that proper motivational explanations of goal‐directed actions are causal explanations. The chapter criticizes the thesis that acceptable teleological explanations of actions are not causal explanations and it offers a solution to a problem that deviant causal chains pose for a causal theory of action.

Open peer commentary on the article “Investigating Extended Embodiment Using a Computational Model and Human Experimentation” by Yuki Sato, Hiroyuki Iizuka & Takashi Ikegami. Upshot: The target article’s findings on the focus of attention in extending an agent’s body schema are consistent with those in developmental psychology and neuroscience on goal-directed action. The consequences of these findings are that embodiment can be extended in a variety of ways, not all of which require direct physical manipulation.

In her highly influential 1984 study Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker speculates that opposition to legal abortion among women was likely to be strongest among those who were full-time homemakers without a college education. But despite a marked decline in that demographic group and a well-documented rise in public support for gender equality since then, the rate of support for legal abortion has remained stubbornly fixed at between fifty and fifty-five percent. This tepid support has coincided with (...) a steep decline in abortion services in rural states, and ever more sweeping restrictions on abortion being tested in the courts. Karissa Haugeberg's Women against Abortion and Katie Watson's Scarlet A both seek to address this state of affairs, albeit in markedly different ways. Haugeberg provides a historical chronicle of the motives and strategies of certain key women activists in the fight against legal abortion, with an eye toward how their concerns “came to serve as blueprints to legislators and judges who continue to craft policies and laws that erode women's right to abortion”. Katie Watson draws upon her experience as an attorney and bioethicist to write a guide “intended to encourage and equip you to engage in respectful, productive, private conversation about your experience with, and opinion of, abortion”. Though both authors reveal their support for legal abortion, both are concerned to understand the motives and goals of those who fight against it. (shrink)

Studying social phenomena is often assumed to be inherently different from studying natural science phenomena. In psychology, this assumption has led to a division of the field into social and experimental domains. The same kind of division has carried over into ecological psychology, despite the fact that Gibson clearly intended his theory for both social and natural phenomena. In this paper, we argue that the social/natural science dichotomy can be derived from a distinction between hermeneutics and science that is deeply (...) rooted in the atomistic, structuralist ontological tradition. We show that, from a process-based perspective, the central questions of hermeneutics (action of an individual within a context of possible actions), ecological psychology (behavior of an organism in an ecological niche) and physics (motion of a particle in a field) share a similar structure. Building on these ideas, we propose a common, process-based methodology for psychology that integrates field theory with insights from quantum mechanics to accommodate traditionally problematic concepts in natural science such as teleology and values. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, empirical findings on the paradigmatic problem of prospective control (such as gaze control in automobile driving in relation to perceptual tuning) are presented. (shrink)

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an enduring mental substance (...) animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this interpretation of infant socio-cognitive competence. (shrink)

People cannot understand intentions behind observed actions by direct simulation, because goal inference is highly context dependent. Context dependency is a major source of computational intractability in traditional information-processing models. An embodied embedded view of cognition may be able to overcome this problem, but then the problem needs recognition and explication within the context of the new, layered cognitive architecture.

The role of intentions in motor planning is heavily weighted in classical psychological theories, but their role in generating eye movements, and our awareness of these oculomotor intentions, has not been investigated explicitly. In this study, the extent to which we monitor oculomotor intentions, i.e. the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location, and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience, is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developed where a pair of faces moved systematically across a (...) screen. In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon as the participants attempted to gaze at one of the faces, preventing them from ever viewing it. The results of the experiment suggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye movement intentions in a way that allows for mismatches between planned gaze landing target and resulting gaze landing target to be consciously experienced during decision-making. (shrink)

Standard dual-process models in the action domain postulate that stimulus-driven processes are responsible for suboptimal behavior because they take them to be rigid and automatic and therefore the default. We propose an alternative dual-process model in which goal-directed processes are the default instead. We then transfer the dual- process logic from the action domain to the emotion domain. This reveals that emotional behavior is often attributed to stimulus-driven processes. Our alternative model submits that goal-directed processes could be the (...) primary determinant of emotional behavior instead. We evaluate the type of empirical evidence required for validating our model and we consider implications of our model for behavior change, encouraging strategies focused on the expectancies and values of action outcomes. (shrink)

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and (...) evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention. Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition. Key Words: collaboration; cooperation; cultural learning; culture; evolutionary psychology; intentions; shared intentionality; social cognition; social learning; theory of mind; joint attention. (shrink)

Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. (...) We induced an increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus. (shrink)

How can symbols have meaning for a subject? Foundations of Understanding argues that this is the key question to ask about intentionality, or meaningful thought. It thus offers an alternative to currently popular linguistic models of intentionality, whose inadequacies are examined: the goal should be to explain, not how symbols, mental or otherwise, can refer to or mean states of affairs in the external world, but how they can mean something to us, the users. The essence of intentionality is (...) shown to be conscious understanding, the roots of which lie in experiences of embodiment and goal-directed action. A developmental path is traced from a foundation of conscious understanding in the ability to perform basic actions, through the understanding of the concept of an objective, external world, to the understanding of language and abstract symbols. The work is interdisciplinary: data from the neurosciences and cognitive psychology, and the perspectives of phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, are combined with traditional philosophical analysis. The book includes a chapter on the nature of conscious qualitative experience and its neural correlates. (Series A)". (shrink)

During the perception of human actions by robotic assistants, the robotic assistant needs to direct its computational and sensor resources to relevant parts of the human action. In previous work we have introduced HAMMER, a computational architecture that forms multiple hypotheses with respect to what the demonstrated task is, and multiple predictions with respect to the forthcoming states of the human action. To confirm their predictions, the hypotheses request information from an attentional mechanism, which allocates the robot’s resources (...) as a function of the saliency of the hypotheses. In this paper we augment the attention mechanism with a component that considers the content of the hypotheses’ requests, with respect to the content’s reliability, utility and cost. This content-based attention component further optimises the utilisation of the resources while remaining robust to noise. Such computational mechanisms are important for the development of robotic devices that will rapidly respond to human actions, either for imitation or collaboration purposes. (shrink)

Is action-guiding vision cognitively penetrable? More specifically, is the visual processing that guides our goal-directed actions sensitive to semantic information from cognitive states? This paper critically examines a recent family of arguments whose aim is to challenge a widespread and influential view in philosophy and cognitive science: the view that action-guiding vision is cognitively impenetrable. I argue, in response, that while there may very well be top–down causal influences on action-guiding vision, they should not be taken to (...) be an instance of cognitive penetration. Assuming otherwise is to assign a computational role to the influencing states that they cannot perform. Although questions about cognitive penetrability are ultimately empirical, the issues addressed in this paper are largely philosophical. The discussion here highlights an important set of considerations that help better understand the relations between cognition, vision, and action. (shrink)

Dual process theorists in psychology maintain that the mind’s workings can be explained in terms of conscious or controlled processes and automatic processes. Automatic processes are largely nonconscious, that is, triggered by environmental stimuli without the agent’s conscious awareness or deliberation. Automaticity researchers contend that even higher level habitual social behaviors can be nonconsciously primed. This article brings work on automaticity to bear on our understanding of habitual virtuous actions. After examining a recent intuitive account of habitual actions and (...) habitual virtuous actions, the author offers her own explanation in terms of goal-dependent automaticity. This form of automaticity provides an account of habitual virtuous actions that explains the sense in which these actions are rational, that is, done for reasons. Habitual virtuous actions are rational in the sense of being purposive or goal-directed and are essentially linked with the agent’s psychological states. Unlike deliberative virtuous actions, the agent’s reasons for habitual virtuous actions are not present to her conscious awareness at the time of acting. (shrink)

It has been shown that, when observing an action, infants can rely on either outcome selection information (i.e., actions that express a choice between potential outcomes) or means selection information (i.e., actions that are causally efficient toward the outcome) in their goal attribution. However, no research has investigated the relationship between these two types of information when they are present simultaneously. In an experiment that addressed this question directly, we found that when outcome selection information could disambiguate the goal (...) of the action (e.g., the action is directed toward one of two potential targets), but means selection information could not (i.e., the action is not efficiently adjusted to the situational constraints), 7- and 9-month-old infants did not attribute a goal to an observed action. This finding suggests that means selection information takes primacy over outcome selection information. The early presence of this bias sheds light on the nature of the notion of goal in action understanding. (shrink)

A great deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the function- al roles of intentions in intentional action. In this paper we sketch and defend a position on this issue while attacking a provocative alternative. Our position has its roots in a cybernetic theory of purposive behavior and is only part of the larger task of understanding all goal-directed behavior. Indeed, a unified model of goal-directed behavior, with appropriate modifications for different types of systems, is (...) a long-range ambition. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: In my view, the clash between ecological psychology, enactivism, and constructivism in general has more to do with irreconcilable metaphysical and theoretical incommensurabilities than disagreements about specific mechanisms or processes of perception. Even with mutual enabling of action and perception, some internal process of self-modification is still needed if novel behavior is to be adequately explained.

Climate change goals and actions are often discussed with reference to their feasibility. However, in the climate change literature, there is no agreed upon understanding of what feasibility means. In this paper, insights from political philosophy are used to address this problem in a two-fold way. First, different uses of the term feasibility in the climate change context are critically analyzed, surfacing problematic uses that can have severe consequences for what goals or actions are considered. Second, the ‘conditional probability (...) account of feasibility’ is presented as a positive account of how feasibility should be understood in the climate change context, and applied to the case of managed retreat as an approach for adaptation to sea level rise. Together, the critical analysis and the positive proposal furthers a necessary discussion on feasibility in the context of climate change. (shrink)

A second-person approach that prioritizes dyadic emotional interaction is not well equipped to explain the origins of the understanding of mind conceived as intentionality. Instead, the critical elements that will deliver the understanding of self and other as persons with intentionality are shared object-centered interactions that include not only emotional engagement, but also joint attention and joint goal-directed action.

How should we conceptualize direct action against climate change? Although direct action is an increasingly significant tactic by the global climate movement, we lack understanding how direct action contributes to the systemic change necessary for addressing the crisis. Drawing upon critical theories of climate change as a crisis in the social reproduction of the metabolic relations between humans and nature in capitalism, I conceptualize direct action as attempts to intervene directly in the organization of the (...) social metabolism, towards reorganizing these relations in a more socially just and ecologically sustainable manner. My framework thus expands and clarifies the scope and potential of direct action as a means of confronting the capitalist climate crisis, as evidenced by Greta Thunberg’s school strike for climate. (shrink)

The numerous perspectives offered on consciousness reflect a multifaceted phenomenon that results from a system of relations. An etymological approach identifies linguistic roots of the meanings of consciousness and illustrates their concern with self-referenced informational relationships of an organism with its environment, a "knowing system" formed in the epistemological relations between knower and known. Common elements of contemporary models suggest that consciousness involves interacting components of a system, including: attention-awareness; phenomenal experiences; self reference; action-behavior, including representations and learning; use (...) of information; interpretation of meaning; goal-directed behavior; and systems of social reference. It is suggested that manifestations of consciousness through the physical properties of the brain are universally represented in language. A preliminary systems model of consciousness is outlined with widespread lexical roots proposed as a culture-neutral framework for constructing theories of consciousness and identifying cognitive constructs which reveal the epistemological roots of consciousness within Indo-European traditions. (shrink)