On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy

On Being Moved From Mirror Neurons to Empathy Advances in Consciousness Research Advances in Consciousness Research...

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On Being Moved From Mirror Neurons to Empathy

Advances in Consciousness Research Advances in Consciousness Research provides a forum for scholars from diﬀerent scientiﬁc disciplines and ﬁelds of knowledge who study consciousness in its multifaceted aspects. Thus the Series will include (but not be limited to) the various areas of cognitive science, including cognitive psychology, linguistics, brain science and philosophy. The orientation of the Series is toward developing new interdisciplinary and integrative approaches for the investigation, description and theory of consciousness, as well as the practical consequences of this research for the individual and society. Editor Maxim I. Stamenov Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Editorial Board David Chalmers

Steven Macknik

Australian National University

Barrow Neurological Institute

Gordon G. Globus

George Mandler

University of California at Irvine

University of California at San Diego

Ray Jackendoﬀ

Susana Martinez-Conde

Brandeis University

Barrow Neurological Institute

Christof Koch

John R. Searle

California Institute of Technology

University of California at Berkeley

Stephen Kosslyn

Petra Stoerig

Harvard University

Universität Düsseldorf

Earl Mac Cormac Duke University

Volume 68 On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy Edited by Stein Bråten

On Being Moved From Mirror Neurons to Empathy

Edited by

Stein Bråten University of Oslo

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data On being moved : from mirror neurons to empathy / edited by Stein Bråten. p. cm. (Advances in Consciousness Research, issn 1381–589X ; v. 68) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Developmental neurobiology--Congresses. 2. Mirror neurons-Congresses. 3. Interpersonal communication in infants--Physiological aspects--Congresses. 4. Emotions in infants--Physiological aspects-Congresses. I. Bråten, Stein. QP363.5O5 2007 612.8--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 5204 3 (Hb; alk. paper)

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© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microﬁlm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

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Table of contents

Contributors Introduction

ix 1

Part I. Introducing the matrix and multiple layers of intersubjectivity and empathy chapter 1 Prologue: From infant intersubjectivity and participant movements to simulation and conversation in cultural common sense Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen chapter 2 Applying developmental and neuroscience findings on other-centred participation to the process of change in psychotherapy Daniel N. Stern chapter 3 The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation Frans B. M. de Waal

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Part II. Mirror neurons and origins of neurosocial support of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity and altercentricity chapter 4 Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese chapter 5 Human mirroring systems: On assessing mind by reading brain and body during social interaction Riitta Hari

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chapter 6 Cues on the origin of language: From electrophysiological data on mirror neurons and motor representations Luciano Fadiga and Laila Craighero chapter 7 Altercentric infants and adults: On the origins and manifestations of participant perception of others’ acts and utterances Stein Bråten chapter 8 From speech to gene: The KE family and the FOXP2 Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and Frédérique Liégeois

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Part III. From preverbal to verbal intersubjectivity in child development chapter 9 Intersubjectivity before language: Three windows on preverbal sharing Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks chapter 10 Early speech perception: Developing a culturally specific way of listening through social interaction Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl chapter 11 On theories of dialogue, self and society: Redefining socialization and the acquisition of meaning in light of the intersubjective matrix Ivar Frönes chapter 12 The intersubjectivity of imagination: The special case of imaginary companions Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

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Part IV. Applications and therapeutic implications chapter 13 When empathic care is obstructed: Excluding the child from the zone of intimacy Karsten Hundeide

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chapter 14 Family disseminate archives: Intergenerational transmission and psychotherapy in light of Bråten’s and Stern’s theories Andrea Cabassi chapter 15 Reaching moments of shared experiences through musical improvisation: An aesthetic view on interplay between a musician and severely disabled or congenital deafblind children Birgit Kirkebaek chapter 16 To sing and dance together: From infants to jazz Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen chapter 17 On circular re-enactment of care and abuse, and on other-centred moments in psychotherapy: Closing comments Stein Bråten Author index Subject index

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Stein Bråten Dept. of Sociology and Human Geography University of Oslo P.O. Box 1096 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway [email protected] Rechele Brooks Dept. of Psychology/Institute for learning and brain sciences CHDD-Building, Room 373 University of Washington Box 357920, Seattle, WA 98195, USA [email protected] Andrea Cabassi Mental Health Department Child Psychiatric Service U.O. Neuropsichiatria Inf. e Psicologia Clinica del’età evolutiva, – A/Usl de Parma Via Verona 36 A, 43100 Parma, Italy [email protected] Barbara T. Conboy Dept. of Speech and Hearing Sciences Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning Mailstop 357920, University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195, USA [email protected] Laila Craighero Università di Ferrara Dipartimento S.B.T.A. sezione di Fisiologia Umana Via Fossato di Mortara 17/19, 44100 Ferrara Italy [email protected] Luciano Fadiga Università di Ferrara Dipartimento S.B.T.A.

sezione di Fisiologia Umana Via Fossato di Mortara 17/19, 44100 Ferrara Italy [email protected] Pier Francesco Ferrari Dept. of Neuroscience/Dept. of Evolutionary and Functional Biology Università di Parma Via Volturno 39, I-43100 Parma, Italy [email protected] Ivar Frönes Dept. of Sociology and Human Geography University of Oslo P.O. Box 1096 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway [email protected] Vittorio Gallese Dipartimento di Neuroscienze – Sezione di Fisiologia, Università di Parma Via Volturno 39, I-43100 Parma, Italy [email protected] Riitta Hari Brain Research Unit Low Temperature Laboratory, and Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre Helsinki University of Technology FIN-02015 HUT, Espoo, Finland [email protected] Karsten Hundeide Dept. of Psychology University of Oslo P.O. Box 1094 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway [email protected] Birgit Kirkebaek VIKOM Centre Kongevejen 256 B 2830 Virum

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Copenhagen, Denmark [email protected] Giannis Kugiumutzakis Laboratory of Psychology Dept. of Philosophy and Social Studies University of Crete, Rethymno, Gallos 74100, Crete, Greece [email protected] Patricia K. Kuhl Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning Mailstop 357920 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195, USA [email protected]

Benjaman Schögler Perception in Action Laboratories PESLS Dept. of Psychology University of Edinburgh St. Leonard’s Land, Holyrrod Rd Edinburgh EH8 EAQ, Scotland, UK [email protected] Daniel N. Stern Faculty of Psychology University of Geneva Cornell University Medical School 14 Ch. De Clairejoie, CH-1225 Chène-Bourg, Geneva, Switzerland [email protected]

Frédérique Liégeois Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, Institute of Child Health UCL, 30 Guilford Street London WC1N 1EH, UK [email protected]

Colwyn Trevarthen Department of Psychology University of Edinburgh 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ Scotland, UK [email protected]

Andrew N. Meltzoff Institute for learning and brain sciences CHDD Building, Room 373 University of Washington Box 357920, Seattle, WA 98195, USA [email protected]

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Unit Institute of Child Health, UCL and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children 30 Guilford Street, London WC 1N1EH, UK [email protected]

Stathis Papastathopoulos Laboratory of Psychology Dept. of Philosophy and Social Studies University of Crete Rethymno, Gallos 74100 Crete, Greece [email protected]

Frans B. M. de Waal Living Links Center, Yerkes Primate Center Psychology Department Emory University, 954 N. Gatewood Road Atlanta, GA 30322, USA [email protected]

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Examining the origins, neurosocial support, and therapeutic implications of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity, and with a focus on implications of the discovery of mirror neurons, this collective volume brings together lines of research that jointly hold the promise of a paradigmatic revolution. Pertinent new findings and results are presented on these topics: i. The matrix and multiple layers of intersubjectivity and empathy ii. The mirror neurons discovery, and origins and neuro-social support of intersubjectivity and other-centred participation iii. From preverbal sharing and speech perception to meaning acquisition and verbal intersubjectivity iv. Implications and applications of the intersubjective matrix in therapy, intervention, and music. Serving as proceedings of the Theory Forum Symposium on “Foundations of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity in light of new findings”, The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, October 3–5 2004, the present volume may be seen to be a sequel to at least three previous publications. First, it follows up the proceedings of the first Theory Forum symposium in the Academy ten years earlier. This resulted in the collective volume Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (ed. by Stein Bråten 1998, and now re-issued by Cambridge University Press as a paperback (2006)). Here were brought together for the first time seminal authors whose findings had challenged psychological theories of child development and pertinent comparative distinctions in psychopathology, primatology, and neuroethology. Second, it has links to a symposium on implications of the mirror neurons discovery, held at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study, Delmenhorst July 5– 8 2000, which resulted in the John Benjamins proceedings Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (ed. by Maxim Stamenov & Vittorio Gallese 2002). Here, in addition to evolutionary, communicative and language implications, functional interpretations and learning contexts applications were examined, including models of perception and learning by imitation. Third, earlier in the same year that the Theory Forum symposium underlying the present volume took place, Daniel Stern (2004) published his book on The

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Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life in which he lays out in Chapter 5 what he terms ‘The intersubjective matrix’ with reference to recent developmental and neuroscience findings that invite a revolution in our understanding of the roots, nature, and implications of intersubjectivity.

A paradigmatic revolution The intersubjective matrix entails inter alia two radical turnabouts. First, no longer can be upheld as valid Cartesian and Leibnizian assumptions about monadic subjects and disembodied and self-centred minds without windows to each other except as mediated by constructed or symbolic representations. Modes of participant perception have been identified entailing co-movements with others in felt immediacy, supplementing perception of others in re-presentational mediacy. Second, no longer can be retained the Piagetian attribution of infant egocentricity as a point of departure for children’s language acquisition and cognitive development. In the last decades some of the story of human infancy has been re-written, as it were, replacing earlier theoretical views of infants as a-social and ego-centric with a new understanding of infant capacity from the outset for interpersonal communion and learning by altercentric participation. The first turnabout is partly consistent with what G. H. Mead (1934) emphasized when he refused to the take as a point of departure the monad locked in a cell, and insisted on the priority of the interpersonal. In his posthumous book on Mind, Self, and Society, he offers a seminal account of the emergence of preverbal and symbolic intersubjectivity albeit, like J. M. Baldwin (1891) before him, he was not open to the possibility of imitation in the first months of life. The second radical turn was announced 45 years later, when Colwyn Trevarthen (1979) puts forward a description of ‘primary intersubjectivity’ in human infants, which at first was ignored or contested. Later, pointing out that the human infant’s anticipatory cerebral system is prepared for direct perception of the variety of sounds, gestures, and movements that humans afford, he defined ‘alteroception’, in analogue to proprioception, as direct perception of the other’s motivated act (Trevarthen 1986). By now, in line with his definitions, replacing the previous attribution of egocentricity made in Piagetian theories of child development and acquisition of language, infant altercentricity or other-centred participation has been identified (Bråten 1998; Stern 2000/2003: xi–xxxix, 2004; Trevarthen et al. 1998). Already in 1985, in his seminal The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Daniel Stern had emphasized the infant in interpersonal communion, and introduced his radical multi-layer model of the four senses of self (and other). This he modifies in an even more radical direction in the new introduction to the paperback version in the light of new findings:

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evidence for the presence of mirror neurons and adaptive oscillators along with the deepening literature on early imitation suggest that probably from the beginning of life, infants have the capacity for what Bråten (1998) terms altero-centric participation or what Trevarthen (1979) has long called primary intersubjectivity. (Stern 2000: xx)

The above are some of the keywords for findings and capacities subsumed in terms of ‘the Intersubjectivity Matrix’ implying a paradigmatic revolution.

On Part I: Introducing the matrix and multiple layers of intersubjectivity Thus, as stressed also in the beginning of the prologue to this volume, the story of human infancy has been rewritten in the last decades, replacing earlier theoretical views of the infant as a-social and ego-centric with a new understanding of infant capacities for interpersonal communion and altercentricity. In their prologue, Bråten and Trevarthen (this volume (1)) distinguish these three layers of intersubjectivity remaining operative throughout normal life (Figure 1). (III) Tertiary intersubjectivity (achieved between 2 and 6 years): symbolic conversation with actual and virtual companions, linked to skills for identifying and using ideas of objects and events, and leading to 2nd order abilities for mental simulation of the mind of conversational companions . . . (II) Secondary intersubjectivity (from about 9 months): objects of joint attention and emotional referencing are brought into play within trusting relations of companionship sometimes inviting object-oriented imitative learning by other-centred participation . . . (I) Primary intersubjectivity (from the first months): direct sympathy with actual others’ expressions of feelings in intimate reciprocal subject-subject contact entailing dance-like proto-conversation . . .

Figure 1. Layers of intersubjectivity succinctly specified (to be elaborated in the prologue)

In contrast to the stages in Piagetian theories of cognitive and moral development, in which earlier stages recede and are replaced by higher-order stages, the above tripartite distinction implies that the layers of primary and secondary intersubjectivity continue throughout life to support higher-order layers of intersubjectivity. This conforms to the multi-layer logic of the developmental model of senses of self (and other) proposed by Daniel Stern (1985/2000), who has specified how the earlier self-other senses continue to prevail and support higher order senses of self and other. In his keynote contribution, Stern (this volume (2)) refers to recent neuroscientific findings that suggest mechanisms for intersubjective phenomena, and to

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developmental accounts of such capacities subsumed in terms of the intersubjective matrix. Stern reviews developmental and infancy research findings attesting to the early foundations of primary intersubjectivity – revealed in neonatal imitation and reciprocal engagement in early infant-adult interplay, and supporting the kind of joint attention and object-oriented learning by imitation that follows around nine months, entailing mutual affect attunement and action- and object-oriented participation, which in turn come to support senses of verbal and narrative self and others. Stern points out how developmental and neuroscience findings on othercentred participation have bearings for understanding of processes of change in psychotherapy. He offers insight into the nature and contents of certain moments in psychotherapy and everyday life: critical “now moments” entail mini-crisis that may come to be resolved in what he terms “moments of meeting”, entailing a qualitative leap in the relationship, and with mutual participant perception as one of the characteristics. Such implications and applications are returned to in Part IV of the present volume. In his key note contribution, Frans de Waal (this volume (3)) reviews expressions of empathy in animals, especially nonhuman primates, and presents a tripartite model of how animals perceive others. It ranges from a core mechanism of emotional linkage arising from a direct mapping of another’s behavioural state onto the subject’s representations. This Perception-Action mechanism (cf. Preston & de Waal 2002) provides the basis for higher layers in which the other is recognized as the source of felt emotions (Cognitive Empathy). This permits responses to be geared more specifically to the other’s situation, thus increasing the effectiveness of sympathetic support, care, or reassurance. Such responses have great survival value in cooperative animals, de Waal argues. At the highest layer, the other’s perspective, situation, and intentions are fully appreciated. As in a Russian doll, each earlier layer plays a role in the higher layers, so that even a fully developed empathic layer of attribution and perspective-taking (layer 3) includes and builds upon unconscious emotional reactions (layer 1). Thus, there is here some affinity and consistency with the three layers or modes of intersubjectivity laid out in the prologue (this volume (1)). The inner core of de Waal’s ‘Russian Doll’ model, entailing motor mimicry and emotional contagion, partly corresponds to the first layer or mode of primary intersubjectivity. While the innermost, automatic core of empathy is distinguished by de Waal in terms of affective resonance in an immediate sense, the higher-order layers entail empathy in a cognitive sense and through intersubjective perspective-taking. In these terms he gives many illustrations of consolations and helping by great apes. On the front cover of the symposium pre-proceedings was used, as the middle part of three illustration, another illustration, a drawing of a chimpanzee holding out a sugar cane for a youngster to lick (Fig. 2 (middle)), based on de Waal’s (1996) photo record in his book on Good Nature.

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Figure 2. Illustrations of (in)take of food inviting participant perception Perception of another’s grasping or taking in food invites in the observer participant perception as if the observer were a virtual co-author, simulating the other’s grasping or intake of food. (Top) The original mirror neurons experiment: When the macaque monkey observes the grasping of a piece of food and when grasping the food by itself, there is a grasp-specific pre-motor neurons discharge in both cases involving the activation of mirror neurons. Now, Ferrari et al. (2003) report the findings of mouth mirror neurons in the monkey ventral pre-motor cortex, referred to in Part II of the present volume. (Middle) Adult female chimpanzee feeds a piece of a sugar cane to an unrelated juvenile at the Yerkes field station, based on photo by Frans de Waal (Good Natured, Harvard U Press 1996: 136f.) who presents his ‘Russian Doll’ model of empathy in this volume (3). (Bottom) As his big sister takes in the spoon with food offered by her baby brother (11 3/4 month) he reveals by his opening his own mouth his other-centred participation in her food-intake (as recorded by Stein Bråten 1996). Drawings, similar to the top and bottom illustrations also appeared in S. Bråten (Ed., 1998: 108, 122), and in Stamenov and Gallese (Eds., 2002: 281), and are returned to in this volume (7).

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In Figure 2 we see various illustrations of (in)take of food inviting participant perception, including the original macaque monkey experiment in which single premotor neurons firings were recorded (Fig. 2 (top) drawing adapted from di Pellegrino et al. 1992; Bråten 1998: 122), entailing the discovery of what later aptly were labelled “mirror neurons”. We also see demonstrated by the chimpanzee (Fig. 2 (middle)) rudiments of the capacity to hand out or give (which the monkey would be lacking). In turn, the younger chimpanzee’s licking may very well have elicited empathy and invited participant perception in the older provider, albeit not in the nature of manifesting by mouth movements other-centred participation, such as exhibited by the 11-month old infants (Fig. 2 (bottom right)).

On Part II: Relating intersubjectivity in humans to the discovery of mirror neurons The same year that the proceedings of the first Theory Forum symposium were published, portraying the original macaque experiment (Bråten (Ed.) 1998: 122, similar to the top illustration in Fig. 2), Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) published their seminal paper “Language within our grasp”, identifying indirect evidence of a mirror neuron system in the human brain and relating inter alia to Liberman’s motor theory of speech perception. That had been partly anticipated (in a Centre of Advanced Study lecture in the Norwegian Academy the preceding year) by this prediction: . . . if by way of experimental procedures the neural basis supporting egocentric perception and the neural basis sensitized to support allocentric perception are uncovered in humans, then I would expect that neural systems, perhaps even neurons, sensitized to realize altercentric perception will be uncovered in experiments designed to test and disconfirm this expectation. (Bråten 1997, 1998: 122–123)

Now, while no studies entailing recording of single neurons, can or have been done on humans, all the indirect neurophysiological evidence afforded (reported and examined inter alia by Rizzolatti et al. 2002: 37–59; cf. also contributions by Ferrari and Gallese, by Hari, and by Fadiga and Craighero (this volume (4–6)), indicates that an adapted and sensitized mirror neuron system is the most likely candidate for partial neurosocial support of intersubjective attunement in humans, including participant perception. Ferrari and Gallese (this volume (4)) present monkey data on grasping and holding neurons, lip-smacking neurons, and lips protrusion neurons. Examining the potential of the mirror neuron system for actions in humans, they compare behavioural studies on synchrony and imitation in human and nonhuman primates, and addresses questions concerning primary and secondary intersubjectivity re-

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lated to the mirror neuron system. Their pointed question concerns which neural mechanisms that may underpin our capacity to capture others’ living experiences just by watching them, a construction built up in order to respond and re-act very early in life, such as attested by documentation of infant intersubjectivity and alter-centred participation. Ferrari and Gallese posit that the mirror neuron system, together with other mirroring neural clusters outside the motor domain, constitute the functional mechanism at the basis of intersubjectivity, and which they consider to entail embodied simulation. By that they mean an automatic, unwitting and pre-reflective functional mechanism, the function of which is to model objects, agents, and events. By means of such embodied simulation we are intentionally attuned to others. The phylogenetic gap between advanced tertiary intersubjective capacities for simulation of mind and the mirror neurons discharge in macaques is of course huge, even though a partial basis for participant perception are afforded by the impressive capacity for mirror neurons discharge in the macaque upon sight of another’s grasping act and upon own execution of a similar grasping act (Fig. 2 (top)). In the ventral premotor cortex of the monkey (area F5) there are neurons that discharge both when the monkey performs a specific hand action and when it observes an individual making a similar action. The strength of mirror neurons discharge even varies with the action context in which the perceived grasp act is embedded; there is a stronger discharge when the food is seen to be grasped and put in the mouth, than when it is seen to be grasped and put in a bucket (Fogassi et al. 2005: 662). And then, in connection with a seminar of mine at the Human Physiology Institute in Parma, Vittorio Gallese showed me the design with a screen which hides from the sight of the monkey the endpoint of the experimenter’s hand grasping the object, allowing only the beginning of the reaching and grasping act to be visible. And yet, even that evokes mirror neurons discharge. This supports the point made by Ferrari and Gallese on embodied simulation. Is is not only a demonstration of the activation of mirror neurons upon observation of parts of another’s partly hidden act, but an indication of the macaque’s being able to rudimentary simulate the completion of that partly hidden target-oriented act. This may be seen to resemble the kind of simulated completion, albeit at a higher layer of intersubjectivity, that the 18-month old toddlers are doing when exposed to the experimenter who fails to pull the dumbbell apart in Meltzoff ’s behavioural re-enactment design (cf. Meltzoff & Brooks this volume (9)). In the proceedings of the Hanse Institute symposium, Stamenov (2002: 249– 271), with a view upon prerequisites for linguistic competence, questions attempts to account for “higher cognitive capacities of humans” with reference to the mirror neuron discovery (cf. also Stamenov & Gallese 2002: 7) because even though they have access to mirror neurons, macaques cannot engage in language, or simulate another’s mind. True, not only are such higher-order modes of intersubjectivity

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beyond their capacities; there are limitations even in bodily capacities for reciprocal resonance and co-movements in the mutual sense of primary intersubjective attunement. While the macaque is able to resonate with grasping (like in Fig. 2 (top)), it is likely to be unable to resonate with an act of giving, since it cannot do what is done by the chimpanzee (Fig. 2 (middle)), who in turn is unable to participate in the kind of face-to-face exchange that is demonstrated by the 11-month old in Fig. 2 (bottom), because that would have required a frame of reference shift in such a face-to-face situation (cf. the contributions by Bråten, and by Billard & Arbib in Stamenov & Gallese (Eds.) 2002: 273–294, 343–352). Such a mirror reversal is returned to by Bråten, this volume (7). Still, we may say that exposure to a manual reaching act, or even to mouth grasping act, such as reported by Ferrari and Gallese, evokes in the macaque a unilateral mode of internal resonance that partly matches that target-oriented act, manifested by the discharge of the same pre-motor neurons that are activated upon own execution of that unilateral target act. And then, when an object is grasped and then eaten, there is a stronger discharge than when an object is grasped and then thrown in a bucket. Even though this is an unilateral target oriented acts, not embedded in bilateral give-and-take interactions (such as specified for human by Bråten 2002: 290n.), such experiments demonstrate a primate basis for the kind of phylogenetic adaptation of mirror neurons systems that may afford part of the neurosocial support of participant perception in human, even infants (cf. also Bråten & Gallese 2004). Reporting from her experimental studies with her co-workers on human mirroring systems related to the mirror neurons discovery, Riitta Hari (this volume (5)) raises questions inter alia about the potential support of predictions and attribution of goals in social interaction, such as predicting another’s doing or saying – predicting the opponent’s move in sport, or completing the speaker who has difficulties in finding the right words, neither of which deserves the term ‘true imitation’. (Detailed examples of such participant predictions are given in Chapter 7 (this volume) in terms of other-centred participation). While pointing out that true imitation is likely to require action understanding and to entail learning of new motor actions, Hari distinguishes true imitation from mere release of stereotypic motor patterns, and from facilitation of actions that are already in the observer’s motor repertoire, e.g. in spectators watching an athletic performance. For mirroring systems studies of the brain basis for social cognition and dynamic interaction, Hari emphasizes the combination of the temporal accuracy of magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings with the fine resolution of magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). One of the MEG studies reported from was applied to hand movements; when the subject stretched the right arm and hand towards a manipulandum, ending the movement with a pinch of the tip, and when an on-line similar movement was observed, both Broca’s region and the primary mo-

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tor cortex were activated during both hand movement execution and observation, satisfying one of the criteria for motor mirror neurons being involved. Broca’s area also relates to speech activation. As for the key question about how the mirror neurons discovery may relate to our understanding of the emergence and acquisition of language, Fadiga and Craighero (this volume (6)) afford cues to the origin of language based on electrophysiological data on mirror neurons and motor representations. They inter alia report Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) data on how a system in humans motorically ‘resonates’ when they listen to speech. Their current research is aimed at investigating if and how, during speech listening, tongue motor representations are activated in the listener as expression of an acoustically evoked motor resonance, and as to whether such activation has a role in the perception of speech. According to Liberman’s motor theory of speech perception, speech is perceived by matching articulatory gestures, embedded in listened words, on the listener’s motor repertoire, entailing that perception and production of speech use a common repertoire of motor primitives represented in the brain as invariant motor commands. Recently this theory has been indirectly supported by a series of neurophysiological data. Brain imaging studies and electrophysiological investigations of motor cortex excitability show that in humans the observation of motor actions activates the motor circuits involved in the generation of the seen movements. Among active areas, the presence of Broca’s region suggests a possible evolutionary pathway linking hand action related mirror system to the birth of spoken language. Fadiga and Craighero point to the homology between this newly discovered visuo-motor mechanism and the acoustic/motor matching postulated by the motor theory of speech perception, opening fruitful windows. The issue of the phylogenetic origin, as well as manifestations in ontogeny of participant perception by infant learners and adult listeners, is pursued by Bråten (this volume (7)). He offers a number of illustrations of how other-centred participation is manifested by preverbal infants and verbal children and adults alike. Like adult feeders, for example, who open their mouth when offering the food to the mouth of the infant or patient their are feeding, when infants reciprocate spoonfeeding, which they can do in the 11th month of their life, they manifest with their mouth movements their participation in the other’s intake of the food as if they were taking part in the eating from the other’s centre, as it were. In contrast to the Piagetian attribution of an egocentric point of departure for children’s development of language, requiring decentration in ontogeny as the child matures, Bråten advances the hypothesis that the mirror neuron system has been decentred in hominin phylogeny to allow for infant listening and learning by (m)other-centred participation to cope and take care. In ontogeny, this altercentric capacity for preverbal learning by virtual other participation announces verbal conversation to come with its reciprocal, participant, and simulational characteristics.

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As for the phylogenetic support of speech articulation, pertinent findings on the inherited speech disorders in the KE family are presented by Faraneh VarghaKhadem and Frédérique Liégeois (this volume (8)). They point to a gene mutation and associated language articulation abnormalities found in half the members of the three-generational KE family present with a dominantly inherited verbal and orofacial dyspraxia caused by a point mutation in the FOXP2 gene. The mutation is associated with bilateral morphometric brain abnormalities in cortical and subcortical regions involved in language and speech motor planning, including the inferior frontal gyrus (part of Broca’s area), the planum temporale, the putamen, the head of the caudate nucleus, and the cerebellum. More recently, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to determine the pattern of brain activation associated with the FOXP2 mutation when performing language tasks. They report on the distribution of brain regions involved during covert verb generation, overt verb generation, and overt word repetition. FOXP2 mutation results in abnormal functioning of a cortico-striatal network involved in both covert and overt language processing. Altogether, these results are consistent with the notion that the FOXP2 gene plays an important role in the development of brain circuits that are crucial to the normal acquisition of speech and language.

On Part III: From preverbal to verbal intersubjectivity in child development Early speech perception and meaning acquisition, windows to intersubjectivity from preverbal sharing, and conversations with invisible companions, are amongst the topics of the contributions in Part III. Drawing upon research in the Seattle’s laboratory on learning and brain science, Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks (this volume (9)) examine phenomena illuminating the nature of preverbal intersubjectivity, entailing these three windows on preverbal sharing: (a) action imitation, (b) joint visual attention, and (c) sensitivity to intentions related to action or attempted action. The latter involves 18-month old toddlers exposed to the dumbbell experiment in Meltzoff ’s behavioural re-enactment design. They see the experimenter’s failed effort to pull the dumbbell apart and, then, when handed the dumbbell, pulls it apart, demonstrating (with a triumphant smile) to have “read the experimenter’s intention”. They also report from experiments with 12-month-olds who had experienced being blind-folded. When exposed to a blind-folded adult, they did not turn to follow the gaze of the adult, unlike the control group in which the infants had had no experience with loss of vision and turned to follow the gaze of the blind-folded adult. As Meltzoff and Brooks point out, this experiment affords a nice demonstration of a ‘like me / like you’ interpersonal mechanism at work. Towards the end of their chapter, they touch upon the question of whether a subserving mirror neuron sys-

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tem is brought to experience, or is a result of experience – a question which is also pursued in terms of phylogenetic adaptation and ontogenetic sensitizing nurture by Bråten (this volume (7)). In her studies of early speech perception, Patricia Kuhl (1998) has shown that the infant’s perceptual space is beginning to get closed to sound distinctions that do not make sense in the ambient language. In her contribution with Barbara Conboy (this volume (10)) on the development of a culturally specific way of listening through social interaction, studies are described oriented towards overcoming such early native language closure. Infants acquire language with remarkable speed, although little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the acquisition process. Studies of the phonetic units of language have shown that early in life, infants are capable of discerning differences among the phonetic units of languages, including native- and foreign-language sounds. Between 6 and 12 months of age, the ability to discriminate foreign-language phonetic units sharply declines. In two studies are investigated the necessary and sufficient conditions for reversing this decline in foreign-language phonetic perception. In one experiment, 9 month-old American infants were exposed to native Mandarin Chinese speakers in 12 laboratory sessions, and compared to a control group exposed only to English in the same number of language sessions. Subsequent test of Mandarin speech perception demonstrated that exposure to Mandarin reversed the decline seen in the English control group. In another experiment, infants were exposed to the same foreign-language speakers and materials via audiovisual or audio-only recordings, without any interpersonal interaction, and which turned out to have no effect. Thus, exposure to live interactive speech in another language makes a difference, but not upon video or media exposure to the same speech. Ivar Frönes (this volume (11)) portrays earlier approaches in sociology and psychology to processes of socialization of the child, as well as views upon (pre)verbal meaning acquisitions that imply that it resists attempts of enculturation and socialization, like Freud’s point about the unpleasantness of culture. Some theories conceive of the cultivated individual as under-socialized, while other theories invite the conception of the socialized individual as over-socialized. Emphasizing the dialogical conception, Frönes returns to G. H. Mead and, before him, to Peirce’s understanding of communication in the sense that “language has strong idiosyncratic, local, and situation-anchored dimensions.” Pertaining to the latter’s pragmatics, Frönes’ chapter, which also relates to the tripartite distinction of intersubjectivity as primary, secondary, and tertiary, invites this reflection: There is a certain degree of affinity between this distinction and Peirce’s distinction between ‘Firstness’, ‘Secondness’, and ‘Thirdness’, which albeit definitions varied concerned, respectively, (i) immediate quality of feeling, (ii) reaction or relating to objects, and (iii) sign mediation and representation. Now, against this background of history of ideas, and given the recent findings, including his own seminal stud-

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ies of peer interaction, Frönes offers a re-definition of socialization and meaning acquisition in light of the intersubjective matrix, defined by Stern (2004 this volume (2)), with reference also to Bråten’s (1988) postulate about an innate ‘virtual other’ and distinction of the mode of felt immediacy. Related to Stern’s (1985) ‘evoked companion’, the child’s virtual other may be seen to pertain to the phenomenon of children’s invisible companions. This topic is examined by Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis (this volume (12)) through their reported studies of five-year old preschool girls. Sixteen preschool girls were interviewed and observed in dyadic play interactions, at the nursery schools. The girls having imaginary companions attribute to them primarily the functional roles of playmate and interlocutor and secondarily the role of a companion in everyday activities. During the dyadic play interactions, the 8 girls with imaginary companions used significantly more of their speech to communicate, than the 8 girls without imaginary companions, and also engaged significantly more often in pretend play and in negotiations about it. During their play with dolls, girls with imaginary companions used them significantly more often as active agents and attributed to them psychological and relational characteristics while acknowledging that they do not really exist. The authors see imaginary companions to emerge naturally because of the inherently dialogical structure of mind and the intersubjective nature of human development. Their findings may leave substance to the assumption that – contrary to what has been surmised from Piaget’s line of enquiry and psychoanalytic thinking – a child who overtly engages with her virtual other may turn out to be more socially and emotionally sensitive and competent also in relation to actual others.

On Part IV: Applications and therapeutic implications of the intersubjective matrix The final Part IV is devoted to applications and therapeutic implications of the intersubjective matrix, as introduced, examined and elaborated in the previous parts, and as defined by Stern in Chapter 5 of The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. Here he makes the point that when people move synchronously or in temporal coordination, they are participating in an aspect of the other’s experience. They are partially living from the other’s center. (Stern 2004: 81)

This is one of the defining characteristics of what Stern (this volume (2)) terms a “moment of meeting”, contributing to a qualitative leap in a relationship that has suffered a mini-crisis. Such a moment of meeting entails “a moment of mutual other-centred participation in which both partners create and undergo a joint

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experience”. This is consistent with how altercentric participation is defined in the glossary to his book as “the innate capacity to experience, usually out of awareness, what another is experiencing [. . .] as if your center of orientation and perspective were centered in the other . . .” (Stern 2004: 241–242). In this definition, in line with Bråten (1998), Stern adds that this is the basic intersubjective capacity that makes such phenomena as imitation, empathy, sympathy, emotional contagion, and identification possible. Empathy, and the way in which it may be obstructed and collapse in the severely pressed caretaker, is a keyword for the contribution by Karsten Hundeide (this volume (13)). He highlights some of the conditions and processes involved in sensitive empathic care on the one hand and neglect and abuse on the other. Drawing upon experiences from the International Child Development Programme, which he is heading, he describes what occurs when empathic care is obstructed in the caretaker who excludes the child from her zone of intimacy. By “zone of intimacy” Hundeide refers to the way in which a child can be included and cared for through empathic identification and sensitive availability of the caregiver to the child’s needs. But a child can also be expelled from the zone of intimacy with subsequent blockage of empathic identification in the caretaker, affective withdrawal leading to neglect and possibly abuse. Finally, Hundeide summarizes the conditions facilitating empathic care and relates these to the newly emerging field of “ethics of closeness” and Levinas’ ideas of the “appeal of the face”. Reporting from his work with child psychiatric service in Parma, Andrea Cabassi (this volume (14)) describes processes of intergenerational transmission and circular re-enactment of violence across generations in terms of his notion of ‘family disseminate archives’ concerning the family, its history, its destiny, its memory across generations. Perturbing cycles of circular re-enactments in parent-child relationship, described in such terms of family disseminate archives, constitute a challenge for psychotherapeutic attempts to break such cycles. As expressed also in poems and texts by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Proust, memories are reflected by colours, senses of smell and touch, traces of movements that invite cross-modal perception. Cabassi reports from telling case examples. Critical elements are partly described in Stern’s terms of amodal perception, affect attunement, and protonarrative envelope, and in Bråten’s terms of felt immediacy, e-motional memory, and altercentric participation. They have been seen to afford cues for counselling and psychotherapy in two cases of perturbed infant-parent relationship and circular re-enactment from which Cabassi reports. Birgit Kirkebaek (this volume (15)) specifies how music give rise to comovements during interplay between a singer, beating on drums accompanying her singing, and severely disabled or blind deaf children, giving rise to moments of shared experience and movements. With reference to interplay between a musician and the blind and severely hearing impaired boy, Lasse, her contribution

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focuses on the pedagogical significance for special education of the new infant paradigm and of a more open biological orientation. This approach is carried out in various Danish projects involving severely disabled and/or deaf blind children, seeking to establish common experience through improvisation between the child and a musician. She emphasizes that the findings, by Colwyn Trevarthen and other researchers, of a connective link between music and communication offers a promise of helping many children with severe disabilities, afforded behaviouroriented training strategies. This is because an aesthetic approach entails that all expressions be seen and taken seriously. Thus, Kirkebaek’s intervention approach is inter alia influence by the emphasis on musical movements, which Benjaman Schögler pursues with Colwyn Trevarthen (this volume (16), in their contribution on infants’ voices and jazz, on singing and dancing together. They are concerned with simple acts of musicality – the expressive movements of music, their perception, and their power to create, communicate and consolidate narratives of meaning in human worlds. They point out how spontaneous musical expression is created and appreciated in mother-infant play, and give several beautiful examples of the inherent musicality in early protoconversation. They further report the results of musical acoustic analysis of vocal records, interpreting the findings in terms of communicative musicality and co-movements. Their basic paradigm for the movement music cycle is illustrated by a concluding illustration of how a gesture or feeling is translated from the score to the mind of the player who brings forth the music and to the body of a dancer. Their leading question is this: There is something measurable in the patterns of communicative flow and expressive behaviour of music and dance that is measurable – what is it and how is it shared and translated between artists? In an experiment set up for singing and gesturing, they report the results in terms of graphs showing the correspondence between recording, with movement in pitch, and corresponding hand movements. Thereby, they examine how improvisations of a single musical narrative, with coherent meaning, may be produced by periodic synchrony of the gestures of jazz players who only hear one another’s intentions and emotions in the recorded instrumental sound. The editor’s concluding comments closes the circle to Stern’s contribution (this volume (2)) concerning the nature and role of the present moment in psychotherapy, and to de Waal’s (this volume (3)) concern with roots of empathy. Here is first offered an account on how occurrences of altruism by toddlers, such as reported by Anna Freud after the second world war, may be rooted in othercentred participation. Then, the question is raised about why abused children may become abusive towards peers and, later, towards younger victims. Finally, certain critical elements in patient-therapist conversations are commented upon and related to Stern’s distinctions and to the three layers of intersubjectivity, distin-

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guished in the prologue (this volume (1)), and in the chapter concluding the first Theory Forum proceedings (Bråten (Ed.) 1998: 272–382). In that collective volume, after having referred inter alia to Damasio (1994), Di Pellegrino et al. (1992), and Le Doux (1993), Trevarthen makes this declaration: The brain mechanisms that represent the human body of the single subject in all its intelligent and emotional activities and states are at the same time very extensive, of ancient linage, and greatly elaborated. The mirror system that enables the expression of other individuals’ bodies to play a part in regulating emotion and rational activity and learning intersubjectively, the ‘virtual other’ mechanism (Bråten 1988a, 1994a, b, this volume) must be similarly extensive. It is interwoven with self-consciousness, and unconscious embodiment of motives, at every level. (Trevarthen 1998: 47)

This Trevarthen voiced in an appendix on infant intersubjectivity and the brain. The present volume may be seen to follow that up, opening windows to (pre)verbal intersubjectivity in light of new findings, including implications of the mirror neurons discovery.

Notes and acknowledgments In addition to grants and administrative assistance from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS), housed by the Academy, in which the Theory Forum symposium underlying the present volume took place, generous grants were also supplied by the Norwegian Research Council, and by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. For assistance in some of the preparation of this volume, I thank Ole Christer Holager Lund, who also assisted me in the technical implementation and running of the symposium, and Thomas Weinholdt, who also helped with picture scanning and processing. I am also indebted to Maxim Stamenov, who has been most helpful with his editorial advices for this volume, including proposals for its trimming. Some of the symposium contributions, not presented here, have been reserved for another collective volume in preparation on Hidden Dimensions of morality, education, and totalitarianism. Oslo, October 12 2006 S.B.

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References Baldwin, J. M. (1891). “Suggestion in infancy.” Science, 17, 113–117. Billard, A., & Arbib, M. (2002). “Mirror neurons and the neural basis for learning by imitation: Computational modeling.” In M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 343–352). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bråten, S. (1988). Dialogic Mind: The Infant and Adult in Protoconversation. In I. M. Carvallo (Ed.), Nature, Cognition and System (pp. 187–205). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bråten, S. (1996). “Infants demonstrate that care-giving is reciprocal.” Centre for Advanced Study Newsletter, 2 (November), 2. Bråten, S. (1997). “What enables infants to give care? Prosociality and learning by altercentric participation.” CAS lecture in The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 4 March 1997. (Printed in S. Bråten: Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn. Dialogue in Infant & Adult. Bergen: Sigma 2000: 231–243.) Bråten, S. (1998). “Infant learning by altercentric participation: the reverse of egocentric observation in autism.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 105–124). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bråten, S. (Ed.). (1998). Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (re-issued as paperback 2006). Bråten, S. (2002). “Altercentric perception by infants and adults in dialogue.” In M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 273–294). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bråten, S., & Gallese, V. (2004). “On mirror neurons systems implications for social cognition and intersubjectivity” (Interview by the journal editors L. T. Westlye and T. Weinholdt). Impuls, 58 (3), 97–107. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: C. P. Putman’s Sons. Di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (1992). “Understanding motor events: A neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research, 91, 176–80. Ferrari, P. F., Gallese, V., Rizzolatti, G., & Fogassi, L. (2003). “Mirror neurons responding to the observation of ingestive and communicative mouth actions in the monkey vertral premotor cortex.” European J Neuroscience, 17 (8), 1703–1714. (Cf. also the abstract by Ferrari and Gallese in Theory Forum Symposium Preproceedings, S. Bråten (Ed.), Oslo: Norwegian Academy of Science, Oct. 3–5 2004: 10.) Fogassi, L., Ferrari, P. F., Chersi, F., Gesierich, B., Rozzi, S., & Rizzolatti, G. (2005). “Parietal Lobe: From Action Undestanding to Intention Understanding.” Science, 308 (29 April), 662–667. Kuhl, P. (1998). “Language, culture and intersubjectivity.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 297–315). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeDoux, J. E. (1993). “Cognitive-emotional interaction in the brain.” Cognition and Emotion, 3, 267–289. Liberman, A. M. (1993). Haskin Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research, 113, 1–32. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Peirce, C. S. (1960). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. V). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piaget, J. (1926/1959). The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge.

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Preston, S. D., & de Waal, F. (2002). “Empathy: Its ultimate and primate basis.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 1–72. Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. (1998). “Language within our grasp.” Trends in Neurosciences, 21 (5), 188–193. Rizzolatti, G., Craighero, L., & Fadiga, L. (2002). “The mirror system in humans.” In M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 37–59). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Stamenov, M. (2002). “Some features that make mirror neuron and human language fairly unique.” In M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 249–271). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stamenov, M., & Gallese, V. (Eds.). (2002). Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2000). “Introduction to the paperback edition.” In D. N. Stern: The Interpersonal World of the Infant (pp. xi–xxxix). New York: Basic Books. (Also London: Karnac 2003.) Stein, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton. Trevarthen, C. (1979). “Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity.” In M. M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before Speech (pp. 321–347). New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1986). “Development of intersubjective motor control in infants.” In M. G. Wade & H. T. A. Whiting (Eds.), Motor Development in Children (pp. 209–261). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Trevarthen, C. (1998). “The concept and foundations of infant intersubjectivity.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 15–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C., Aitken, L., Papoudi, D., & Robarts, J. (1998). Children with Autism (2nd ed.). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. de Waal, F. B. M. (1996). Good Natured. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Prologue From infant intersubjectivity and participant movements to simulation and conversation in cultural common sense Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen University of Oslo / University of Edinburgh

In the last few decades the story of human infancy that has been told by philosophers and medical and psychological sciences has been re-written. In place of the idea that infants are a-social and ego-centric there is a new understanding that a baby is born with a lively talent for interpersonal communion. The indulgent opinion of parents has received abundant confirmation from careful observational research. Thus micro-analyses of proto-conversations with two-month-olds have revealed that infants are endowed with a cerebral system that enables direct perception of interests and feelings in an other person and responsive attunement permitting delicate, emotionally regulated engagements. Like the processes of altercentric participation found by Bråten (1998a, 2002) to be exhibited in early cultural learning situations, probably subserved by the mirror system recently discovered by Rizzolatti and his co-workers and identified in the human brain (Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998), these characteristics break radically with the assumptions in Freudian and Piagetian traditions which implied a long developmental period of de-centration before sociality and intersubjectivity could emerge.

Modes of intersubjectivity Today, based on the empirical findings of the last three decades, we are able to distinguish different layers of intersubjective attunement in human development before language. The innate intersubjectivity defined in the 1970s (Trevarthen 1974, 1979; Bateson 1975, 1979; Stern 1977; Bullowa 1979) helps explain the emergence of the toddler’s appetite for speech in the mother tongue and indeed for intent par-

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ticipation in the learning of all varieties of cultural habits and manners throughout childhood (cf. Bråten 1988, 1998; Bråten & Trevarthen 1994/2000; Dunn 1998; Harris 1998; Hobson 1998); see also Stern’s (2000/2003) new introduction to his 1985-book on The Interpersonal World of the Infant,1 and the literature on cultural learning, especially Bruner 2003; Rogoff 1995). Tracing the growth of communication of purposes and concerns through the first two years has brought a richly nuanced account of how the child uses negotiation with other persons’ awareness and intentions in the world to grasp meaning (cf. Halliday and others). The following summarises the key steps that prepare the way for and support the elaboration of higher-order competences in communication and thinking, including conversational speech, creation of narrative explanations and sharing myths, beliefs and scientific ideas afforded by the ambient parental culture: I.

The primary intersubjective dialogues of protoconversation and reciprocal sympathetic imitation exhibited in the first weeks of life (Bateson, Trevarthen) lead to more lively jokes and games rich in emotions of ’other awareness’ (Reddy). Initiatives are tested in a teasing and provocative way. Affectionate attachments are strengthened by this play and build friendships around habitual ‘formats’ or ‘rituals’ of baby songs and action games (Stern, Bruner) in which the infants learn to take an active part, for example, by an 11-days-old on the nursing table in a dance-like interplay with her mother (recorded 1990 by Bråten). An exchange of imitations and expressions of emotion may be elicited in the first hours after birth (e.g. as recorded 1983 by Kugiumutzakis), the infant showing initiative as well as copying movements, which reveals that imitation to reproduce a movement made by another is but one element in the innate capacity for mutual engagement in two way expression of sympathetic interest (Nagy and Molnár). The mutual mirroring and turn-taking which we find in mature verbal conversation is clearly foreshadowed in these first bouts of sympathetic mimetic play, and the ‘communicative musicality’ entailed in dyadic protoconversation allows to be captured in terms of the parameter of musicality such as ‘pulse’ and ‘quality’ (cf. Malloch & Trevarthen in press). After a few months an infant may show a wider sociability, being capable of engaging concurrently with more than one other.2 II. Secondary intersubjective attunement in a triangular subject-subject-object format (Trevarthen & Hubley 1978) in which objects of joint attention and emotional referencing are brought into play as occurrences of mutual attention within trusting relations of companionship. The infant displays to others of knowledge and skill learned by sharing intentions and interests are animated by emotions of ‘pride’ and ‘shame’. Others’ object-oriented acts elicit participant perception or re-enactment, for example by infants who learn to reciprocate their caregivers’ spoon-feeding before their first birthday (e.g. as

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recorded by Bråten 1996), and sometimes help-oriented co-movements realizing the other’s (failed) intention, as in Trevarthen and Hubley’s example of Tracy under 12 months ‘helping’ her mother move an object aside out of the way. In the final months of the first year the words people use to label people, objects or actions attract attention and invite imitation, then after 14 months or so the gestures and vocalisations of ‘protolanguage’ give way to clear speech. Toddlers soon begin to combine words to predicate linguistically, e.g. “Doggy Wet”; “Ball Roll” (Akhtar & Tomasello 1998) giving voice to shared topics and meanings found in joint and mutual awareness. III. Tertiary intersubjective understanding (Bråten & Trevarthen 1994/2000) in conversational and narrative speech, entailing predication and a sense of verbal or narrative self and other in first-order modes of symbolic communication, and (from 3 to 6 years) second-order understanding of others’ minds and emotion (theory or simulation of mind) opens for perspective-taking and emotional absorption, even in fictional others, for self-other dialoguing in dramas of narrative imagination, for simulation of conversation partners’ minds, and for listeners completing the speaker’s aborted statements by virtue of other-centred participation (Bråten 2002). We stress the importance of the social-emotional roots and nurture of the development of dialogical competence and consciousness. The emotions supported in affectionate engagements between adult and infants, and soon between peers and with other acquaintances of all ages, are essential to the regulation of normal brain development to the development of the mind’s dialogical and creative consciousness, and thus to the common sense of cultural awareness. Emotions are not merely responsible for the natural control of instinctive appetites and aversions that serve immediate survival of the body or give regularity to the baby’s feeding and sleep-wake cycles. Emotions that generate the expression in the separate brains of mother and baby can come together in a confluence of affect that develops an organization of its own – an organization moreover that is also reflected in the self-other organization of the developing mind. The shifting between dialogical competence and consciousness manifests itself in intersubjective attunement at various levels – from confluence of affect at the primary level to advanced selfother simulation and constructions at a more advanced level involving internal self-creative and dialogical circles of complementary self-other perspectives. Thus, a major point here is that such higher-order achievements continue to be supported by capacities and competencies unfolding in the primary and secondary steps or layers, which continue to be operational and supportive throughout life, like the various senses of self distinguished in the multi-layered model by Stern (1985/2000). The kind of mutually fulfilling processes that we have found to be exhibited in early protoconversation and cultural learning situations be-

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fore the first year’s birthday may be seen to resemble the key characteristics of higher-order speech conversation. For example, teenagers in face-to-face conversation often reflect one another’s gestures in much the same way that we observe in early infant-adult interaction, and sometimes complete one another’s speech acts akin to patterns manifested also in preverbal object-oriented manual interplay. In dialogue, for example, between speech-competent participants, the “attunement to the attunement of the other” (Rommetveit 1998: 360) appears to be prepared for by the mutual, dance-like interplay which we can observe already in the first weeks after birth. That fact that neonates, 45 minutes old or even younger, can imitate facial gestures of the adults to whom they are exposed is evidence of such early readiness for immediate contact with others. Of course other non-verbal forms of adult human communion share the same vital principles and rhythmic foundations, and these are especially clear in ritual performances, drama, music and dance (see Schögler & Trevarthen this volume (16)). In the following we offer a succinct characterization of some of the operating characteristics pertaining to the various steps or layers.

(I) Newborns’ imitation and protoconversation in the first weeks and months. Most parents and caretakers have experienced how their babies in the first months of life complement them in a finely tuned interplay of mutual fulfilling and followup of gestures and expressions. Even in the first weeks after birth mother and child can achieve such coordination of expressions and movements in a sort of circular dance of mutually completing and inter-woven bodily motions. There is a primary intersubjective attunement in a reciprocal subject-subject format of protoconversation and interpersonal communion, in which participants attend and attune to one another’s emotive expressions and gesture- and sound- producing movements, inviting semblant re-enactment and affect attunement, beginning soon after birth and preparing for and supporting higher-order competencies later in life. For example, pertaining to vocal imitation and speech development, some 45 minutes-olds may attempt to imitate /a/, and 20 weeks-olds /a/, /u/ and /i/). At 6 weeks or earlier infants engage with adults in reciprocal protoconversation. In their early speech perception infants are beginning to ‘prune’ sounds from their perceptual space that make no sense in the ambient language (Kuhl 1998; Conboy & Kuhl this volume). In the first weeks after birth infants have been documented by experimental studies to imitate a variety of gestures, such as tongue protrusion, brow motions, and head rotation, finger movements, gestural features used to express surprise, delight and boredom, and vocal (vowel) productions. Most dramatic is perhaps the video documentations by Kugiumutzakis (1983, 1998: 74) of how neonates in the first hour after birth attempt to come up with a semblant response, match-

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ing his mouth and brow gestures. Inviting even vocal imitation, respectively, of the sounds /a/, /m/ and /ang/, newborns (ranging from 14 to 42 minutes of age) tried to produce a matching /a/, while failing with respect to the other invited sounds. Trying hard to emit the sound, accompanied by stretching hand movements and closed eyes, the result was usually an intense explosion of a prolonged and unstructured /a/-sound. Evidence has been obtained of infants’ musical listening and natural preference for musical features of the voice. Even a premature newborn baby may actively contribute to the precise rhythmic exchange of vocal songs with a songlike regulation of pitch and timbre (Trevarthen 1993; Malloch 1999). Speech to infants in different languages has universal rhythmic and prosodic features, and rising pitch contours elicit and maintain infant attention more than falling pitch. Unlike the sharply rising pitch contour in maternal vocalization that alerts the infant, the pitch is low and continuous in comforting (Fernald 1992; Papousek 1994). There is a precise regulation of the pitch of a mother’s voice and the infants have an innate preference for the range of a happy mother’s speech no matter what language she speaks.

(II) Object-oriented learning by participant participation. When objects of joint attention and emotional referencing are brought into play, a window is opened around nine months of age for imitative learning of object-manipulation. Bråten (1996) has documented that infants can reciprocate spoon-feeding before their first year’s birthday – for instance a baby boy (11 3/4 month), when allowed to take the spoon in his own hand, reciprocates his big sister’s spoon-feeding, and even opens his own mouth in the process. When infants reciprocate in this manner they demonstrate that while having been previously spoon-fed they have not just participated by receiving and eating the food, but actually having virtually partaken in the caregiver’s spoon-feeding from the caregiver’s stance. This entails simulation by altercentric participation in the other’s act, similar to what occurs when the caregiver unwittingly opens his or her mouth when the baby opens the mouth to receive the food. Their circular re-enactment of what they have experienced as recipients of spoon-feeding show that they must have been able to participate in the feeder’s movements from the feeder’s stance – the very reverse of what is seen from an outside, egocentric stance in such face-to-face situations. In order for infants to be able reciprocate the spoon-feeding they must have been able to virtually partake in their caregivers’ previous spoon-feeding activity as if they were co-authors of the feeding, even though their caregivers have been the actual authors. This is the defining criteria of learning by altercentric participation (Bråten 1998 this volume (7)). In almost the same vein we may regard the 18 month old in Meltzoff ’s behavioral re-enactment design. Watching the model failing to pull the dumbbell apart,

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the child, when handed the dumbbell, pulls it apart, usually with a triumphant smile. Here is demonstrated the child’s capacity to “read the model’s intention” (Meltzoff & Moore 1998: 50–52), but there is more involved, and which may be specified in terms of other-centred participation: From having virtually participated in the model’s effort, evoking simulated completion of the attempted act, there is circular re-enactment by the child, successfully realizing the target act. By merely watching someone aiming for the target, they show that they can realize the unrealized target, from e-motional memory of mental simulation circuits evoked by participant perception of the model’s effort. Again, these are also operating processes characteristic of verbal conversation.

(III) Intersubjective understanding in narrative and conversational contexts. In both of the above occurrences, in the case of spoon-feeding and the case of realizing an unrealized attempted target act, we see processual mechanisms in operation which resemble and probably support processes in verbal conversation. Here are parallels of the conversational efficiency demonstrated in verbal dialogues later in ontogeny. For example, you may be listening to a conversational partner who is in the process of making a verbal utterance who, before the utterance is completed, appears to hesitate or to be at loss for the right words, and without hesitation you supply the words, completing the utterance of the speaker, who is silently nodding or confirming with just a “yes” your verbal completing of the other’s half-made utterance. Analogue to the spoon-feeding situation: when mouth movements of the feeder – infant or adult – reflect the corresponding mouth movements of the one being fed we may see a parallel here also to the virtual participation exhibited by partners in verbal conversation, co-enacting one another’s complementary acts and sometimes completing one another’s utterances by virtue of simulating the production, much as the toddler does in the above behavioural re-enactment design. From about 3 to 6 years of age, then, is manifested meta-understanding of other’s understanding entailing second-order mental understanding of thoughts and emotions in self and other in virtue of recursive mental simulation of mental processes in others – beginning with discovery of deceit and attribution of false beliefs, and with co-narrative fictional constructions with peers, and enabling the child listening to a story to take the point-of-view of the main character, e.g. as demonstrated by Harris (1998) and by Rall and Harris (2000). This pertains to the qualitative leap to children’s simulation or theory of mind, correlating with their verbal and conversational ability and entailing second-order understanding of others’ thoughts and emotions. It seems reasonable to assume that a mirror system for matching or simulating others’ acts may afford a precursory and nurturing path to simulation of other minds (cf. Bråten 1998a, b; Gallese & Goldman 1998; Bråten & Gallese 2004), and that such preverbal ca-

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pacity for virtual participation in what others are doing are likely to support the kind of inner feedback loops defined by Bråten’s (1974) conversational simulation of mind model, illustrating how dialogue partners simulating one another’s verbal production and understanding.

Musicality in communication before language Musicality manifests its fundamental features in the cultivated expressive ways human bodies move, and also in the ways that infants behave in interaction with the rhythmic expressions of motive force in the vocalizations and gestures of other human beings. A newborn knows the mother by the tone and inflections of her voice. When a six-month-old smiles with recognition of a favourite song, and bounces with the beat, it is like knowing his or her name, displaying a social ’me’ within the family’s affectionate pleasure of sharing.” (Trevarthen 2002: 21). It has been found that happy mothers vocalize through the octave above middle C, and that a depressed mother’s speech, which fails to engage a young infant’s interest, falls below this range. Like the rhythm of steps is to the pulse of dance, the musical pitch range and its expressive modulations in song appear to be innate attributes of human vocal communication. Music seeks and invite the experience of moving and expressing life in sound, and its singing and voice-like sound also appeal to affectionate moral sentiments that draws us into empathic fellow feelings and moving in sympathy (Panksepp & Bernatsky 2002). For many years the Papouseks and Daniel Stern and his colleagues have, in different ways, brought our attention to the ‘musicality’ of expressions in communication with infants. The Papouseks (1981) identified musical forms of expression produced intuitively by parents and infants with motivation for cultural learning. Stern (1985) identified the ‘affect attunement’ of a mother’s voice with the essential affectionate support that an infant depends upon for development of a secure and expressive personality. An inner sense of time, of kairos, not chronos, is seen in the spontaneous activity of a newborn baby in calm control of the energy of moving, ‘in the present moment’ (Stern 2004). The baby’s body moves rhythmically and in flowing cycles of effort. It shows the measured hierarchy of rhythms of a central motor control, which has been labeled the Intrinsic Motive Pulse (IMP). The senses – stimulated among the muscles and joints of the baby’s limbs and inside the body, as well as in special exteroceptive organs that respond to energy patterns reflected back from the environment – ride on the movement, efficiently absorbing effects of pressure, touch, sight and sound. Reflex startles only occasionally break the pattern when there is an invasion of unexpected, unassimilated, stimulation. Observations of infants’ active participation in mothers’ nursery songs and body games show how interested they are and how willingly the babies move with

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the music. Mazokopaki and Trevarthen (2007) report that an infant of 6 months will still on hearing music, orient, smile and then join in with rhythmic movements as he or she ‘picks up’ the music. Infants of 3 or 4 months and more learn songs quickly, move to them, and demonstrate to familiar others their pride in being able to act with the rhythms and melodies. Malloch (1999) has demonstrated that the sounds of a recorded protoconversation between a 6-week-old Scottish girl, Laura, and her mother could be analyzed in rigorous musical acoustic terms of rhythmic base, qualitative control of melodic expression in pitch and timbre, phrasing of utterances with bar structure, and progression over tens of seconds in narrative cycles of energy and excitement. (cf. also Schögler & Trevarthen this volume). The mutual attunement and musical ways in which the infant and the adult in protoconversation or in a conversation-like dance resonate with one another and complete or fulfil one another’s sounds and moves, attest to ‘the muse within’ (Björkvold 1992) and may be compared to some of the characteristics of intimate verbal conversations in which the partners complete one another’s utterances.

Neurophysiological support and questions about phylogeny When the listener completes the talker’s speech act and when the feeder’s mouth movements match the recipient’s mouth movements, their virtual participation is overtly manifested. The partial neurophysiological support of such feats has now been discovered. The discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ and the electrophysiological experimental evidences of a mirror system in the human brain inform about the kind of neurophysiological system, a virtual mirror system, that is the likely support of the above processes of participant perception. The mirror neurons, first found in macaque monkeys to discharge both when another is observed grasping a piece of food and when the monkey is preparing for grasping the piece by itself, subserve a system that appear to match the act perceived done by another individual with a semblant, internally generated enactment in the perceiver (cf. Di Pellegrino et al. 1992; Fadiga et al. 1995; and contributions by Rizzolatti, Fadiga, and others in Stamenov & Gallese (Eds.) 2002). Further experimental evidence suggests that such a system exists also in humans, in the brain region that contains Broca’s area (which not only serves speech, but appears to come active during execution and imagery of hand movement and tasks involving hand-mental rotation). Identifying such a mirror neurons system enabling observed enactment to be matched to semblant, internally generated enactment in the observer of that enactment, Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) refer to Liberman’s (1993) motor theory of speech perception implying a close link between the production and perception of speech. This is partly

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consistent with what is portrayed in Bråten’s (1974) simulation of mind conversation model of how the listener takes a part in the speaker’s production process, and which would presuppose the operational subservience of such a mirror system.

Implications for the evolution of speech? Rizzolatti and Arbib suggest that usage of ‘mirror neurons’ may mark the beginning of intentional communication in human phylogeny, the first primitive dialogue, as it were, in which the matching mirror system enables intentional meaning to be assigned to the other’s observed act by virtue of evoking a matching enactment in the observer. They refer to Donald’s (1991) assumption about mimesis as precursor to language, and speculate on the sequence of events that might have led from gestural communication to speech. It is likely, they state, that the human capacity to communicate beyond that of other primates depended on the progressive evolution of the mirror system in its globality. Following up this, Gallese and Stamenov suggest that with the primate premotor cortex as the common ground, an evolutionary continuity to language skill may be traced from pre-language arm- and hand-manual behaviours and, furthermore, that the specialization for language of human Broca’s region appears to emerge from the mirror system, originally serving action understanding (cf. the introduction in Stamenov & Gallese (Eds.) 2002: 1–10). The mirror system has been located to involve human brain areas that subserve speech and mental hand rotation. It has been recorded to be evoked in human subjects when another hand-grasping individual was observed and when the subjects imagined themselves grasping the object without actually moving their hand. It is highly pertinent that Broca’s area which may be involved in the mirror system also become active in tasks involving mental hand rotation. It pertains to the kind of participant mirroring which may be attributed to intimate dialogue partners who mirror one another’s postures and gestures and sometimes complete one another’s utterances. And it pertains to preverbal learning by altercentric participation which may have afforded a distinct selective advantage in hominid and human phylogeny (Bråten 2002, 2004). Donald argues for the transitional role of a mimetic Homo erectus culture towards a narrative (mythic) culture. An evolved capacity for participant perception in face-to-face learning and warning situations, we submit, may have been precursory and supportive of such conversational speech adaptation in human evolution. To infants endowed with the capacity for virtual (other) participation in gesticulating and articulating others, an emerging ambient speech language, perhaps accompanied by a speech-mediated pedagogy, would have afforded opportunities for their beginning to attune themselves by participant speech perception to the prosody and rhythm of the emerging language culture into which they were born.

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In view of what we have uncovered about the ontogenesis of speech, this may be added: While an evolutionary continuity to language skill may be traced from pre-language arm- and hand-manual behaviours, there appears to be a somewhat similar continuity also in early ontogeny; i.e. from manual action learning and understanding to conceptual comprehension and mental understanding. While the phylogenetic specialization for language appears to emerge from an ancient mechanism, the mirror system, originally serving only early action learning and action understanding in human evolution, that system became critical in Hominid and Human evolution for subserving processes in preverbal learners and verbal dialogue partners for altercentric mirroring and participation. One may venture the speculation that the phylogenetic steps towards speechmediated teaching and learning may in certain respect parallel the ontogenetic steps (I, II, III) delimitated above – from intersubjective participation in an immediate sense to higher order modes of intersubjective understanding mediated by thought, language and symbolic communication. This blurs the distinction, however, between a speech community evolving as a co-created novelty and as environmentally given in ontogeny to those born into the speech community, nurturing the impressive speech learning capacity of the very young. While societal evolution from phylogeny has involved the generation of new cultural lifeworlds in new domains never before entertained, the child is born into the peculiar rhythms and musical sounds of a language culture that already exists, nurturing the self-creative transitions from consensual communion to symbolic, narrative communication. This would not have been as efficient, we may now claim, were it not supported by an innate, preverbal virtual-other mechanism enabling participant speech perception, and subserved by a phylogenetically afforded and adapted resonant mirror system.

Notes . While having previously taken exception to Trevarthen’s (1979) attribution of primary intersubjectivity to early infancy, Daniel Stern (2000), in his new introduction to the paperback edition of The Interpersonal World of the Infant, makes this declaration of a shift in his position: In light of new evidence of other-centered participation shown by infants in their many forms of imitation, as well as the new findings on mirror neurons and adaptive oscillators, I am now convinced that early forms of intersubjectivity exist almost from the beginning of life. (Stern 2000: xxii) Such recent evidences, he declares, “suggest that, probably from the beginning of life, infants have the capacity for what Bråten (1998) terms altero-centric participation or what Trevarthen has long called primary intersubjectivity” (Stern 2000: xx). . Engagements with more than one may entail experience that leads to complex emotional regulations that according to Selby and Bradley may establish immediate preferences and aversions

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between infant participants in triads, which per formal graph theoretical definition cannot be anything but imbalanced, entailing a dyadic relation + one excluded from that dyad. Even in the infant-mother-father triad an initial imbalance may come to be at play dependent, of course, upon the nature and degree of active parent participation.

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Bruner, J. (1995) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bullowa, M. (Ed.). (1979). Before Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (1992). “Understanding motor events: A neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research, 91, 176–180. Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dunn, J. (1998). “Siblings, emotion and the development of understanding.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 158–168). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Pavesi, G., & Rizzolatti, G. (1995). “Motor facilitation during action observation: A magnetic stimulation study”. Journal of Neurophysiology, 73, 2603–2611. Fernald, A. (1992). “Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals.” In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Toby (Eds.), Adapted Mind (pp. 391–426). New York: Oxford University Press. Gallese, V., & Goldman, A. (1998). “Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mindreading.” Trends in Cognitive Science, 2 (12), 293–450. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language. London: Edward Arnold. Harris, P. (1998). “Fictional Absorption: Emotional response to make-believe.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 336–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, R. Peter (1998). “The intersubjective foundations of thought.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 283–296). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kugiumutzakis, G. (1998). “Neonatal imitation in the intersubjective companion space.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 63–88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhl, P. (1998). “Language, culture and intersubjectivity: The creation of shared perception.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 297– 315). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liberman, A. M. (1993). Haskin Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research, 113, 1–32. Malloch, S. (1999). “Mother and infants and communicative musicality.” In I. Deliège (Ed.), Rhythms, Musical Narrative, and the Origins of Human Communication. Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue, 1999–2000 (pp. 29–57). Liège, Belgium: European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Mazokopaki, K., & Trevarthen, C. (2007). “Infants’ rhythms: Moving in the absence and presence of music”. In S. Malloch & C. Trevarthen (Eds.), Communicative Musicality: Narratives of Expressive Gesture and Being Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press (in preparation). Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1998). “Infant intersubjectivity: Broadening the dialogue to include imitation, identity and intention.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 47–62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagy, E., & Molnár, P. (2004). “Homo imitans or Homo provocans? Human imprinting model of neonatal imitation.” Infant Behaviour and Development, 27 (1), 54–63. Panksepp, J., & Bernatzky, G. (2002). “Emotional sounds and the brain: The neuro-affective foundations of musical appreciation.” Behavioural Processes, 60, 133–155.

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Papousek, H., & Papousek, M. (1987). “Intuitive parenting: a dialectic counterpart to the infant’s integrative competence.” In H. R. Schaffer (Ed.), Handbook of Infant Development (pp. 67– 85). London: Academic Press. Rall, J., & Harris, P. (2000). “In Cinderella’s slippers. Story comprehension from the protagonist’s point of view.” Development Psychology, 36, 202–208. Reddy, V. (2003). “On being the object of attention: Implications for self-other consciousness.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (9), 397–402. Rogoff, B. (2003). The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rizzolatti, G., Camarda, R., Fogassi, M., Gentilucci, M., Luppino, G., & Matelli, M. (1988). “Functional organization of interior area 6 in the macaque monkey”. Experimental Brain Research, 71, 491–507. Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. (1998). “Language within our grasp.” Trends in Neurosciences, 21 (5), 188–193. Rizzolatti, G., Craighero, L., & Fadiga, L. (2002). “The mirror system in humans”. In M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 37–59). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rommetveit, R. (1998). “Intersubjective attunement and linguistically mediated meaning in discourse.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 354–371). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selby, J. M., & Bradley, B. S. (2003). “Infants in groups: A paradigm for study of early social experience.” Human Development, 46, 197–221. Stamenov, M., & Gallese, V. (Eds.). (2002). Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2000). “Introduction to the paperback edition.” In D. N. Stern (Ed.), The Interpersonal World of the Infant (pp. xi–xxxix). New York: Basic Books. (Also: London: Keaton 2003). Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton. Trevarthen, C. (1974). “Conversation with a two-month-old.” New Scientist, 2, 230–235. Trevarthen, C. (1979). “Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity.” In M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before Speech (pp. 227–270). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1980). “The Foundations of Intersubjectivity.” In D. Olson (Ed.), The Social Foundation of Language and Thought (pp. 316–242). New York: Norton and Co. Trevarthen, C. (1986). “Development of intersubjective motor control in infants.” In M. G. Wade & H. T. A. Whiting (Eds.), Motor Development. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Trevarthen, C. (1988). “Infants trying to talk: How the child invites communication from the human world.” In R. Söderbergh (Ed.), Children’s Creative Communication (pp. 9–31). Lund: Lund University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1989). “Origins and directions for the concept of infant intersubjectivity.” SRCD Newsletter, Autumn, 1–4. Trevarthen, C. (1990a). “Signs before speech.” In T. A. Sebeok & J. Umiker-Sebeok (Eds.), The Semiotic Web (pp. 689–755). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Trevarthen, C. (1990b). “Growth and education in the hemispheres.” In C. Trevarthen (Ed.), Brain Circuits and Functions of the Mind: Essays in Honours of Roger Sperry (pp. 334–357). New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1992a). “Emotions of human infants and mothers and development of brain.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15 (3), 524–525.

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Trevarthen, C. (1992b). “An infant’s motives for speaking and thinking in the culture.” In A. H. Wold (Ed.), The Dialogical Alternative (pp. 99–138). Oslo: Scandinavian University Press/Oxford University Press (distr.). Trevarthen, C. (1993). “The self born in intersubjectivity: An infant communicating.” In U. Neisser (Ed.), The Perceived Self (pp. 121–173). New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1998). “The concept and foundations of infant intersubjectivity.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 15–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (2002). “Origins of musical identity: Evidence from infancy for musical social awareness.” In R. A. R. Mac Donald, D. J. Hargreaves, & D. Meill (Eds.), Musical Identities (pp. 21–38). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trevarthen, C., & Hubley, P. (1978). “Secondary intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding, and acts of meaning in the first year.” In J. Lock (Ed.), Action, Gesture, and Symbol (pp. 183–229). London: Academic Press. Trevarthen, C., Aitken, K. J., Papoudi, D., & Robarts, J. Z. (1998). Children with Autism (2nd ed.). London: Jessica Kingsley. Trevarthen, C., & Schögler, B. (2004). “On musicality: Learning it’s meaning from infants’ voices and jazz.” Draft for the Theory Forum Symposium on (Pre)verbal Intersubjectivity in Light of New Findings. The Norwegian Academy of Science, Oslo, October 3–5.

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Applying developmental and neuroscience findings on other-centred participation to the process of change in psychotherapy Daniel N. Stern University of Geneva / Cornell University Medical School

Introduction There must exist mechanisms for phenomena such as sympathy, empathy, identification, imitation, internalization, “reading” other’s intentions, psychological intimacy, etc. – intersubjectivity, in general. In this volume, we will learn of recent neuroscientific findings that suggest mechanisms for these phenomena. We are also offered developmental accounts of the capacity for these various forms of intersubjectivity. I will briefly review these two, by way of introducing them, and as a necessary background for viewing the change process in psychotherapy as seen in the light of what we now know about other-centred participation. There are a host of related phenomena that can be observed or felt when human beings interact: resonance, empathy, identification, imitation, internalization, “reading” other’s intentions, affect attunement, social referencing, and other-centred participation, etc. These can, perhaps, be pulled together as various forms of sympathy and of intersubjectivity. Without these forms of sympathy and intersubjectivity it is impossible to imagine a number of phenomena, such as: basic social skills; harmonious affective interactions; language acquisition; the development of moral emotions and morality; children’s play that involves jokes, tricks, fooling around, and lying; highly coordinated spontaneous group behaviour; the possibility of psychotherapy; the psychic intimacy involved in friendship; and in falling in love. And that is only a very partial list. Life would be barren, indeed. The capacity for sympathy and intersubjectivity also seems to be required for mental health in general. It is suggested that several forms of psychopathology such as sociopathologies, some personality disturbances, forms of schizophrenia, and autism, come about, in part, through deficits in these capacities.

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The symposium giving rise to this volume has been devoted to exploring the mechanisms that underlie these capacities. To set the stage for this exploration, I will give a brief overview of the situation from a philosophical, neuroscientific, developmental and clinical viewpoint.1

On philosophy of intersubjectivity The philosophers have recognized the profound importance of and necessity for sympathy and intersubjectivity in humans for a very long time. Until relatively recently, in the modern scientifically oriented west, we have isolated the mind from the body, from nature, and most importantly for our purposes here, from other minds. It was thought that each mind has to be constructed privately and perhaps quite idiosyncratically, from within. We are now experiencing a revolution. The new view assumes that the mind is always embodied in and made possible by the sensori-motor activity of the body. That it is interwoven with and co-created by the environment that immediately surrounds it, which includes the intentions, desires, feelings, actions, sounds of other minds. And that it is constituted and maintained by way of its interactions with other minds. Without these constant interactions there would be no recognizable mind. This leads to the view that the mind is, by nature, “intersubjectively open, since it is partially constituted through its interaction with other minds (see Husserl 1960, for an earlier philosophical position; Zahavi 1996, 2001, for a more recent one). What this means is that human beings possess a mental primitive described as, the passive (not voluntarily initiated), pre-reflected experience of the other as an embodied being like oneself...” (Thompson 2001: 12). Intersubjectivity is not simply a capacity, it is a condition of humanness from the phenomenological point of view.

Neuroscience findings Neuroscientific evidence is rapidly accumulating that appears to support the basic notions arrived at by phenomenologists. One crucial finding is the discovery of “mirror neurons”. These provide possible neurobiological mechanisms for understanding aspects of sympathy and intersubjectivity (Gallese et al. 1996; Gallese & Goldman 1998; Gallese 2001; Rizzolatti et al. 1996; Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998; Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese 2001). Mirror neurons sit adjacent to motor neurons. They fire in an observer who is doing nothing but watching another person behave (e.g., reaching for a glass). And the pattern of firing in the observer mimics the pattern that the observer would use if he were reaching for that glass, himself. In brief, the visual infor-

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mation received when watching another act gets mapped on to the equivalent motor representation in our own brain by the activity of these mirror neurons. It permits us to directly participate in another’s actions, without having to imitate them. We experience the other as if we were executing the same action, or feeling the same emotion. This “participation” in another’s mental life creates a sense of feeling/sharing with/understanding them, and in particular their intentions and feelings. I am purposely using the term feelings instead of affects so as to include sentiments, sensory sensations and motor sensations, along with classical Darwinian affects. Clearly, the mirror neuron system takes us further in understanding (at the neural level) resonance, empathy, sympathy, identification, other-centred participation and intersubjectivity. This story is not yet over. At this point, the evidence for such a resonance system seems to apply to hand, mouth, face and foot actions, as well as for vocal sounds. There is another feature of this system. It is particularly sensitive to goaldirected actions, i.e. movements with a readily inferable intention. Even more, the perception of an attributable intention seems to have its own brain localization – a sort of intention detecting centre (Blakemore & Decety 2001). For example, the intention-detector brain centre will get activated if the action, in its context, seems to have an intention. If the exact same movement is seen but in another context where no intention can be attributed, the brain centre will not activate. The longstanding idea of a human tendency of mind to perceive and interpret the human world in terms of intentions is strengthened by such findings. And the reading of another’s intentions is cardinal to intersubjectivity. There is another finding that may serve as a mechanism for partially understanding sympathy and intersubjectivity. To resonate with someone, the two of you may have to be in synch. Either you could move in synchrony, as one may see lovers do as they sit across a table and simultaneously approach and withdraw their faces from one another, and start to move their hands together at the same instant. The discovery of adaptive oscillators may provide a clue. These oscillators act like clocks within our body. They can be reset, rapidly, over and over, and their rate of firing can be adjusted to match the rate of an incoming stimulation. These inner clocks use the real time properties of incoming signals (e.g. from someone handing you a dish) to “set” your adaptive oscillators, so that they immediately bring their own rate of neural firing into synch with the periodicity of the incoming signal (Torras 1985; Port & van Gelder 1995). The result is that the outreaching arm of the person drying the dishes will be perfectly coordinated in time with the outreaching hand of the person handing over the dish. David Lee has devised elegant models, tau theory, to describe how this kind of dyadic coordination and synchrony could occur (Lee 1998).

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The need for some such mechanism is evident when one thinks about the extraordinary temporal coordination human beings and animals are capable of. Think how easy it is for us to kick a moving soccer ball while we are running, or catch a fly ball on the run. In interpersonal interactions the problems of temporal coordination may be even more complex because we alter trajectories more rapidly and unpredictably than moving balls do. Even so, when moving heads together for a kiss, even a first time, sudden, passionate kiss, we rarely end up breaking our front teeth. There is usually a soft landing. The essential point is that when people move synchronously or in temporal coordination, they are participating in an aspect of the other’s experience.

Developmental findings on intersubjectivity Developmental evidence about sympathy and intersubjectivity pointing in the same direction also continues to accumulate rapidly. Early forms of intersubjectivity can be seen in infants beginning right after birth. This argues for the fundamental nature of the intersubjective matrix we develop in. Several researchers have described intersubjective behaviours in pre-verbal, pre-symbolic infants. This very early manifestation of intersubjectivity speaks to the issue of innateness. Colwyn Trevarthen finds primary intersubjectivity in very young infants by observing the tight mutual coordination of infant and mother behaviour in free play. The timing of their movements, the onset of their facial expressions, their apprehension of the intentions of the other that are anticipated (Trevarthen & colleagues 1974, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1988, 1993, 1995, 1999/2000). For instance, in one experiment, the mother and infant interact via a television setup, so that they are actually in separate rooms but see and hear each other on a monitor as if sitting face-to-face. If a split-second delay in the sound or sight of the behaving mother is experimentally introduced, the infant quickly notices and the interaction breaks up. Correspondence is already expected in inter-human contact. Correspondence is the key word that leads Trevarthen to speak of “primary intersubjectivity”. Early imitation has been another major route to proposing early forms of intersubjectivity (Maratos 1973; Meltzoff & colleagues 1977, 1981, 1985, 1993, 1995, 1999; Kugiumutzakis 1998, 1999). Meltzoff and colleagues began by focusing on neonates imitating actions seen on an experimenter’s face (e.g. sticking the tongue out). How could one explain such behaviours when the infant did not know he had a face or tongue, when he only saw a visual image of the experimenter’s act, yet responded with a motor act guided by his own proprioceptive (not visual) feedback, and that there had been no previous learning trials to establish such an imitation? The answer lay in an early form of intersubjectivity based on cross-modal transfer of form and timing. Other such examples of early imitation were found. Meltzoff

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and colleagues concluded that infants take in something of the other in the act of imitation, which solidifies the sense that the other is “like me”, and “I am like them”. He further speculates that for an infant to learn about (make internal representations of) inanimate objects she must manipulate or mouth them, but to learn about (and represent) people she must imitate them. The infant’s mind uses different channels for people. My colleagues and I have taken a third route, focusing on how a mother can let her infant know that she knows about their inner feeling state (Stern et al. 1984; Stern 1985). For instance, if an infant emitted an affective behaviour after an event, how could the mother let the infant know that she grasped, not simply what the infant did, but what was the feeling the infant experienced that lay behind what he did. The emphasis has shifted from the overt behaviour to the subjective experience underlying it. I proposed “affect attunement,” a form of selective and cross-modal imitation, as the path to sharing inner feeling states, in contradistinction to faithful imitation as the path to sharing overt behaviour. Jaffe et al. (2001) add another piece of suggestive evidence. They show how preverbal infants (four and twelve months) and mothers precisely time the starting, stopping, and pausing of their vocalizations to create a rhythmic coupling and bidirectional coordination of their vocal dialogues. This implies that they have control over not only their own, timing, but have captured that of the other as well. The issue of coordinated timing is obviously central for synchronicity and access to another’s temporal experience. Watson and colleagues (1995) and Gergely and Watson (1999) have found a most fascinating way the infant becomes sensitive to the behaviour and timing of others. They propose that we, and infants, have “innate contingency detection analysers”. Such modules measure the extent to which someone’s behaviour is exactly synchronous with your own. They find that before three months, infants are most interested in events that are perfectly contingent. This would make babies most sensitive to themselves. Between four and six months there is a shift. Infants become most interested in events that are highly but imperfectly contingent with their own behaviour. That is exactly what an interacting other person does. They now become most interested in the behavioural timing of others, using themselves as the standard. There is now a consensus forming that infants are born with minds that are especially attuned to other minds as manifest through their behaviour. This is based in large part on the detection of correspondences in timing, intensity and form that are inter-modally transposable. The result is that from birth on, one can speak of a psychology of mutually sensitive minds.

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The intersubjective matrix Bråten (1998a, b) has pulled together the above developmental evidence in the pre-symbolic infant by coining the term “altero-centred participation”. By this he means that intersubjectivity is available in infancy by virtue of the innate ability to enter into the other’s experience and participate in it. He suggests that the human mind is constructed to encounter “virtual others”. His conclusions fit very well with the presence of an underlying mechanisms of mirror neurons and adaptive oscillators as well as with the thrust of the philosophers’ arguments. After roughly seven to nine months, the scene changes somewhat. The infant becomes capable of a more elaborate form of intersubjectivity, of what Trevarthen and Hubley (1978) have called “secondary intersubjectivity”. (See also Stern 2000, new introduction.) These forms of intersubjectivity, too, are being put in place well before the infant is verbal or symbolic. The sharable mental states start to include goal-directed intentions, focus of attention, affects and hedonic evaluations, and, as before, the experience of action. Each is a partially separate domain of intersubjectivity. The participating in the other’s feelings is only one such domain. There is far more work going on concerning the sharing of the focus of attention in order to triangulate a referent and create the joint framing necessary for language to emerge (Tomasello 2003). The “reading” of intentions deserves a special mention because intention is central to all perspectives on motivated human activity. Some psychological element is needed to push, pull, activate or somehow put events in motion. Intentions go under many guises and variations. In folk psychology, using the examples of journalism and gossip, it is the motive, the “why?” that propels the tale. In psychoanalysis it is the wish or desire. In ethology it is the activated motivation. In cybernetics it is the goal and its value. In narrative theories it can be the desire, or belief, or goal, or motive, or “trouble”. But intentions, in one form or another, in one state of completeness or another, are always there, acting as the engine driving the action forward. We see the human world in terms of intentions (Bruner 1990). And we act in terms of our own. You cannot function with other humans without reading or inferring their motives or intentions. This reading or attributing intentions is our primary guide to responding and initiating action. Inferring intentions in human behaviour appears to be universal. It is a mental primitive. It is how we parse and interpret our human surround. If one is unable to infer the intentions of others, or profoundly uninterested in so doing, they will act outside of the human pale. Autistic people have been assumed to be in this position. So have some schizophrenic patients (see Parnas, Bovet, & Zahavi 2002). The perceiving/inferring intentions in human actions begin early in life. Meltzoff and colleagues have described several situations in which pre-verbal infants

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grasp the intention of someone acting, even when they have never seen the intention fully enacted, i.e. never reaching its intended goal. In such a situation, grasping the intention requires an inference. In one experiment, the pre-verbal infant watches an experimenter pick up an object and “try” to put it into a container. But, the experimenter drops the object en route so it never gets to the intended goal. Later, when the infant is brought back to the scene and given the same material, he picks up the object and directly puts it into the container. In other words, he enacts the action that he assumes was intended, not the one he saw. The infant has chosen to privilege the unseen, assumed intention over the seen, actual action (Meltzoff 1995). Other such experiments make the same point (Meltzoff & Moore 1999). Gergely et al. (1995) and Gergely and Csibra (1997) have performed a related experiment using animated televised cartoons. Here too, the infants when watching the animation, interpret the scene in terms of the intentions they infer rather than the actions they see. (The fact that the objects are animated, i.e. act like people would, is certainly crucial.) Rochat and colleagues have shown the same primacy of inferred intention over seen action in infants even younger, at nine months (Rochat, Morgan, & Carpenter 1997). In any event, the reading of intentions (at whatever developmental level) is possible and necessary from very early in life. At twelve months “social referencing” is seen (Emde & Sorce 1983). A common example is when an infant just learning to walk falls and is surprised but not really hurt. She will look to her mother’s face to “know” what to feel. If the mother expresses fear and concern, the infant will cry. If she smiles, the baby will probably laugh. In other words, in situations of uncertainty or ambivalence, the affect state shown in others is pertinent to how the baby will feel. After eighteen months, when the child becomes verbal, new forms of intersubjectivity start to be quickly added (Astington 1993). As soon as the infant can, herself, do it, feel it, think it, she can probably participate in its being done, felt or thought by others. The breadth of the child’s intersubjectivity only awaits her own development. (There is an interesting unanswered question here. Could an infant participate in another’s experience even before she could do it herself? This is a legitimate question because, as a rule in development, receptive capacities appear before productive ones.) During childhood, cognitive psychology assumes that children acquire a more general “Theory of Mind”, i.e. they develop a more formal capacity to represent mental states in others. There are several versions of Theory of Mind in children that are currently debated (e.g., Leslie 1987; Harris 1989; Hobson 2002; Hobson & Lee 1999; Fodor 1992; Goldman 1992; Baron-Cohen et al. 1993; Baron-Cohen 1995; Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997). A major point of contention is to what extent the ability to represent other minds is a formal cognitive process, or must it rely on resonance or simulation that permits some kind of direct feeling access to the others’

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experience. Certainly, each could reinforce the other as development proceeds. But I can not imagine any fundamental base for intersubjectivity without resonance, by whatever mechanism. In the last analysis, it is about feeling, not cognition. There are two other points worth mentioning. Two-way intersubjectivity (“I know (feel), that you know (feel), that I know (feel)”) requires some kind of recursive participation in, or representation of the other’s mind. Theory of Mind may be helpful in such considerations, at least after infancy. For instance, one-way intersubjectivity (“I know (feel) that you...”) may not require a theory of mind. However, the intersubjective reiteration necessary for two-way intersubjectivity may be greatly enhanced by a theory of mind when it develops later. (The sharp distinction I have drawn between one-way and two-way intersubjectivity is too sharp, especially in practice. In the majority of situations it is more fruitful to think in terms of degrees of symmetry and asymmetry, where these represent the poles of a spectrum. There is also the question of, can you participate in the non-conscious experience of another? Many clinical notions would have to answer yes.) I believe that many Theory of Mind theorists set too strict criteria of when a true Theory of Mind can be assumed, often using the ability to represent false beliefs in others as the sole and ultimate criterion (around five years). Yet, Judy Dunn’s (1999) and Vasu Reddy’s (1991, 2002) work, on younger children’s joking, teasing, tricking and being mean to each other would suggest that even earlier forms of Theory of Mind are frequently seen in natural and not necessarily verbal settings. In brief, the developmental evidence suggests that beginning at birth the infant enters into an intersubjective matrix. This is assured because basic forms of intersubjectivity are manifest right away. As new capacities are developed and new experiences come available they will be swept into the intersubjective matrix, which has its own ontogenesis. The breadth and complexity of this matrix expands rapidly, even during the first year of life when the infant is still pre-symbolic and pre-verbal. Then, as the infant reaches the second year and is capable of new experiences, such as, for example, the “moral” emotions of shame, guilt and embarrassment, these will get drawn into the intersubjective matrix, as something he can now experience within himself and in others. Intersubjective richness expands again with the advent of more developed cognitive capacities during childhood. And again, at each phase of our life course development the intersubjective matrix grows deeper and richer.

Some clinical implications: Now moment and moment of meeting Some clinical observations point in the same direction as the above mentioned work. Autistic people continue to amaze. What strikes one most about autism,

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is that they do not appear to be immersed in an intersubjective matrix. There appears to be a failure of “mind-reading” – a massive failure of intersubjectivity. They appear to be “mind blind” which makes autists often appear odd, or other worldly. The existence of autism, is not in itself evidence for the intersubjective matrix. However, the picture of people living without being immersed in an intersubjective matrix gives a perspective on the matrix we normally live in. This matrix is like oxygen. We breath it all the time without noticing its presence, until it is no longer there. When confronted with autism, we can sense the world suddenly without oxygen, and it is a shock. In a different clinical vein, the Boston Change Process Study Group (Boston CPSG),2 of which I am a member, has examined psychotherapy micro-analytically to identify points of change. We have come to view the therapeutic process as being guided by the need to constantly orient the intersubjective field between the two partners. This orienting, reorienting, questioning and validating, second by second, the immediate status quo of the intersubjective field provides the infrastructure of the sessions (Stern et al. 1998; Tronick et al. 1998; Boston CPSG, report No. 3, 2003; Boston CPSG report No 4, 2004; Stern 2004). Perhaps even more pertinent, major moments of change in psychotherapy are brought about through moments of sympathy and implicitly grasped intersubjectively. This is so even in talking therapies. We have found and identified these two kinds of present moment to play a significant role – now moment and moment of meeting. The key notion is that in psychotherapy certain moments emerge that call into question the current status of the working relationship between therapist and client (for good or ill). These moments, called “now moments”, are a sort of “moment of truth” or of Kairos. They create a mini-crisis needing resolution. Such moments are largely unpredictable and remain in the domain of what is implicitly known. They are emergent properties of two minds interacting. They are resolved by “moments of meeting”. These involve a moment of mutual other-centred participation in which both partners create and undergo a joint experience. The experience is of short duration: seconds, subjectively a present moment. This resonant experience enlarges the intersubjective field between them which then opens up new possibilities for exploration. A qualitative leap is accomplished. A change has occurred. Objectively, such present moments may last from one to ten seconds; subjectively, they are what the participants experience as an uninterrupted now.

In summary Understanding the nature of sympathy and intersubjectivity promises to have a profound effect on how we understand human nature at the levels of brain and

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mind, and how we view their development. It also provides pertinent glimpses into mental health.

Notes . Portions of this overview have been taken from The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. D. N. Stern, 2004. . The members of the Boston CPSG are Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Alec Morgan, Jeremy Nahum, Lou Sander, and myself.

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Gallese, V. (2001). “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis. From Mirror neurons to empathy.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5–7, 33–50. Gergely, G., Nadsasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Biro, S. (1995). “Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age.” Cognition, 56, 165–193. Gergely, G., & Csibra, C. (1997). “Teleological reasoning in infancy: The infant’s naive theory of rational action. A reply to Premack and Premack.” Cognition, 63, 227–233. Gergely, G., & Watson, J. S. (1999). “Early social-emotional development: Contingency perception and the social biofeedback model.” In P. Rochat (Ed.), Early Social Cognition (pp. 101–136). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Goldman, A. (1992). “In defence of the simulation theory.” Mind and Language, 7, 104–119. Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1998). Words, Thoughts and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harris, P. (1989). Children and Emotion. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hobson, R. P., & Lee, A. (1999). “Imitation and identification in autism.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 40, 649–659. Hobson, R. P. (2002). The Cradle of Thought. London: Pan Macmillan. Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations (transl. Dorian Cairns). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kugiumutzakis, G. (1998). “Neonatal imitation in the intersubjective companion space.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication in Early Ontogeny (pp. 63–88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaffe, J., Beebe, B., Feldsteln, S., Crown, S., & Jasnow, M. (2001). “Rhythms of dialogue in early infancy.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 66 (2), Serial No. 264. Kugiumutzakis, G. (1999). “Genesis and development of early human mimesis to facial and vocal models.” In J. Nadel & C. Butterworth (Eds.), Imitation in Infancy (pp. 36–59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, D. N. (1998). “Guiding movements by coupling taus.” Ecological Psychology, 10 (3–4), 221– 250. Leslie, A. M. (1987). “Pretence and representation: The origins of “theory of mind.”” Psychological Review, 94, 412–426. Maratos, O. (1973). The origin and development of imitation in the first six months of life. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Geneva. Meltzoff, A. N. (1981). “Imitation, Intermodal Coordination and Representation in Early Infancy.” In G. Butterworth (Ed.), Infancy and Epistemology (pp. 85–114). Brighton: Harvester Press. Meltzoff, A. N. (1995). “Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by eighteen month-old children.” Developmental Psychology, 3, 838–850. Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1977). “Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates.” Science, 198, 75–78. Meltzoff, A. N., & Gopnik, A. (1993). “The role of imitation in understanding persons and developing a theory of mind.” In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism (pp. 335–366). New York: Oxford University Press. Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1999). “Persons and representations: Why infant imitation is important for theories of human development.” In J. Nadel & G. Butterworth (Eds.), Imitation in Infancy (pp. 9–35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parnas, J., Bovet, P., & Zahavi, D. (2002). “Schizophrenic autism: Clinical phenomenology and pathogenic implications.” World Psychiatry, 1 (3), 131–136.

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Port, R., & van Gelder, T. (Eds.). (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. Reddy, V. (1991). “Playing with other’s expectations: Teasing and mucking about in the first year.” In A. Whiten (Ed.), Natural Theories of Mind (pp. 143–158). Oxford: Blackwell. Reddy, V. (2002). “Sharing humor and laughter in autism and Down’s Syndrome.” British Journal of Psychology (in press). Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. A. (1998). “Language within our grasp.” Trends in Neuroscience, 21, 188–194. Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (2001). “Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action.” Neuroscience Nature Reviews, 2 (9), 661–670. Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (1996). “Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions.” Cognitive Brain Research, 3, 131–141. Rochat, P., Morgan, R., & Carpenter, M. (1997). “Young infants’ sensitivity to movement information specifying social causality.” Cognitive Development, 12, 441–465. Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2000). “New introduction.” The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: W. W. Norton. Stern, D. N., & Gibbon, J. (1978). “Temporal expectancies of social behavior in motherinfant play.” In E. B. Thoman (Ed.), Origins of Infant’s Social Responsiveness. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Stern, D. N., Hofer, L., Haft, W., & Dore, J. (1984). “Affect attunement: The sharing of feeling states between mother and infant by means of intermodal fluency.” In T. Field & N. Fox (Eds.), Social Perception in Infancy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Stern, D. N., Sander, L. W., Nahum, J. P., Harrison, A. M., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan, A. C., Bruschweiler-Stern, N., & Tronick, E. Z. (1998). “Non-interpretive mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy. The “something more” than interpretation.” (The Boston Change Process Study Group, Report No. 1.) International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 903–921. Thompson, E. (2001). “Empathy and consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (5–7), 1–32. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: An Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Torras, C. (1985). Temporal-Pattern Learning in Neural Models. Amsterdam: Springer Verlag. Trevarthen, C. (1979). “Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity.” In M. M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication (pp. 321–347). New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1980). “The foundation of intersubjectivity: Development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants.” In D. Olson (Ed.), The Social Foundation of Language and Thought (pp. 316–242). New York: Norton. Trevarthen, C. (1988). “Universal cooperative motives: How infants begin to know the language and skills of the culture of their parents.” In C. Jahoda & I. M. Lewis (Eds.), Acquiring Culture (pp. 37–90). Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm. Trevarthen, C. (1993). “The self born in intersubjectivity: An infant communicating.” In U. Neisser (Ed.), The Perceived Self (pp. 121–173). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Trevarthen, C. (1998). “The nature of motives for human consciousness.” Psychology: The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society, 4 (3), 187–221. (Special issue: The place of psychology in contemporary sciences, Part 2. T. Velli (Ed.).) Trevarthen, C. (1999/2000). “Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: Evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication.” Musicae Scientiae: Special Issue, Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origin of Human Communication, 155–211. Trevarthen, C. (2001). Intrinsic motives for companionship in understanding: Their origin, development, and significance for infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22 (12), 95–131. Trevarthen, C., & Hubley, P. (1978). “Secondary intersubjectivity: confidence, confides and acts of meaning in the first year.” In A. Lock (Ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol (pp. 183–229). New York: Academic Press. Tronick, E. Z., BruschweiIer-Stern, N., Harrison, A. M., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan, A. C., Nahum, J. P., Sander, L. W., & Stern, D. N. (1998). “Dyadically expanded states of consciousness and the process of therapeutic change.” Infant Mental Health Journal, 19, 290–299. Watson, J. S. (1994). “Detection of self: The perfect algorithm.” In S. Parker, R. Mitchell, & M. Boccia (Eds.), Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans Developmental Perspectives (pp. 131– 149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zahavi, D. (1996). “Husserl’s intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 27, 228–245. Zahavi, D. (2001). “Beyond empathy. Phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity.” Journal of Consciousness studies, 8, 151–167.

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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation Frans B. M. de Waal Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University

Evolution rarely throws out anything. Instead, structures are transformed, modified, co-opted for other functions, or “tweaked” in another direction. Thus, the frontal fins of fish became the front limbs of land animals, which over time turned into hoofs, paws, wings, and hands. They became flippers in mammals that returned to the water. Occasionally, a structure loses all function and becomes superfluous, but this is a gradual process, often ending in rudimentary traits rather than disappearance. Thus, we find tiny vestiges of leg bones under the skin of whales and remnants of a pelvis in snakes. This is why to the biologist, a Russian doll is such a satisfying plaything, especially if it has a historical dimension. I own a doll that shows Russian President Vladimir Putin on the outside, within whom we discover, in this order, Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Kruschev, Stalin, and Lenin. Finding a little Lenin and Stalin within Putin will hardly surprise most political analysts. The same is true for biological traits: the old always remains present in the new. This is relevant to the debate about the origins of empathy and imitation since psychologists tend to look at the world through different eyes than the biologist. Psychologists sometimes put our most advanced traits on a pedestal, ignoring or even denying simpler antecedents. They believe in saltatory change, at least in relation to our own species. This leads to unlikely origin stories, postulating discontinuities with respect to language, which is said to result from a brand new “module” in the human brain (e.g. Pinker 1995), or with respect to human cognition, which is viewed as having cultural origins (e.g. Tomasello 1999). True, human capacities reach dizzying heights, such as when I understand that you understand that I understand, etcetera. But we are not born with what phenomenologists call “reiterated empathy.” Both developmentally and evolutionarily, advanced forms of empathy are preceded by and grow out of more elementary ones. In fact, instead of language and culture appearing with a Big Bang in our species and then trans-

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forming the way we relate to each other, Greenspan and Shanker (2004) propose that it is from early emotional connections and nonverbal “proto conversations” (cf. Trevarthen this volume) between mother and child that language and culture sprang. Instead of empathy being an endpoint, it may have been the starting point. Biologists prefer bottom-up over top-down accounts, even though there is definitely room for the latter. Once higher order processes have come into existence, they begin to modify processes at the base. The central nervous system is a good example of top-down processing, such as the control the prefrontal cortex exerts over memory. The prefrontal cortex is not the seat of memory, but can “order” memory retrieval (Tomita et al. 1999). In the same way, culture and language filter and shape expressions of empathy. The distinction between “origin of ” and “shaping” is a fundamental one, though, and I will argue here that empathy is the original, pre-linguistic form of inter-individual linkage that only secondarily has come under the influence of language and culture. The same argument applies to imitation, which I will discuss at the end of this essay. Bottom-up accounts are the opposite of Big Bang theories. They assume continuity between past and present, child and adult, human and animal, even between humans and the most primitive mammals. We may assume that empathy evolved in the context of the parental care obligatory in mammals (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971; MacLean 1985). Signalling their state through smiling and crying, human infants urge their caregiver to pay attention and come into action (Acebo & Thoman 1995; Bowlby 1958). This also applies to other primates. The survival value of these interactions is evident from the case of a female chimpanzee, who lost a succession of infants despite intense positive interest because she was deaf and did not correct positional problems (such as sitting on the infant, or holding it upside-down) in response to its distress calls (de Waal 1982). In mammals, parental care is tied to lactation, which only one gender is capable of. During the 180 million years of mammalian evolution, females who responded to their offspring’s needs out-reproduced those who were cold and distant. Having descended from a long line of mothers who nursed, fed, cleaned, carried, comforted, and defended their young, we should not be surprised, therefore, by gender differences in human empathy. They appear well before socialization: the first sign of empathy – one baby crying when it hears another baby cry – is already more typical of girl babies than boy babies (Hoffman 1977). In an observational study (based on maternal reports) of children in their second year of life, girls witnessing distress in others showed more concern than boys (Zahn-Waxler et al. 1992). According to the literature on adult gender differences, women report stronger empathic reactions than men (Eisenberg 2000). In line with the above parental care hypothesis, Taylor (2002) attributes such differences to the “tending instinct” of women. The flip-side of this gender picture is provided by empathy

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disorders, such as autism, which are four times more common in the human male than female (Baron-Cohen 2003). For a human characteristic, such as empathy, that is so pervasive, develops so early in life (e.g. Hoffman 1975; Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow 1990), shows such important neural and physiological correlates (e.g. Adolphs et al. 1994; RimmKaufman & Kagan 1996; Decety & Chaminade 2003) as well as a genetic substrate (Plomin et al. 1993), it would be strange indeed if no evolutionary continuity existed with other mammals. The possibility of empathy and sympathy in other animals has been largely ignored, however. This is partly due to an excessive fear of anthropomorphism, which has stifled research into animal emotions (Panksepp 1998; de Waal 1999), and partly to the one-sided portrayal of the natural world as a place of combat rather than social connectedness. After a distinctly Huxleyan period of “nature red in tooth and claw” (e.g. Huxley 1894; Dawkins 1976), evolutionary biologists are returning to Charles Darwin, who – inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment – regarded sympathy and even morality as inborn in both humans and other animals. In The Descent of Man, Darwin (1871: 77) noted that “many animals certainly sympathize with each other’s distress or danger.” Adopting the same perspective, de Waal (1996) and Flack and de Waal (2000) have argued that human morality is constructed from building blocks that we share with other social animals, with empathy being foremost among them. Within a bottom-up framework the focus is not so much on the highest levels of empathy and imitation, but rather on their simplest forms, and how these forms combine with increased cognition to produce more complex ones. Is it possible to trace the evolution of empathy and imitation across the phylogenetic tree? Can we follow these capacities from when they were mere frontal fins, so to speak, to when they became as versatile as the human hand? How and why did this transformation take place? The evolution of empathy and imitation runs from shared emotions and intentions to a gradual “unblurring” of the lines between individuals. The own experience is increasingly set apart from the vicarious one, even though both reside within the same brain and body. This process culminates in a cognitive appraisal of the other’s behaviour and situation: we adopt the other’s perspective. As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers never separate from the inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms by advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them.

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Animal empathy What is empathy? Social animals need to coordinate action and movement, collectively respond to danger, communicate about food and water, and assist those in need. Responsiveness to the behavioural states of conspecifics ranges from a flock of birds taking off all at once because one among them is startled by a predator to a mother ape who returns to a whimpering youngster to help it from one tree to the next by draping her body as a bridge between the two. The first is a reflex-like transmission of fear that may not involve any understanding of what triggered the initial reaction, but that is undoubtedly adaptive. The bird that fails to take off at the same instant as the rest of the flock may be a predator’s lunch. The selection pressure on paying attention to others must have been enormous. The mother-ape example is more insightful, involving anxiety at hearing one’s offspring whimper, assessment of the reason for its distress, and an attempt to ameliorate the situation. There exists ample evidence of one primate coming to another’s aid in a fight, putting an arm around a previous victim of attack, or other emotional responses to the distress of others (to be reviewed below). In fact, almost all communication among nonhuman primates is emotionally mediated. We are familiar with the prominent role of emotions in human facial expressions (Ekman 1982), but when it comes to monkeys and apes – which have a homologous array of expressions (van Hooff 1967) – emotions are equally important. When the emotional state of one individual induces a matching or closely related state in another, we speak of “emotional contagion” (Hatfield et al. 1993). Even if such contagion is undoubtedly a basic phenomenon, there is more to it than simply one individual being affected by the state of another: the two individuals often engage in direct interaction. Thus, a rejected youngster may throw a screaming tantrum at its mother’s feet, or a preferred associate may approach a food possessor to beg by means of sympathy-inducing facial expressions, vocalizations, and hand gestures. In other words, emotional and motivational states often manifest themselves in behaviour specifically directed at a partner. The emotional effect on the other is not a by-product, therefore, but actively sought. With increasing differentiation between self and other, and an increasing appreciation of the precise circumstances underlying the emotional states of others, emotional contagion develops into empathy. Empathy encompasses – and could not possibly have arisen without – emotional contagion, but it goes beyond it in that it places filters between the other’s and one’s own state. In humans, it is around the age of two that we begin to add these cognitive layers (Eisenberg & Strayer 1987).

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Two mechanisms related to empathy are sympathy and personal distress, which in their social consequences are each other’s opposites. Sympathy is defined as “an affective response that consists of feelings of sorrow or concern for a distressed or needy other (rather than the same emotion as the other person). Sympathy is believed to involve an other-oriented, altruistic motivation” (Eisenberg 2000: 677). Personal distress, on the other hand, makes the affected party selfishly seek to alleviate its own distress, which is similar to what it has perceived in the object. Personal distress is therefore not concerned with the situation of the empathyinducing other (Batson 1991). A striking primate example was offered by de Waal (1996: 46): the screams of a severely punished or rejected infant rhesus monkey will often cause other infants to approach, embrace, mount or even pile on top of the victim. Thus, the distress of one infant seems to spread to its peers, which then seek contact to soothe their own arousal. Inasmuch as personal distress lacks cognitive evaluation and behavioural complementarity, it does not reach beyond the level of emotional contagion. That most modern textbooks on animal cognition (e.g. Shettleworth 1998) fail to index empathy or sympathy does not mean that these capacities are not an essential part of animal lives; it only means that they are being overlooked by a science traditionally focused on individual rather than inter-individual capacities. Tool-use and numerical competence, for instance, are seen as hallmarks of intelligence, whereas appropriately dealing with others is not. It is obvious, however, that survival often depends on how animals fare within their group, both in a cooperative sense (e.g. concerted action, information transfer) and a competitive sense (e.g. dominance strategies, deception). It is in the social domain, therefore, that one expects the highest cognitive achievements. Selection must have favoured mechanisms to evaluate the emotional states of others and to quickly respond to them. Empathy is precisely such a mechanism. In human behaviour, there exists a tight relation between empathy and sympathy, and its expression in psychological altruism (e.g. Batson et al. 1987; Eisenberg & Strayer 1987; Hoffman 1982; Hornblow 1980; Wispé 1986). It is reasonable to assume that the altruistic and caring responses of other animals, especially mammals, rest on similar mechanisms. When Zahn-Waxler visited homes to find out how children respond to family-members instructed to feign sadness (sobbing), pain (crying), or distress (choking), she discovered that children a little over one year of age already comfort others. Since expressions of sympathy emerge at an early age in virtually every member of our species, they are as natural as the first step. An unplanned side-bar to this study, however, was that household pets appeared as worried as the children by the “distress” of a family-member. They hovered over them or put their heads in their laps (Zahn-Waxler et al. 1984). Rooted in attachment and what Harlow named the “affectional system” (Harlow & Harlow 1965), responses to the emotions of others are commonplace in

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social animals. Thus, behavioural and physiological data suggest emotional contagion in a variety of species (reviewed in Preston & de Waal 2002b; de Waal 2003). Rats and pigeons display distress in response to the suffering of a conspecific, and have been observed to terminate stress manipulations affecting others in a variety of laboratory procedures (Church 1959; Watanabe & Ono 1986). Monkeys are prepared to starve themselves by not pressing a bar that delivers food if such action is paired with shock to a conspecific (Masserman et al. 1964). Although these early studies suggest that, by behaving in certain ways, animals try to alleviate or prevent distress in others, it remains unclear if spontaneous responses to distressed conspecifics are explained by (a) distress signals of others being aversive, (b) personal distress generated through emotional contagion, or (c) true helping motivations. Work on nonhuman primates has furnished further information. Some of this evidence is anecdotal, which – albeit a respectable starting point for research – does not permit a choice between alternative hypotheses (de Waal 1991), but systematic data on empathic reactions exists as well.

Anecdotes of “changing places in fancy” Striking descriptions of primate empathy and altruism can be found in Yerkes (1925), Ladygina-Kohts (2002 [1935]), Goodall (1990), and de Waal (1982, 1996, 1997). Primate empathy is such a rich area that O’Connell (1995) was able to conduct a content analysis of thousands of qualitative reports. She concluded that responses to the distress of another seem considerably more complex in apes than monkeys. To give just one example of the strength of the ape’s empathic response, Ladygina-Kohts wrote about her young chimpanzee, Joni, that the only way to get him off the roof of her house (much better than any reward or threat of punishment) was by arousing his sympathy: If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his plays or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists. (Ladygina-Kohts 2002 [1935]: 121)

De Waal (1996, 1997) has suggested that apart from emotional connectedness apes have an appreciation of the other’s situation and a degree of perspective-taking. So, the main difference with monkeys is not in empathy per se, but in the cognitive overlays, which allow apes to adopt the other’s viewpoint. One striking report in

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this regard concerns a bonobo female empathizing with a bird at Twycross Zoo, in England: One day, Kuni captured a starling. Out of fear that she might molest the stunned bird, which appeared undamaged, the keeper urged the ape to let it go. . . . Kuni picked up the starling with one hand and climbed to the highest point of the highest tree where she wrapped her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird as hard she could towards the barrier of the enclosure. Unfortunately, it fell short and landed onto the bank of the moat where Kuni guarded it for a long time against a curious juvenile. (de Waal 1997: 156)

What Kuni did would obviously have been inappropriate towards a member of her own species. Having seen birds in flight many times, she seemed to have a notion of what would be good for a bird, thus offering us an anthropoid version of the empathic capacity so enduringly described by Adam Smith (1759: 10) as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” Perhaps the most striking example of this capacity is a chimpanzee who, as in the original Theory-of Mind (ToM) experiments of Premack and Woodruff (1978), seemed to understand the intentions of another and provided specific help: During one winter at the Arnhem Zoo, after cleaning the hall and before releasing the chimps, the keepers hosed out all rubber tires in the enclosure and hung them one by one on a horizontal log extending from the climbing frame. One day, Krom was interested in a tire in which water had stayed behind. Unfortunately, this particular tire was at the end of the row, with six or more heavy tires hanging in front of it. Krom pulled and pulled at the one she wanted but couldn’t remove it from the log. She pushed the tire backward, but there it hit the climbing frame and couldn’t be removed either. Krom worked in vain on this problem for over ten minutes, ignored by everyone, except Jakie, a seven-year-old Krom had taken care of as a juvenile. Immediately after Krom gave up and walked away, Jakie approached the scene. Without hesitation he pushed the tires one by one off the log, beginning with the front one, followed by the second in the row, and so on, as any sensible chimp would. When he reached the last tire, he carefully removed it so that no water was lost, carrying it straight to his aunt, placing it upright in front of her. Krom accepted his present without any special acknowledgment, and was already scooping up water with her hand when Jakie left. (adapted from de Waal 1996)

That Jakie assisted his aunt is not so unusual. What is special is that he correctly guessed what Krom was after. He grasped his aunt’s goals. Such so-called “targeted helping” is typical of apes, but rare or absent in most other animals. It is defined as altruistic behaviour tailored to the specific needs of the other even in novel

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situations, such as the highly publicized case of Binti-Jua, a female gorilla who rescued a human child at the Brookfield Zoo, in Chicago (de Waal 1996, 1999). It is important to stress the incredible strength of the ape’s helping response, which makes these animals take great risks on behalf of others. Whereas in a recent debate about the origins of morality, Kagan (2000) took it as self-evident that a chimpanzee would never jump into a cold lake to save another, it may help to quote Goodall (1990: 213) on this issue: In some zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands, surrounded by waterfiled moats . . . Chimpanzees cannot swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they fall into deep water. Despite this, individuals have sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from drowning – and were sometimes successful. One adult male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall into the water. (Goodall 1990: 213)

The only other animals with a similar array of helping tendencies are dolphins and elephants. This evidence, too, is largely descriptive (dolphins: Caldwell & Caldwell 1966; Connor & Norris 1982; elephants: Moss 1988; Payne 1998), yet here again it is hard to accept as coincidental that scientists who have watched these animals for any length of time have numerous such stories, whereas scientists who have watched other animals have few, if any.

Consolation behaviour A difference between monkey and ape empathy is also evident in systematic studies of a behaviour known as “consolation,” first documented by de Waal and van Roosmalen (1979). Consolation is defined as friendly, reassuring contact directed by an uninvolved bystander at one of the combatants in a previous aggressive incident. For example, a third-party goes over to the loser of a fight and gently puts an arm around his or her shoulders (Figure 1). The advantages of consolation for the actor are unclear. The actor could probably walk away from the scene without any negative consequences. Chimpanzee consolation is well-quantified. De Waal and van Roosmalen (1979) based their conclusions on an analysis of hundreds of post-conflict observations, and a replication by de Waal and Aureli (1996) included an even larger sample in which the authors sought to test two relatively simple predictions. If third-party contacts indeed serve to alleviate the distress of conflict participants, these contacts should be directed more at recipients of aggression than at aggressors, and more at recipients of intense than of mild aggression. Comparing thirdparty contact rates with baseline levels, we found support for both predictions (Figure 2).

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Figure 1. Consolation among chimpanzees: A juvenile puts an arm around a screaming adult male who has just been defeated in a fight with a rival. Consolation is common in apes, but rare or absent in the monkeys. Photograph by the author.

Consolation has thus far been demonstrated in great apes only. When de Waal and Aureli (1996) set out to apply exactly the same observation protocols as used on chimpanzees to detect consolation in macaques, they failed to find any. Despite numerous attempts to demonstrate it, consolation has thus far not been found in monkeys (Watts et al. 2000). One recent monkey study even failed to find alleviation of another’s distress in the one relationship category in which one definitely would expect it: between mother and offspring (Schino et al. 2004). Mother macaques do not provide spontaneous reassurance to distraught offspring. This came as a surprise, because reconciliation studies, which employ essentially the same research methodology, have demonstrated reconciliation in species after species. Why, then, is consolation restricted just to humans and apes? Targeted helping and consolation may require a distinction between self and other that allows the other’s situation to be distinguished from one’s own while maintaining the emotional link that motivates behaviour. Possibly, one cannot

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Figure 2. Graph showing the rate with which third parties contact victims of aggression in chimpanzees, comparing recipients of serious and mild aggression. Especially in the first two minutes following an incident, recipients of serious aggression receive more contacts than baseline. After de Waal and Aureli (1996).

achieve cognitive empathy without a high degree of self-awareness. In other words, in order to understand that the source of an affective state is not oneself but the other and to understand why the other’s state arose (e.g. the cause of the other’s distress) one needs a distinction between self and other. Gallup (1982) was the first to speculate about a possible connection between cognitive empathy and mirror self-recognition (MSR). This view is supported both developmentally, by a correlation between the emergence of MSR in children and their helping tendencies (Bischof-Köhler 1988; Zahn-Waxler et al. 1992), and phylogenetically, by the presence of complex helping behaviour and consolation in the Hominoids (humans and apes) but not other primates. It is well-known that Hominoids are also the only primates with MSR (Anderson & Gallup 1999). Interestingly, at least one of the two non-primates that regularly show targeted helping – dolphins and elephants – has recently joined the ranks of species with mirror self-recognition. The discovery of MSR in dolphins (Reiss & Marino 2001) supports the proposed connection between increased self-awareness, on the one hand, and cognitive empathy, on the other.

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Russian doll model The literature includes accounts of empathy as a cognitive affair, even to the point that apes, let alone other animals, probably lack it (Povinelli 1998; Hauser 2000). This view equates empathy with mental state attribution and ToM. The opposite position has recently been defended, however, in relation to autistic children. Contra earlier assumptions that autism reflects a ToM deficit (Baron-Cohen 2000), autism is noticeable well before the age of 4 years at which ToM typically emerges. Williams et al. (2001) argue that the main deficit of autism concerns the socioaffective level, which in turn negatively impacts sophisticated down-stream forms of inter-personal perception, such as ToM. So, ToM is seen as a derived trait, and the authors urge more attention for its antecedents (see also Baron-Cohen 2003, 2004). Preston and de Waal (2002a) propose that at the core of the empathic capacity is a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the “subject”) with access to the subjective state of another (the “object”) through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations. When the subject attends to the object’s state, the subject’s neural representations of similar states are automatically activated. The closer and more similar subject and object, the more perceiving the object will activate matching peripheral motor and autonomic responses in the subject (e.g. changes in heart rate, skin conductance, facial expression, body posture). This activation allows the subject to get “under the skin” of the object, sharing its feelings and needs, which in turn fosters sympathy, compassion, and helping. Preston and de Waal’s (2002a) Perception-Action Mechanism (PAM) fits Damasio’s (1994) somatic marker hypothesis of emotions as well as recent evidence for a link at the cellular level between perception and action (e.g. “mirror neurons,” di Pellegrino et al. 1992; Fadiga & Craighero this volume; Ferrari & Gallese this volume). The idea that perception and action share common representations is anything but new: it goes as far back as the first treatise on Einfühlung, the German concept translated into English as “empathy” (Wispé 1991). When Lipps (1903) spoke of Einfühlung, which literally means “feeling into,” he speculated about innere Nachahmung (inner mimicry) of another’s feelings along the same lines as proposed by the PAM. Accordingly, empathy is a routine involuntary process, as demonstrated by electromyographic studies of invisible muscle contractions in people’s faces in response to pictures of human facial expressions. These reactions are fully automated, occurring even when we are unaware of what we saw (Dimberg et al. 2000). Accounts of empathy as a higher cognitive process neglect such gut-level reactions, which are far too rapid to be under conscious control. Perception-action mechanisms are well-known for motor perception (Prinz & Hommel 2002), causing researchers to assume similar processes to underlie emotion perception (Gallese 2001; Wolpert et al. 2001). Data suggest that observing

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Figure 3. The Russian doll model of intersubjectivity. Empathy covers all processes leading to related emotional states in subject and object, with at its core the perception-action mechanism (PAM) of Preston and de Waal (2002a), such as the tendency to match the other’s emotional state. Higher levels of empathy build upon this hard-wired socio-affective basis, such as cognitive empathy (i.e. assessment of the reasons for the other’s emotions – a requirement for targeted helping) and adoption of the other’s perspective. On the copying side (left), the emphasis is on matching the other’s behavior through mimicry, sharing the other’s goals and intentions, and assessment of the other’s methods to reach a particular goal, as in full-blown imitation. It is assumed that the outer layers of the Russian doll cannot exist without its inner ones, and that its core processes underlie all manifestations of intersubjectivity.

and experiencing an emotion involve similar physiological substrates (Adolphs et al. 1997, 2000), and that affect communication creates similar physiological activity in subject and object (Dimberg 1982, 1990; Levenson & Reuf 1992). Recent investigations of the neural basis of empathy (Carr et al. 2003; Wicker et al. 2003; Singer et al. 2004; de Gelder et al. 2004) have provided strong support for the PAM. This view of the empathic capacity was first depicted as a Russian doll by de Waal (2003). Accordingly, empathy covers all forms of one individual’s emotional state affecting another’s, with simple mechanisms at its core and more complex mechanisms, cognitive filters, and perspective-taking abilities as its outer layers (Figure 3). Autism may be reflected in deficient outer layers of the Russian doll, but such deficiencies go back to deficient inner layers. This is not to say that higher cognitive levels of empathy are irrelevant, but they are built on top of this firm, hard-wired basis without which we would be

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Figure 4. Cognitive empathy (i.e. emotional empathy combined with appraisal of the other’s situation) allows for aid tailored to the other’s needs. In this case a mother chimpanzee reaches out to help her son out of tree after he screamed and begged (see hand gesture). Photograph by the author.

at a loss about what moves others. At the core of the Russian doll we find PAMinduced emotional contagion around which cognitive empathy and attribution are constructed. Cognitive empathy implies appraisal of another’s predicament or situation (cf. de Waal 1996). The subject not only responds to the signals emitted by the object, but seeks to understand the reasons for these signals, looking for clues in the other’s behaviour and situation. Cognitive empathy makes it possible to furnish targeted helping that takes the specific needs of the other into account (Figure 4). These responses go well beyond emotional contagion, yet they would be hard to explain without the motivation activated by the emotional component. Without this core component we would be as disconnected as Mr. Spock in Star Trek, constantly wondering why others feel what they say they feel.

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Whereas monkeys (and many other social mammals) clearly seem to possess emotional contagion and some forms of targeted helping, the latter phenomenon is not nearly as robust as in the great apes. For example, at Jigokudani monkey park, in Japan, first-time mother macaques are kept out of the hot water springs by park wardens because of the experience that these females will accidentally drown their infants. They fail to pay attention to them when submerging themselves in the ponds (de Waal 1996). This is something monkey mothers apparently learn with time, showing that they do not automatically take their offspring’s perspective. De Waal (1996) ascribed their behavioural change to “learned adjustment,” setting it apart from cognitive empathy, which is more typical of apes and humans. Ape mothers respond immediately and usually appropriately to the specific needs of their offspring. They are, for example, very careful to keep them away from water, rushing over to pull them away as soon as they get too close. In conclusion, empathy is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon: it covers a wide range of emotional linkage patterns, from the very simple and automatic to the very sophisticated. It seems logical to first try to understand the basic forms, which are widespread indeed, before addressing the variations that cognitive evolution has constructed on top of this foundation.

Acting like others The same PAM underlying emotional state-matching and empathy likely provides the basis for motor mimicry and imitation (Figure 3). We know from mirrorneuron studies that monkeys not only make the actions of others their own (i.e. mirror neurons respond similarly during a performed action, such as grasping, and a perceived one in others), but do the same for chains of actions and their predicted outcomes. In other words, the intentions of others, instead of being cognitively understood, seem to be automatically encoded from observed motor sequences (Fogassi et al. 2005; Fadiga & Craighero this volume). When reading one another, monkeys thus adopt an “intentional stance” (cf. Dennett 1987). This predisposition to be in tune with others and their intentions has high survival value for group-living animals, which need to synchronize activities. Imagine a group in which every individual would eat and sleep and play at different times: group coordination would become impossible. Primates sleep when others sleep, play when others play, and forage or hunt when others forage or hunt. Known as “social facilitation,” experiments show that satiated primates begin eating again when they see others eat (Addessi & Visalberghi 2001; Ferrari et al. 2005), scratch themselves when they see others scratch themselves (Nakayama 2004), and yawn in response to a video of a yawning conspecific (Anderson et al. 2004). Novel behaviour is copied, too, at least by apes. Examples are the imitation of a specific

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limping walk by juvenile group mates of an injured adult male (de Waal 1982) and successful “Do as I Do” experiments involving human models (Custance et al. 1995; Myowa-Yamakoshi & Matsuzawa 1999). De Waal (1998) proposed “identification” with others as the basis of imitation. Similar to Preston and de Waal’s (2002a) characterization of PAM, identification entails bodily mapping the self onto the other (or the other onto the self), resulting in feeling one with another. One thus becomes vicariously one with the other. Bodily similarity – such as with members of the own gender and species – likely enhances shared representation, hence identification. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that after the initial scepticism about imitation in primates, based on their failure to copy complex human actions (e.g. Tomasello et al. 1993), the first convincing evidence came from a study using conspecific models (Voekl & Huber 2000). It is also not surprising that when young chimpanzees learn to use a wand to fish for ants, daughters copy their mothers more precisely than sons (Lonsdorf et al. 2004). Identification with others seems so central that de Waal (2001) proposed that the cultural transmission of habits and skills is based on conformism with those to whom one feels close. Instead of cultural transmission being driven by reward-based learning, as assumed by learning psychologists (e.g. Galef 1990), it seems motivated by a desire to be and act like others (see also Matsuzawa et al. 2001). Rewards help, but are not critical: the driving force of observational learning rather seems socio-emotional. There are many examples of socially learned habits that provide no extrinsic rewards during most of the learning period, and sometimes no such rewards ever (reviewed in de Waal 2001). This theory of Bonding- and Identification-Based Observational Learning (BIOL) is currently being tested by my research team with encouraging initial results. The cooperative nature of primates implies that they read the emotions and intentions of others, coordinate with them, and spontaneously help each other achieve shared goals. Thus, chimpanzees regularly recruit each other’s support when chasing off an opponent (de Waal & van Hooff 1981), hold up a pole as “ladder” for another to reach out-of-reach goals (Menzel 1972; de Waal 1982), or jointly transport heavy objects (Figure 5).1 Wild chimpanzee males could not possibly hunt together without the same ability to read each other, which probably also applies to other highly coordinated hunters, such as killer whales and wolves. This is not to say that animals help each other all the time. Even if they automatically read emotions and intentions, this information is not necessarily translated into action. Moreover, if action does result, it does not always benefit the other. Animals can use the same understanding of others to out-compete or deceive them. They may see another individual heading for food, and make sure to get there first. However, we should not confuse their understanding of others with the specific application of this information, which varies with social relationships and circumstances.

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Figure 5ab. Cooperation and coordination come naturally to primates. It involves an appraisal of the other’s behaviour and intentions, such as here by a young chimpanzee who has joined an unrelated adult to “help” her move a heavy drum from one location to another. Afterwards, the two sat together on the drum. Photographs by the author.

Even if the literature on empathy and imitation often emphasizes the cognitive side of these abilities – especially in the case of humans – Hoffman (1981: 79) rightly noted that “humans must be equipped biologically to function effectively in many social situations without undue reliance on cognitive processes.” It could not be otherwise. If each time we saw someone perform an activity or express an emotion we would need to mentally imagine their situation and objectives so as to grasp the meaning of their behaviour, we would be far too slow to respond and perhaps, after a while, far too tired, too. Luckily, we grasp the meaning of the behaviour of others based on bodily representations that come to us without any conscious effort. We are hard-wired to connect to those around us, and so are many other animals.

Note . The Living Links website features footage of Crawford’s (1937) classical experiment on ape cooperation, which shows a high degree of coordination as well as the willingness of an unmotivated partner to help a motivated one achieve its goals: http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/ crawfordvideo.html

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chapter 

Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma

Introduction By observing mother-infant interactions during early infancy, it is clear that a play of mutual exchange between mother and infant is taking place. Such mutual exchange between mother and child may take the form of timing their behaviours, such as the onset of facial expressions, or of anticipating other’s intentions. This can be further noticed in the ability of the infant to detect when this correspondence is temporarily broken. A further evidence of forms of intersubjectivity taking place during infancy is early imitation (Meltzoff & Moore 1977) and cross-modal imitation, or affect attunement (Stern 1985). In the last few decades, the evidence accumulated in developmental psychology (Trevarthen 1974, 1979, 1980; Stern 1985, 2004) favours the idea that very early during development the infant is endowed with an innate capacity of subjectsubject engagements, in a game of bi-directional communication that enables him/her of direct alteroception or even as Bråten (1998) defines it, of “alter-centred participation”. This new perspective in developmental psychology represents a breaking point with the Freudian and Piagetian legacy anchored to auto- and ego-centric assumptions. These findings on infant-mother relationship clearly indicate that our nervous system has been constructed in such a way that it enables us to capture others’ living experiences just by watching them. This construction is built up in order to respond and re-act at very early stages during life. In this chapter we will address the central question of which neural mechanisms may underpin such capability. We will posit that the mirror neuron systems, together with other mirroring neural clusters outside the motor domain, constitute the neural underpinnings of embodied simulation, the functional mechanism at the basis of intersubjectivity. We will also provide behavioural evidence that such a system can be at the basis of several social-cognitive phenomena in human and

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nonhuman primates. This will help in delineating a possible evolutionary scenario in which intersubjectivity emerged. Here we employ the term “embodied simulation” as an automatic, unconscious, and pre-reflexive functional mechanism, whose function is the modelling of objects, agents, and events. Simulation, as conceived of in the present paper, is therefore not necessarily the result of a willed and conscious cognitive effort, aimed at interpreting the intentions hidden in the overt behaviour of others, but rather a basic functional mechanism of our brain and we will propose that this basic functional mechanism is sub-personally instantiated by mirror neurons. In addition, because it also generates representational content, embodied simulation seems to play a major role in our epistemic approach to the world. It represents the outcome of possible actions, emotions, or sensations one could take or experience, and serves to attribute this outcome to another organism as a real goal-state it is trying to bring about, or as a real emotion or sensation it is experiencing. By means of embodied simulation, we are intentionally attuned to others (see Gallese 2005).

Mirror neurons: Monkey data About ten years ago Rizzolatti and colleagues discovered a class of premotor visuomotor neurons, named mirror neurons, that discharge not only when the monkey executes goal-related hand actions like grasping objects, but also when observing other individuals (monkeys or humans) executing similar actions (di Pellegrino et al. 1992; Gallese et al. 1996; Rizzolatti et al. 1996). Neurons with similar properties were later discovered in a sector of the posterior parietal cortex reciprocally connected with area F5 (PF mirror neurons, see Rizzolatti et al. 2001; Gallese et al. 2002). The most interesting property of mirror neurons consists in the fact that in most of them there is a good congruence between the seen and the executed actions effective in activating them. Because of this congruence, it was hypothesized that mirror neurons, by matching action observation with action execution, allow understanding of actions made by others. This latter capacity is not simply limited to recognition of motor patterns, but it extends also to the goal of the observed action. Every time we observe an action made by another individual, we are able to understand its goal because the observed action is matched on our internal representation of it, which, in turn, is endowed with the knowledge of the goal. Further studies carried out in our lab corroborated and extended our original hypothesis. We showed that F5 mirror neurons are also activated when the final critical part of the observed action, that is, the hand-object interaction, is hidden (Umiltà et al. 2001). In a second study we showed that a particular class of F5

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mirror neurons, “audio-visual mirror neurons”, can be driven not only by action execution and observation, but also by the sound produced by the same action (Kohler et al. 2002). These neurons instantiate semblant informational content at quite an “abstract” level. If the various modes of presentation of events as intrinsically different as sounds, images, or voluntary body actions, nevertheless are bound together within the same neural substrate, what we have is a mechanism instantiating a form of conceptualization. This perspective can be extended to other parts of the sensory-motor system (see Gallese & Lakoff 2005). In a recent study (Ferrari et al. 2005a) it has been shown that mirror neurons can generalize the goal of an action to actions that are not in the monkey motor repertoire such as those made with a tool. What is interesting here is that what is coded, at a very abstract level, is the goal of an action even though the monkey is not able to reproduce it. The fact that the visual descriptions of actions outside the motor repertoire can map onto one’s own motor system supports the idea that the sensory description of observed social stimuli is strongly related (embodied), and somehow interpreted, to the observer’s own body sensory-motor knowledge. So far, the capability of monkey mirror neurons to connect the observed individual with the observer seems to configure a mechanism that can be useful in understanding actions but with no necessity to directly interact with another individual. It is as if we were watching a TV movie in which we observe and interpret the events that unfold in a story. However, the mirror neuron story becomes more complex in the light of the recent findings of a new category of mirror neurons that are related to the execution/observation matching system for mouth actions (Ferrari et al. 2003). Most mouth mirror neurons, as they have been named, respond to observation of ingestive actions such as biting, tearing with the teeth, sucking, licking, etc. An example of an “ingestive” mouth mirror neuron is shown in Figure 1, A. They show the same specificity of hand mirror neurons. They do not respond to simple object presentation or to mouth mimed actions. An interesting finding is that a small percentage of mouth-related mirror neurons discharge during the observation of intransitive, communicative facial actions performed by the experimenter in front of the monkey (“communicative mouth mirror neurons”), such as lips-smacking, lips protrusion or tongue protrusion. Figure 1, B and C shows two examples of “communicative” mouth mirror neurons. The motor response of mouth communicative mirror neurons is more complex. In those neurons in which it was possible to test the motor response during monkey execution of communicative actions, there was a clear activation (Figure 1, C). However, most neurons responded also when the monkey executed ingestive actions. It has been hypothesized that the presence of mouth mirror neurons is indicative of a system originated for understanding transitive mouth ac-

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Figure 1. Examples of mouth mirror neurons. In each panel the rasters and the histograms represent the neuron response during a single experimental condition. The histogram represents the average of ten trials. Rasters and histograms are aligned with the moment in which the mouth or the hand of the experimenter (observation conditions) or of the monkey (motor conditions) touched the food or when the food is abruptly presented (presentation conditions). During observation of communicative actions the rasters and histograms alignment was made with the moment in which the action was fully expressed. Ordinates: spikes/sec; abscissae: time; bin width: 20 ms. A. Ingestive mouth mirror neuron.

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tion and subsequently it has been exploited to evolve an oro-facial communicative system (Ferrari et al. 2003; Fogassi & Ferrari 2004). The properties of mouth mirror neurons, and in particular of the “communicative” ones, could constitute an emergent property of the monkey mirror neurons in which the open access to others’ experiences by means of the observer’s own body-related knowledge is also extended to oro-facial actions which may imply a direct participation of the observer in a dyadic communication. Thus, this new property of mirror neurons would open a new possibility for the system in such a way that the flow of social information is not unidirectional (from the observed agent to the observer) but it also encompasses a bi-directional mutual exchange, a new intersubjective space or an intersubjective matrix as defined by Stern (2004).

The mirror neuron system for actions in humans Several studies using different experimental methodologies and techniques have demonstrated also in the human brain the existence of a mirror neuron system matching action perception and execution. During action observation there is a strong activation of premotor and parietal areas, the likely human homologue of the monkey areas in which mirror neurons were originally described (for a review, see Rizzolatti et al. 2001; Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004; Gallese et al. 2004). Furthermore, the mirror neuron matching system for actions in humans is somatotopically organized, with distinct cortical regions within the premotor and posterior parietal cortices being activated by the observation/execution of mouth, hand, and foot related actions (Buccino et al. 2001). A recent brain imaging study, in which human participants observed communicative mouth actions performed by humans, monkeys and dogs showed that

Figure 1. Top. The experimenter approaches with his mouth the food held on a support, grasps it with the teeth and holds it. Middle. The experimenter grasps with the hand a piece of food placed on a support and holds it. Bottom. The experimenter moves a piece of food to the monkey’s mouth; the monkey grasps and holds it with its teeth. B. Communicative mouth mirror neuron. Top. The experimenter makes a lip-smacking action looking at the monkey. Middle. The experimenter protrudes his lips looking at the monkey. Bottom. The experimenter moves a piece of food toward the monkey’s mouth; the monkey protrudes its lips and takes the food. C. Communicative mouth mirror neuron. Left. The experimenter protrudes his lips looking at the monkey. Right. During the experimenter lips protrusion the monkey responds almost simultaneously to the experimenter gesture by making a lipsmacking action. Modified from Ferrari et al. (2003).

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the observation of communicative mouth actions led to the activation of different cortical foci according to the different observed species. The observation of human silent speech activated the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus, a sector of Broca’s region. The observation of monkey lip-smacking activated a smaller part of the same region bilaterally. Finally, the observation of the barking dog, activated only exstrastriate visual areas. Actions belonging to the motor repertoire of the observer (e.g., biting and speech reading) or very closely related to it (e.g. monkey’s lip-smacking) are mapped on the observer’s motor system. Actions that do not belong to this repertoire (e.g., barking) are mapped and henceforth categorized on the basis of their visual properties (Buccino et al. 2004). The involvement of the motor system during observation of communicative mouth actions is also testified by the results of a TMS study by Watkins et al. (2003), in which they showed that the observation of communicative, speechrelated mouth actions, facilitate the excitability of the motor system involved in the production of the same actions.

Mirror neurons and primary intersubjectivity: Behavioural studies on synchrony and infant imitation in human and nonhuman primates When writing about neural correlates of intersubjectivity, Stern in his recent book pointed out an interesting issue: “To resonate with someone, you may have to be unconscious in synch with that person. You could move in synchrony, as lovers may do when they sit across a coffee table and trace a dance as they simultaneously approach and withdraw their faces from one another or move their hands together at the same instant” (Stern 2004: 80). What do mirror neurons tell us about synchrony and resonance? Is it possible to formulate and test hypotheses in the examination of these phenomena? Rizzolatti et al. (1999) used a metaphor to better elucidate how we understand the actions of others through the mirror mechanism. We understand other’s actions through a mechanism of resonance, in which the motor system of the observer “resonates” (i.e. mirror neurons activation) whenever an appropriate visual and/or acoustic input is presented, although it does not necessarily imply the production of an overt movement. Rizzolatti and coworkers (1999, 2002) proposed that the internal motor representation of the observed action can be used for response facilitation, i.e., for triggering the repetition of an observed action that is already in the observer’s motor repertoire. Response facilitation is achieved by means of a resonance mechanism (Rizzolatti et al. 1999) in which the motor system of the observer (or the listener) is activated specifically when an appropriate visual (and/or acoustic) stimulus is presented.

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Non-human primates may offer an interesting model to test this hypothesis. Recently, we experimentally targeted a behaviour that is particularly sensitive to social input: eating behaviour. In a series of behavioural experiments carried out in macaques (Ferrari et al. 2005b) we tested the hypothesis, based on the mirror system function, that the observation and hearing of eating actions activates the motor programs of similar actions, thus facilitating their execution. Monkeys that were fed and had left over food in their cages increased their feeding behaviour when they observed (experiment 1), or just heard (experiment 2), other individuals eating (Figure 2). In contrast, the sound (control) of ripping paper did not elicit any eating behaviour in the listener (experiment 3). Which is the function of this synchrony of monkey feeding behaviour? Since in primates feeding is characterized by being primarily social, we speculated that feeding activities of macaque monkeys necessitate social sensitiveness aimed at tuning individuals’ own behaviour with that of group members. Behavioural coordination, i.e., doing the same things at the same time (Coussi-Korbel & Fragaszy 1995) has undoubted advantages; for example, group cohesiveness (that is an effective anti-predator behavioural strategy) which is promoted by timing similar activities with others. Another form of intersubjectivity is early imitation that was firstly described by Meltzoff and Moore in human infants (1977). This and other studies clearly showed that human infant can imitate facial gestures made by an adult, such as mouth opening, tongue protrusion and lips protrusion (Kugiumutzakis 1998, 1999; Meltzoff & Gopnik 1993). How can it be possible to imitate facial gestures if the infant cannot see his/her face? How can he/she match his/her face with that of the model? What happens is the translation of the personal perspective of the demonstrator into the infant body perspective. Following the same reasoning on the resonance mechanism of the motor system underpinned by the mirror neurons functioning, it is possible to postulate that in early imitation neonates’ motor systems can innately respond specifically to the experimenter gesture without having a visual feedback of the their own face. This direct link between observed and executed acts, embedded in the mirror system may have important implications for the development of intersubjectivity. According to Meltzoff (2002) early imitation can be an important tool to learn about persons and about objects and to distinguish the identity of other people and thus a way to enter into a personal relationship with others. Studies on nonhuman primates may help to better understand possible functions of early imitation and to track a possible evolutionary path towards an emergence of this behaviour. Similarly to humans, also in chimpanzee it has been reported a case of facial imitation that takes place very early after birth (Myowa 1996; Myowa et al. 2004). It lasts two months before disappearing. These authors suggested that neonatal imitation in chimpanzees enables newborns to orient preferentially to the conspecifics’ face. Although still anecdotal, we have observed a

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Figure 2. Mean number of instantaneous eating sample points scored during baseline and test period in ten pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina). Each individual contributed with the averaged value of its three sessions. During the baseline period the demonstrator was visible to the observer (only in experiment 1) but could not eat any food. During the test period the stimulus (the sound or the vision of a monkey eating food) was introduced (Top) Experiment 1 (monkey heard and observed another individual eating), (Middle) Experiment 2 (monkey heard another individual eating), and (Bottom) Experiment 3 (monkey heard ripping paper sound). Asterisks indicate significant differences between test and baseline period scan samples (p < 0.05, Wilcoxon test). From Ferrari et al. (2005b).

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similar phenomenon in infant macaques for a few days after birth (Ferrari et al. 2006). Using a methodology similar to that adopted by Meltzoff and Moore (1977) we tested the behavioural response specificity of the infant macaques to human and facial and hand gestures. The facial and hand gestures used as stimuli were: mouth opening, lips protrusion, tongue protrusion and hand opening. The infant macaques were tested at the age of 1, 3, 7 and 14 days. At the age of 1 week, infant macaques imitated tongue protrusion, lipsmacks and mouth openings when they saw them performed by a human experimenter (see Figure 3). These findings suggest that macaques may possess such imitative capacity very soon after birth (i.e. in the first week of life), which, however, tends to disappear very early. Although data on nonhuman primates are very scarce, it is clear that human early imitation is not a unique feature of the human being but has evolved probably from other related non-human primates. The fact that the type of gestures imitated are usually related to affiliate meanings seems to suggest that in primates the need to establish a deep relation (not just in term of attachment but also in term of different forms of intersubjectivity) between two individuals, typically the mother and the infant, could have been a crucial evolutionary force. Furthermore, what the data on early imitation seems to suggest is that in some species of primates the newborn is capable of tuning his/her behaviour with that observed by another individual. The sensory-motor system is already set to be coordinated with someone else’s experience in a participatory sense. This ‘alter-centred participation’ is one of the tenet of the “primary intersubjectivity” model (Bråten 1998). According to this model, in fact, infants have a whole set of capacities to attune their

Figure 3. Neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion in a one week old macaque. The two pictures are taken from a videotape. In the left picture is depicted the gesture made by the model that is holding in his hand the infant monkey. The picture on the right has been taken about two seconds after the end of the model’s gesture. The gesture made by the model was repeated 7–8 times in a period of 20 seconds. As the monkey protruded its tongue, no other movements (either with the hand or the mouth) were recorded.

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minds with those of others. The result of this attunement is that of sharing the first- and the third-person experience. This (probably) innate capacity to enter and participate in other’s experience could be served by a neural mechanism such as that of the mirror neurons. One aspect that neuroscience should explore more in depth is whether the mirror neurons matching system is confined to functions such as action understanding or whether the system can be further exploited in the alter-centred participation.

The mirror neuron system and secondary intersubjectivity Before becoming verbal and symbolic, the infant acquires more complex forms of intersubjectivity. One of these is of utmost importance in the development of the capacity of interacting and sharing experiences with others: understanding intentions. We will show here that the organization of the motor system may provide a substrate for perceiving/inferring intentions. We will see that for the development of a motor system fully adapted to interact with the physical and inanimate world, it is necessary to intrinsically have a concept of intention for guiding the body in space towards a goal.

Mirror neurons and the understanding of intentions When an individual starts a movement aimed to attain a goal, such as picking up a pen, he/she has clear in mind what he/she is going to do, for example writing a note on a piece of paper. In this simple sequence of motor acts the final goal of the whole action is present in the agents’ mind and is somehow reflected in each motor act of the sequence. The action intention, therefore, is set before the beginning of the movements. This also means that when we are going to execute a given action we can also predict its consequences. Monkeys may exploit the mirror neuron system to optimize their social interactions. At least, the evidence we have collected so far seems to suggest that the mirror neuron system for actions is enough sophisticated to enable its exploitation for social purposes. Recent results by Cisek and Kalaska (2004) show that neurons in the dorsal premotor cortex of the macaque monkey can covertly simulate observed behaviours of others, like a cursor moved to a target on a computer screen, even when the relation between the observed sensory event and the unseen motor behaviour producing it is learned through stimulus-response associations. The hypothesis is that monkeys might entertain a form of motor intentionality, a likely precursor of a full-blown intentional stance.

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But monkeys certainly do not entertain full-blown mentalization. Thus, what makes humans different? At present we can only make hypotheses about the relevant neural mechanisms underpinning the mentalizing abilities of humans that are still poorly understood from a functional point of view. In particular, we do not have a clear neuroscientific model of how humans can understand the intentions promoting the actions of others they observe. A given action can be originated by very different intentions. Suppose one sees someone else grasping a cup. Mirror neurons for grasping will most likely be activated in the observer’s brain. A simple motor equivalence between the observed action and its motor representation in the observer’s brain, however, can only tell us what the action is (it’s a grasp) and not why the action occurred. Determining why action A (grasping the cup) was executed, that is, determining its intention, can be equivalent to detecting the goal of the still not executed and impending subsequent action (say, drink from the cup). The view that mirror neurons code the what but not the why of an action seems to be reversed by recent electrophysiological data. In the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) of the monkey it has been recently described mirror neurons with very interesting properties. They discharge in association with monkey motor acts (grasping) only when they are embedded in a specific action aimed at different goals (Fogassi et al. 2004; Rizzolatti et al. 2006; Fogassi et al. 2005). For example, a neuron will fire when the monkey grasps a piece of food only if the grasping act is aimed to bring the food into the mouth and not if it is aimed to place the food into a container. Thus, these neurons code the same motor act differently depending on the final action goal. Fogassi and colleagues (2004) proposed that the motor properties of these mirror neurons and of other motor neurons found in the IPL could be that of facilitating the fluidity of an action in which different motor acts follow one the other. Single motor acts are dependent to each other as they participate to the global goal of an action, thus forming pre-wired intentional chains, in which each next motor act is facilitated by the previously executed one. The visual response of some of these mirror neurons is similar to their motor response. In fact, they discharged differentially depending on whether the observed grasping was followed by bringing to the mouth or by placing. Note that the neurons’ activation is present before the monkey observes the experimenter starting the second motor act (bringing food to the mouth or placing it into the container). This new property of parietal mirror neurons, suggest that in addition to recognizing the goal of the observed motor act, they discriminate identical motor acts according to the action in which these acts are embedded. This would allow the monkey to predict what is the goal of the observed action and, thus, to “read” the intention of the acting individual.

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The mechanism of intention understanding just described appears to be rather simple. Depending on which motor chain is activated, the observer is going to have an internal representation of what, most likely, the action agent is going to do. This view is corroborated by a recent fMRI study carried out in healthy human subjects (Iacoboni et al. 2005) showing that premotor mirror neurons-related areas not only code the “what” of an action but also its “why”, that is, the intention promoting it. Detecting the intention of Action A is equivalent to predict its distal goal, that is, the goal of the subsequent Action B. The statistical frequency of action sequences (the detection of what most frequently follows what), as they are habitually performed or observed in the social environment, can therefore constrain preferential paths of inferences/predictions. As hypothesized above, this can be accomplished by chaining different populations of mirror neurons coding not only the observed motor act, but also those that in a given context would normally follow. Ascribing intentions would therefore consist in predicting a forthcoming new goal.

Mirroring emotions and sensations Emotions constitute one of the earliest ways available to the individual to acquire knowledge about its situation, thus enabling to reorganize this knowledge on the basis of the outcome of the relations entertained with others. The coordinated activity of sensory-motor and affective neural systems results in the simplification and automatization of the behavioural responses that living organisms are supposed to produce in order to survive. The integrity of the sensory-motor system indeed appears to be critical for the recognition of emotions displayed by others (see Adolphs 2003; Adolphs et al. 2000), because the sensory-motor system appears to support the reconstruction of what it would feel like to be in a particular emotion, by means of simulation of the related body state. The implication of this process for empathy should be obvious. A recently published functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study showed that experiencing disgust and witnessing the same emotion expressed by the facial mimicry of someone else, both activate the same neural structure – the anterior insula – at the same overlapping location (Wicker et al. 2003). This suggests, at least for the emotion of disgust, that the first- and third-person experiences of a given emotion are underpinned by the activity of a shared neural substrate. Thus, it is the activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed to enable direct experiential understanding. Similar to emotions, also the tactile dimension can be intimately related to the interpersonal dimension. New empirical evidence suggests that the first-person experience of being touched on one’s body activates the same neural networks ac-

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tivated by observing the body of someone else being touched (Keysers et al. 2004). Within SII-PV, a multimodal cortical region, there is a localized neural network similarly activated by the self-experienced sensation of being touched, and the perception of an external tactile relation. The double pattern of activation of the same brain region suggests that our capacity to experience and directly understand the emotional and tactile experience of others could be mediated by embodied simulation, that is, by the externally triggered activation of some of the same neural networks underpinning our own emotion and tactile sensations (see Gallese 2005).

Conclusion In the present chapter we propose that mirror neurons and mirror-related mechanisms here described may represent the neurobiological grounding for the expression of some forms of primary and secondary intersubjectivity. These mechanisms allow individuals to participate in another’s action, feeling or emotion through a preferential access of the visual information about the outside social world to our sensorimotor experience. The mirror neuron systems and the other non-motor mirroring neural clusters in our brain represent one particular sub-personal instantiation of embodied simulation. With this mechanism we do not just “see” an action, an emotion, or a sensation. Side by side with the sensory description of the observed social stimuli, internal representations of the body states associated with these actions, emotions, and sensations are evoked in the observer, ‘as if ’ he/she would be doing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion or sensation. According to this perspective, social cognition is not only explicitly reasoning about the contents of someone else’s mind. Our brains, and those of other primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism, embodied simulation, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds. We also elucidated the possible link between the organization of the motor system and its capacity to generate internal representations of what the agent is going to do. In fact, the motor neurons in the parietal cortex seem to be organized in chains that code different motor acts which are dependent to each other as they participate to the global overarching goal of an action. By means of embodied simulation, the activation of these chains during the observation of motor acts of others determines the activation in the observer’s brain of the final goal of the action. Thus, mirror neurons appear to be a suitable mechanism not only for action understanding but also for the detection of the intentions promoting the behaviour of others. In other terms, as previously hypothesized (Gallese & Goldman 1998), it could be at the basis of basic forms of mind reading.

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The shareability of the phenomenal content of the intentional relations of others, by means of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional attunement (cf. Fogassi et al. 2005). Intentional attunement, in turn, by collapsing the others’ intentions into the observer’s ones, produces the peculiar quality of familiarity we entertain with other individuals. This is what “being empathic” is about (see Gallese 2005). By means of a shared neural state realized in two different bodies that nevertheless obey to the same functional rules, the “objectual other” becomes “another self ”.

Acknowledgements The study was supported by EU Contract QLG3-CT-2002-00746, Mirror, EU Contract IST-2000-29689 Artesimit, by the Italian Ministero dell’Università e Ricerca, Cofin 2002, and grant RBNE01SZB4 from the FIRB/MIUR.

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Meltzoff, A. N., & Gopnik, A. (1993). “The role of imitation in understanding persons and a theory of mind.” In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Flusberg, & D. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding Other Minds (pp. 335–366). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meltzoff, A. N. (2002). “Elements of a development theory of imitation.” In A. N. Meltzoff & W. Prinz (Eds.), The imitative mind. Development, evolution, and brain bases (pp. 19–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myowa, M. (1996). “Imitation of facial gestures by an infant chimpanzee.” Primates, 37, 207– 213. Myowa-Yamakoshi, M., Tomonaga, M., Tanaka, M., & Matsuzawa, T. (2004). “Imitation in neonatal chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).” Dev Sci., 7, 437–442. Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V., & Fogassi, L. (1996). “Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions.” Cog. Brain Res., 3, 131–141. Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (1999). “Resonance behaviors and mirror neurons.” Arch. Ital. Biol., 137, 85–100. Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (2001). “Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action.” Nature Rev. Neurosci., 2, 661–670. Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (2002). “From mirror neurons to imitation: Facts and speculations.” In A. N. Meltzoff & W. Prinz (Eds.), The Imitative Mind. Development, Evolution, and Brain Bases (pp. 247–265). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). “The mirror neuron system.” Ann. Rev. Neurosci., 27, 169–192. Rizzolatti, G, Ferrari, P. F., Rozzi, S., & Fogassi, L. (2006). “The inferior parietal lobule: Where action becomes perception.” Novartis Foundation Symposium. Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Development Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton. Trevarthen, C. (1974). “Conversation with a two-month-old.” New Scientist, 2, 230–235. Trevarthen, C. (1979). “Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity.” In M. M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication (pp. 231–347). New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1980). “The foundation of intersubjectivity: Development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants.” In D. Olson (Ed.), The Social Foundation of Language and Thought (pp. 316–342). New York: Norton. Umiltà, M. A., Kohler, E., Gallese, V., Fogassi, L., Fadiga, L., Keysers, C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2001). “I know what you are doing. A neurophysiological study.” Neuron, 31, 155–165. Watkins, K. E., Strafella, A. P., & Paus, T. (2003). “Seeing and hearing speech excites the motor system involved in speech production.” Neuropsychologia, 41, 989–994. Wicker, B., Keysers, C., Plailly, J., Royet, J.-P., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (2003). “Both of us disgusted in my insula: The common neural basis of seeing and feeling disgust.” Neuron, 40, 655–664.

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Human mirroring systems On assessing mind by reading brain and body during social interaction Riitta Hari Helsinki University of Technology

Views into human brain function As social creatures, we human beings crave for interaction with each other, and our most important “stimuli” are the other humans. Consequently, it would be reasonable to study functions of the human brain during natural social interaction. From the experimental neuroscientist’s point of view, such attempts are, however, highly complex as the stimuli are multifaceted, context-dependent, and vary dynamically during the interaction, depending also on the subject’s own reactions. For that reason, reliable interpretation of the results of such experiments would be extremely challenging. It is therefore understandable that the progress of human brain research has rather relied on “bottom-up” approaches, starting from detailed descriptions of sensory functions. The bottom-up doctrine derives, among others, from the brilliant work of the Nobel laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who in 1960’s identified in the cat and monkey visual cortex classes of neurons with increasing complexity. Similar approaches have been invaluable in increasing our knowledge about various aspects of brain function. However, the pitfall is that the methodologically limited practices of research may bias the scientists to think that the percepts and higher cognitive functions are realized only in a bottom-up way, starting from the simple low-level analysis and progressing towards more demanding neuronal computations that finally give rise to conscious percepts. In strong conceptual contrast to the bottom-up approach is the “top-down” thinking that assumes that the organism’s experience about the world – collected during evolution, ontogenesis, and cultural interaction – leads to strong expectations, hypotheses, and predictions of the forthcoming events. Thus the external

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stimuli would rather serve as a testing material for the available hypotheses, in addition to being triggers for percepts and thoughts. Within the top-down framework, some aspects of social cognition and interaction become more understandable. For example, humans are surprisingly fast in categorizing complex stimuli: The emotional expression of a face is, at the brain level, recognized within 100 ms (Pourtois et al. 2004). Also, pictures of distorted finger postures elicit additional activation in the extrastriatal visual cortex already from 250 ms onwards (Avikainen et al. 2003). Such categorization processes are highly automatized because of the extensive practice in everyday life – much more so than the perception of checkerboard patterns or monotonous sound sequences that are commonly used as stimuli in brain research in the hope of simplifying the experimental setups. It should be noted that it is not always self-evident how, and to which direction, an experimental setup should be modified to make it as simple as possible. For example, some logical puzzles are more easily solved in a social than in an abstract context, encouraging the real-life approaches for studies of brain basis of higher cognitive functions. One recent research line, relevant for brain basis of social interaction, addresses non-verbal communication via “mirror neurons” that were discovered in the monkey frontal lobe a decade ago (for reviews, see Rizzolatti et al. 2001; Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004). These mirror neurons (Fadiga & Craighero 2005), have been proposed to serve as the basis for shared motor representations between the producer and receiver of a motor-act based message. The mirror neurons are, in a strict sense, motor neurons: they are activated both when the subject makes a movement herself and sees another person making a similar movement. The human mirror-neuron system (Nishitani & Hari 2000), comprising several interconnected brain areas, provides one possible mechanism for shared motor representations, and it is closely interconnected to other brain areas that likely form corresponding sensory mirroring systems. In this chapter the mirroring systems will be discussed in a rather broad context, starting from a brief summary of our magnetoencephalographic (MEG) mirror-neuron system studies, and then progressing to considerations of human– human interactions from a neuroscientist’s point of view. The MEG recordings, carried out with state-of-the art whole-scalp neuromagnetometers (see Figure 1), allow non-invasive tracking of brain functions at time scales from 1 ms to several hundreds of ms – all relevant for brain processes underlying percepts, movements, and speech (Hämäläinen et al. 1993; Hari et al. 2000; Hari 2004). The excellent temporal accuracy of MEG, combined with the superb spatial resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provides a state-of-the-art approach to image the brain basis of social cognition and dynamic interaction.

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Figure 1. Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recording with a 306-channel whole-scalp sensor array is starting at the Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology.

MEG studies of the human mirror system Our earliest mirror-neuron system study used the level of the 20-Hz motor-cortex oscillations as a tool to monitor the functional state of the primary motor cortex

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when the subject either performed finger manipulations herself or just observed similar movements (Hari et al. 1998). The aim was to see whether the primary motor cortex, normally controlling skilled voluntary movements, would be activated during observation of action. When the subject was herself manipulating a small object, the primary motor cortex was clearly activated, as was evident from a suppression of the 20-Hz oscillations. Interestingly, activation – although to a smaller extent – was also seen when the subject just viewed another person’s manipulation movements without moving herself. Surface electromyogram indicated that the subject did not herself contract muscles while viewing the other person’s movements. These findings on the modulation of cortical rhythms indicate that the human primary motor cortex is activated when the subject just views another person’s actions. A later study showed 15–20% stronger suppression for motor acts presented live than those seen on a video (Järveläinen et al. 2001), suggesting differentiation of natural and artificial movements at the level of the primary motor cortex. To be able to monitor a wider cortical network, the next MEG study applied brain activity time-locked to hand movements (Nishitani & Hari 2000): The subject either stretched his right arm and hand towards a manipulandum, ending the movement with a pinch of the tip, or he just observed, or both observed and imitated on-line similar movements made by the experimenter. The first activation, occurring in the posterior visual areas about 400 ms before the subject pinched the top of the manipulandum, was followed by activation in Broca’s region, then in the left motor cortex (contralateral to the moving arm), and finally in the right motor cortex. Importantly, Broca’s region and the primary motor cortex were activated both during action execution and observation, thereby fulfilling the requirements for containing motor mirror neurons. Broca’s region, the core area of the human mirror system (and the human homologue of the monkey mirror-neuron area F5) seems to support many functions related to both verbal and non-verbal communication (Nishitani et al. 2005). In monkeys, the mirror neurons of the F5 region are also activated by orofacial gestures. The same seems to be true for humans because still pictures of lip forms activated the human mirror-neuron system with a clear dynamic progression of the signals from posterior to anterior brain areas (Nishitani & Hari 2002): During both viewing and imitation conditions, the activation spread, in both hemispheres, from occipital cortex to the superior temporal region (STS), the inferior parietal lobule, the inferior frontal lobe (Broca’s region), and finally to the primary motor cortex. The whole activation sequence took only 250 ms. Surface electromyogram from mouth muscles ruled out muscular activity during the observation condition.

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Imitation and the mirror-neuron system Mirror neurons have been suggested to be important for imitation (Rizzolatti et al. 2001; Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004). Our MEG findings are in line with this proposal, indicating stronger activation in Broca’s region and primary motor cortex during on-line imitation than during execution or observation (Nishitani & Hari 2000). Because the connotations of the term imitation vary a lot, it is useful to make a distinction between three different phenomena: (i) release of stereotypic motor patterns, (ii) facilitation of actions that are already in the subject’s motor repertoire (for example seeing an athletic performance), and (iii) true imitation during which the imitator learns new motor actions. True imitation likely requires action understanding, and thereby may involve a contribution from Broca’s region (Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004). But even the lowest-level “imitation” is much more complex than e.g. a spinal reflex where the trigger (e.g. hammering the tendon) produces a similar reaction (contraction of a muscle) independently of the subject’s previous experience. One example is the motor contagion that occurs when the whole flock of birds escapes from a lake after the first bird has started to fly. Interestingly, the making-of-movie track on the DVD of “Winged Migration” (Director Jacques Perrin; Sony Pictures, 2001) reports a related event that contrasts a simple copying interpretation of the phenomenon: When a flock of movie-star geese, imprinted on humans to follow an ultra-light aircraft, once left the people and joined a migrating flock of wild geese, the movie team was afraid that they had lost the birds forever. However, after 15 minutes the group of geese returned. Apparently the movements of the flying wild geese were not sufficient to direct the behaviour of the imprinted geese whose goal, hierarchically above the released motor patterns, was not at that stage to migrate. Another example of the higher-order control of simple motor release patterns is evident in yawning, which is easily spread by contagion. Contagious yawning is not true imitation because everybody yawns in her/his own typical manner after receiving a proper trigger. Yawning can be released, in addition to the visual stimulus, also by just reading about yawns (please don’t do it now. . .!), meaning that the idea is enough to release the motor pattern. The proposed role of Broca’s region for action understanding (Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004) would predict that contagious yawns would not require additional Broca’s region activation, and this hypothesis is supported by our recent fMRI results (Schürmann et al. 2005). If imitation is connected to mirror-neuron system function, one might expect persons with deficient imitation skills to show abnormalities in mirror-neuron system activation. In fact, high-functioning autistic subjects, suffering from Asperger’s syndrome and known to have impaired imitation skills as well as difficulties in understanding intentions of other people, show delayed and/or dampened activation in Broca’s region, with more abnormalities in the right than the left

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hemisphere (Nishitani et al. 2004). This finding suggests a disorder either in the frontal or parietofrontal part of the mirror-neuron system and may be related to deficient action–perception matching in subjects with Asperger.

Shaping of the mirror-neuron system The individual development and fine-tuning of the mirror-neuron system could rely upon similar principles as does any developmental brain plasticity. When the basic requirements for inter-area wiring are fulfilled, the brain self-organizes on the basis of the statistical properties of the stimuli in the outside world (Kohonen & Hari 1999), much more so when the subject pays attention to the stimuli and interacts actively with her environment. It has been proposed that the mirror-neuron properties in the whole STS– inferior parietal–F5 circuit of monkey cortex would have been arisen during Hebbian learning (Keysers & Perrett 2004), but the development of the human mirror-neuron system has not yet been studied. However, in a recent MEG study of observation of chopstick use (see Figure 2, top), the activation of the primary motor cortex was the stronger the more often the (Finnish) subjects had themselves used chopsticks during the last year (Järveläinen et al. 2004), implying that the experience affects the strength of mirror-neuron system activation. It is conceivable that when the observed motor sequence contains recognizable parts that already are included in the observer’s own motor vocabulary, the subject can both more easily understand and – if needed – imitate the action. The mirror neurons can also be activated by sounds that imply actions (Kohler et al. 2002). Thus in the functional hierarchy the idea of the act has to arise first and the activation of the mirror neurons can go beyond the information given, thereby emphasizing the role of previous experience in shaping up the mirrorneuron system. Accordingly, goal-directed movements activate the primary motor cortex more strongly than do physically identical non-goal-directed movements (see Figure 2 (bottom); cf. Järveläinen et al. 2004).

Predictions and goals in social interaction To be evolutionarily useful, many decisions concerning other people’s acts and aims have to be fast and automatized and, accordingly, many human–human interactions are predictive. Prediction is one of the key properties of all developed nervous systems (Llinas 2001). However, predictions of human behaviour differ inherently from forecasts of the inanimate world, such as weather, which are based on the observed regularities in nature and the consequent generalizations. What

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Figure 2. Top: Examples of the video clips presented during observation of goal-directed and non-goal-directed tool use: The subject observed the experimenter either to place small objects with chopsticks from one plate to another or to execute similar movements without touching or moving the objects. Bottom: Activation levels in the right primary motor cortex of 9 subjects, quantified on the basis of the local 20-Hz oscillatory activity. The normalized levels of activation are indicated, value 0 corresponding to full activation/excitation during subject’s own movements and value 100 referring to inhibition during rest. Adapted from Järveläinen et al. (2004).

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we predict in other people’s actions is further constrained by our familiarity with the person we are observing, our own experience about the physical limits of motor acts, as well as by our understanding of the normative rules of society. These predictions occur most of the time unconsciously, having been perfected by the life-time experience of social interactions. Prediction becomes especially noticeable in verbal conversation, when an attentive listener may complete the sentence if the speaker has difficulties in finding the right words. The predictive nature of viewing other people’s motor acts is also reflected in the observer’s gaze that anticipates the movements (Flanagan & Johansson 2003). Predictive interaction forms the basis of many sports: the participant with poor predictive abilities will certainly lose in boxing or tennis. Importantly, the interaction depends on the goals and intentions of the participants. For example, in a doubles game of tennis, the players try to predict the opposing player’s moves in order to counteract, whereas they observe their co-player in order to co-operate. On the other hand, singers in a choir, athletes in a team of artistic gymnasts, and soldiers in a parade troop try to monitor nearby persons in order to synchronize with their rhythm, often by means of imitation. Independent of whether the subject’s intention is to imitate, counteract, or co-operate, other people’s motor acts can affect the observer’s motor patterns in an automatized manner. How the interaction occurs, however, is under the control of the observer’s goals.

Body as the display site of the mind With the rapid progress of brain imaging methods, many aspects of the human brain structure, connections, and function can be made public, i.e., visible to other persons. In contrast, the mind largely remains private; the best we can do at present is to search for neuronal correlates of different mental phenomena. However, the discovery of mirror neurons has reawakened old views about human motor actions as informants about the mind. Phenomenological philosophers consider the body as the expression and display site of the mind. Folk psychology and arts also contain frequent, and often humorous references to similar phenomena (e.g. “Einen Mann von Geist erkennt mann auch von hinten” (Schopenhauer)). It is true that we unconsciously interpret many personal characteristics of other persons on the basis of their gaze, posture, gait, gestures, and facial expressions, even in the absence of any verbal interaction. Interpretations of bodily actions as indicators of the mind often go beyond species, so that we may think that a monkey or a cat is nervous or depressed. Some degree of cross-species reading of motor intentions is beneficial for both parties in predator–prey interactions. A part of our intentions obviously become public in our motor actions. To understand the mind, it is therefore necessary, besides reading signals from the

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brain, to observe the subject’s motor behaviour and expressions while she interacts with her environment – an environment which includes, as most important constituents, other people.

Staying tuned with multiple mirroring systems Common to all successful communication is that the sender and receiver of a message stay tuned. In crickets, for example, acoustic communication is temperaturecoupled so that alterations in temperature induce parallel changes in production of the calling song (by males) and in the preference for the song (by females) (Pires & Hoy 1992). The required “parity” of the receptive and productive modes between different individuals of a species inevitably leads into a tight action–perception link within each individual: one subject’s output is the other’s input and vice versa. One good example is the motor theory of speech (Liberman & Whalen 2000), assuming that the listener tries to match her/his own motor representations to the motor articulation patterns of the speaker. Although the mirror neurons could well serve as links between the sender and receiver of a motor-act based messages, they are not sufficient to support the multitude of human–human interactions that require shared motor and sensory representations. For example, observation of hand actions results in modification of activations of both the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices SI and SII (Avikainen et al. 2002), and seeing someone to be touched activates the SII cortex (Keysers et al. 2004). Moreover, speech listening modulates the excitability of tongue muscles (Fadiga et al. 2002), and viewing of orofacial gestures of speech results in a somatotopic modulation of the SI cortex of left hemisphere (Möttönen et al. 2005). Some of the sensory activations associated with action observation might be related to “forward models” that, via efference copies, inform the sensory areas about the forthcoming sensory input which then would be compared with the predictions. The pioneering findings of the motor mirror neurons are already followed by discoveries of a number of other mirroring systems that support our shared representations for actions, intentions, feelings, and emotions, including pain (e.g. Singer et al. 2004; Saarela et al. 2006). In addition to the motor representations important for imitation, our brains most likely house similar highly automatized systems for motor counter-acting and co-operation. Social interaction also requires insight into the beliefs, desires, and thoughts of the other persons, and the links of brain’s “theory-of-mind” circuits (Frith & Frith 1999) with the motor and sensory mirroring systems still remain to be resolved.

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Acknowledgments This study was supported by the Academy of Finland and the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation. I thank Drs. Marieke Longcamp, Nobuyki Nishitani, Martin Schürmann, and Amanda C. de C. Williams for comments on the manuscript.

References Avikainen, S., Forss, N., & Hari, R. (2002). “Modulated activation of the human SI and SII cortices during observation of hand actions.” Neuroimage, 15, 640–646. Avikainen, S., Liuhanen, S., Schurmann, M., & Hari, R. (2003). “Enhanced extrastriate activation during observation of distorted finger postures.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 658–663. Fadiga, L., & Craighero, L. (2007). “Cues to the origin of language: From electrophysiological data on mirror neurons and motor represenatations.” This volume: Chapter 6. Fadiga, L., Craighero, L., Buccino, G., & Rizzolatti, G. (2002). “Speech listening specifically modulates the excitability of tongue muscles: A TMS study.” European Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 399–402. Flanagan, J. R., & Johansson, R. S. (2003). “Action plans used in action observation.” Nature, 424, 769–771. Frith, C., & Frith, U. (1999). “Interacting minds – A biological basis.” Science, 286, 1692–1695. Hämäläinen, M., Hari, R., Ilmoniemi, R., Knuutila, J., & Lounasmaa, O. V. (1993). “Magnetoencephalography – Theory, instrumentation, and applications to noninvasive studies of the working human brain.” Reviews of Modern Physics, 65, 413–497. Hari, R. (2004). “Magnetoencephalography in clinical neurophysiological assesment of human cortical functions.” In E. Niedermeyer & F. Lopes da Silva (Eds.), Electroencephalography: Basic Principles, Clinical Applications, and Related Fields (pp. 1165–1197). Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. Hari, R., Forss, N., Avikainen, S., Kirveskari, E., Salenius, S., & Rizzolatti, G. (1998). “Activation of human primary motor cortex during action observation: A neuromagnetic study.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 95, 15061–15065. Hari, R., Levänen, S., & Raij, T. (2000). “Timing of human cortical activation sequences during cognition: Role of MEG.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 455–462. Järveläinen, J., Schürmann, M., Avikainen, S., & Hari, R. (2001). “Stronger reactivity of the human primary motor cortex during observation of live rather than video motor acts.” Neuroreport, 12, 3493–3495. Järveläinen, J., Schürmann, M., & Hari, R. (2004). “Activation of the human primary motor cortex during observation of tool use.” Neuroimage, 23, 187–192. Keysers, C., & Perrett, D. I. (2004). “Demystifying social cognition: A Hebbian perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 501–507. Keysers, C., Wicker, B., Gazzola, V., Anton, J. L., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (2004). “A touching sight: SII/PV activation during the observation and experience of touch.” Neuron, 42, 335– 346.

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Kohler, E., Keysers, C., Umilta, M. A., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (2002). “Hearing sounds, understanding actions: Action representation in mirror neurons.” Science, 297, 846–848. Kohonen, T., & Hari, R. (1999). “Where the abstract feature maps of the brain might come from.” Trends in Neurosciences, 22, 135–139. Liberman, A. M., & Whalen, D. H. (2000). “On the relation of speech to language.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 187–196. Llinas, R. (2001). I of the Vortex. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Möttönen, R., Järveläinen, J., Sams, M., & Hari, R. (2005). “Viewing speech modulates activity in the left SI mouth cortex.” Neuroimage, 24, 731–737. Nishitani, N., Avikainen, S., & Hari, R. (2004). “Abnormal imitation-related cortical activation sequences in Asperger’s syndrome.” Annals of Neurology, 55, 558–562. Nishitani, N., & Hari, R. (2000). “Temporal dynamics of cortical representation for action.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 97, 913–918. Nishitani, N., & Hari, R. (2002). “Viewing lip forms: Cortical dynamics.” Neuron, 36, 1211–1220. Nishitani, N., Schurmann, M., Amunts, K., & Hari, R. (2005). “Broca’s region: From action to language.” Physiology (Bethesda), 20, 60–69. Pires, A., & Hoy, R. R. (1992). “Temperature coupling in cricket acoustic communication. II. Localization of temperature effects on song production and recognition networks in Gryllus firmus.” Journal of Comparative Physiology [A], 171, 79–92. Pourtois, G., Grandjean, D., Sander, D., & Vuilleumier, P. (2004). “Electrophysiological correlates of rapid spatial orienting towards fearful faces.” Cerebral Cortex, 14, 619–633. Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). “The mirror-neuron system.” Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192. Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (2001). “Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 661–670. Saarela, M., Hlushchuk, Y., de C. Williams, A. C., Schürmann, M., Kalso, E., & Hari, R. (2007). “The compassionate brain: Humans detect intensity of pain from another’s face.” Cerebral Cortex, 17, 230–237. Schürmann, M., Hesse, M. D., Stephan, K. E., Saarela, M., Zilles, K., Hari, R., & Fink, G. R. (2005). “Yearning to yawn: The neural basis of contagious yawning.” Neuroimage, 24, 1260– 1264. Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., Kaube, H., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D. (2004). “Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain.” Science, 303, 1157– 1162.

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Cues on the origin of language From electrophysiological data on mirror neurons and motor representations Luciano Fadiga and Laila Craighero Department of Neuroscience, University of Ferrara

Introduction There are two main views on the origin of human language. The first is that it derives from animal’s call, the other from gestures. In the present article we argue that the second view is much more plausible. We discuss first a neurophysiological mechanism, the mirror neuron system, which solves the problem of direct comprehension of action meaning. We discuss then how this system can be also at the basis of speech perception. The faculty of language is a cognitive ability that only humans possess. How then, did language appear? This is a completely open question. Yet, the discovery of a new class of neurons in the monkey, the so-called mirror neurons, indicates a mechanism that may give some clues on the origin of speech and its continuity with non-human primate behaviour. This mechanism, in fact, is of great evolutionary importance since it is supposed to be at the basis of the way in which primates understand actions made by their conspecifics. Moreover, evidence coming from different experimental approaches has demonstrated that a mirror-neuron system is present also in humans. The most intriguing finding deriving from brain imaging studies is that one of the regions mainly involved in this system is the left inferior frontal cortex in correspondence of the Broca’s region which is classically considered a language-related brain region. In the present article we will briefly describe the basic properties of mirror neurons in non-human primates and man and we will present some experimental data indicating that the mirror neuron system in humans could be at the basis of speech perception.

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Mirror neurons in monkeys Mirror neurons are a set of neurons originally discovered in the ventral premotor cortex of the macaque monkey. Their defining property is that they became active both when the monkey does a particular action (like grasping an object) and when it observes another individual making a similar action (see Rizzolatti et al. 2001). In order to be triggered by visual stimuli, mirror neurons require an interaction between a biological effector (hand or mouth) and an object. The sights of an object alone, of an agent mimicking an action, or of an individual making intransitive (non-object directed) gestures are all ineffective. The object significance for the monkey has no obvious influence on mirror neuron response. Grasping a piece of food or a geometric solid produces responses of the same intensity. Mirror neurons show a large degree of generalization. Largely different visual stimuli, but representing the same action, are equally effective. For example, the same grasping mirror neuron that responds to a human hand grasping an object, responds also when the grasping hand is that of a monkey. Similarly, the response is, typically, not affected if the action is done near or far from the monkey, in spite of the fact that the size of the observed hand is obviously different in the two conditions. It is also of little importance for neuron activation if the observed action is eventually rewarded. The discharge is of the same intensity if the experimenter grasps the food and gives it to the recorded monkey or to another monkey, introduced in the experimental room. An important functional aspect of mirror neurons is the relation between their visual and motor properties. Virtually, all mirror neurons show congruence between the visual actions they respond to and the motor responses they code. According to the type of congruence they exhibit, mirror neurons have been subdivided into “strictly congruent” and “broadly congruent” neurons (Gallese et al. 1996). Mirror neurons in which the effective observed and effective executed actions correspond in terms of goal (e.g. grasping) and means for reaching the goal (e.g. precision grip) have been classed as “strictly congruent”. They represent about one third of F5 mirror neurons. Mirror neurons that, in order to be triggered, do not require the observation of exactly the same action that they code motorically, have been classed as “broadly congruent”. They represent about two-third of F5 mirror neurons.

Mirror-neuron system in humans There are no studies in which single neurons were recorded from the putative mirror-neuron areas in humans. Thus, a direct evidence of the existence of mirror neurons in humans is lacking. There is, however, a rich amount of data proving,

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indirectly, that a mirror-neuron system does exist also in humans. Evidence in this sense comes from neurophysiological and brain-imaging experiments (Gastaut & Bert 1954; Cochin et al. 1998, 1999; Altschuler et al. 1997, 2000; Hari et al. 1998; Salmelin & Hari 1994; Hari & Salmelin 1997). More direct evidence that the motor system in humans has mirror properties was provided by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies. Fadiga et al. (1995) recorded motor evoked potentials (MEPs), elicited by stimulation of the left motor cortex, from the right hand and arm muscles in volunteers required to observe an experimenter grasping objects (transitive hand actions) or performing meaningless arm gestures (intransitive arm movements). Detection of the dimming of a small spot of light and presentation of 3-D objects were used as control conditions. The results showed that the observation of both transitive and intransitive actions determined an increase of the recorded MEPs with respect to the control conditions. The increase concerned selectively those muscles that the participants use for producing the observed movements. The MEPs facilitation during movement observation may result from a facilitation of the primary motor cortex due to mirror activity of the premotor areas, to a direct facilitatory input to the spinal cord originating from the same areas, or from both. Support for the cortical hypothesis (see also below, brain imaging experiments) came from a study by Strafella and Paus (2000). By using a double-pulse TMS technique, they demonstrated that the duration of intracortical recurrent inhibition, occurring during action observation, closely corresponds to that occurring during action execution. A large number of brain imaging studies showed that the observation of actions done by others activates in humans a complex network formed by occipital, temporal and parietal visual areas, and two cortical regions whose function is fundamentally or predominantly motor (Rizzolatti et al. 1996; Grafton et al. 1996; Grèzes et al. 1998, 2001, 2003; Iacoboni et al. 1999, 2001; Nishitani & Hari 2000, 2002; Buccino et al. 2001; Perani et al. 2001; Decety et al. 2002, Koski et al. 2002, 2003; Manthey et al. 2003). These two last regions are the rostral part of the inferior parietal lobule and the lower part of the precentral gyrus plus the posterior part of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). These regions form the core of the human mirror-neuron system. Hand grasping movements (Grafton et al. 1996; Rizzolatti et al. 1996) as well as more complex hand/arm movements were used as visual stimuli (Decety et al. 1997; Grèzes et al. 1998). The results of the first experiments showed that during the observation of hand grasping there was an activation of the left inferior frontal cortex, in correspondence of the Broca’s region. In addition activations were found in the left superior temporal sulcus (STS), the rostral part of the left inferior parietal lobule (area 40), the left opercular parietal region and the rostral part of the supplementary motor area (SMA-proper) (Grafton et al. 1996; Rizzolatti et al. 1996). The first three regions most likely correspond to the

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monkey cortical areas where there are neurons that discharge when the monkey observes biological actions, namely: area F5 (Gallese et al. 1996), the STS region (Perrett et al. 1989; Carey et al. 1997) and the rostral part of the inferior parietal lobule (Fogassi et al. 1998). In studies carried out by the Lyon group (Decety et al. 1997; Grèzes et al. 1998) the involvement of Broca’s area during observation of hand/arm actions was further confirmed. The authors instructed subjects to observe meaningful (with a goal) and meaningless movements. The main results of the condition in which subjects observed meaningless arm movements were these: an activation of the parietal lobe bilaterally, in the left precentral gyrus and the cerebellum on the right side (Grèzes et al. 1998). On the contrary, the observation of meaningful hand actions, in addition to the already mentioned frontal and parietal areas, activates the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s region). Note that the activation of Broca’s region during observation of action, suggests for this area the putative role of human homologue of area F5. In this direction point also some comparative cytoarchitectonical data (see Petrides & Pandya 1997) which entail a morphological parallel between monkey premotor area F5 (a disgranular frontal cortex) with Broca’s area (BA44 and the most posterior part of 45), and fMRI data from Binkofsky et al. (1999) demonstrating that Broca’s region become active also during manipulation of complex objects. In an fMRI study (Buccino et al. 2001), it was assessed whether the observation of actions made with different effectors would activate specific parts of the premotor cortex in accord with the somatotopic organization of the region. While being scanned, normal participants were asked to carefully observe different videotaped object- and non-object-related actions, performed by another individual with different effectors (mouth, arm/hand and foot). Results showed that observation of both object- and non-object-related actions determined a somatotopically organized activation of premotor cortex. The somatotopic pattern was similar to that of the classical motor cortex homunculus. In addition, during the observation of object-related actions, an activation, also somatotopically organized, was found in the posterior parietal lobe. Thus, when individuals observe an action, an internal replica of that action is automatically generated in their premotor cortex. In the case of object-related actions, a further object-related analysis is performed in the parietal lobe, as if the subjects were indeed using those objects. These results bring the previous concept of an action observation/execution matching system (mirror system) into a broader perspective: this system is not restricted to the ventral premotor cortex, but involves several somatotopically organized motor circuits. It is important to note that the observation of transitive actions activated both the parietal and the frontal node of the mirror-neuron system, while the intransitive actions the frontal node only. This observation is in accord with the lack of inferior parietal lobule activation found in other studies in which intransitive

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actions were used (e.g. finger movements, Iacoboni et al. 1999, 2001; Koski et al. 2002, 2003). Considering that the premotor areas receive visual information from the inferior parietal lobule, it is hard to believe that inferior parietal lobule was not activated during the observation of intransitive actions. It is more likely, therefore, that when an object is present, the inferior parietal activation is stronger than when the object is lacking, and the activation, in the latter case, does not reach statistical significance.

What links hand actions with speech? Mirror neurons represent the neural basis of a mechanism that creates a direct link between the sender of a message and its receiver. By transforming an action done by an individual into a representation of the same action in the motor cortex of the observer, this mechanism creates a direct, non-arbitrary link between two communicating individuals. Actions done by other individuals become messages that are understood by an observer without any cognitive mediation. Others’ actions, however, do not generate only visually perceivable signals. Action-generated sounds and noises are also very common in nature. One could expect, therefore, that also this sensory information, related to a particular action, could determine a motor activation specific for that same action. A recent neurophysiological experiment addressed this point. Kohler and colleagues (2002) investigated whether there are neurons in area F5 that discharge when the monkey makes a specific hand action and also when it hears the corresponding actionrelated sounds. The experimental hypothesis started from the remark that a large number of object-related actions (e.g. breaking a peanut) can be recognized by a particular sound. The authors found that 13% of the investigated neurons discharge both when the monkey performed a hand action and when it heard the action-related sound. Moreover, most of these neurons discharge also when the monkey observed the same action demonstrating that these ‘audio-visual mirror neurons’ represent actions independently of whether they are performed, heard or seen. The presence of an audio-motor resonance in a region that, in humans, is classically considered a speech-related area, evokes the Liberman’s hypothesis on the mechanism at the basis of speech perception (motor theory of speech perception, Liberman et al. 1967; Liberman & Mattingly 1985; Liberman & Whalen 2000). The motor theory of speech perception maintains that the ultimate constituents of speech are not sounds, but articulatory gestures that have evolved exclusively at the service of language. A cognitive translation into phonology is not necessary because the articulatory gestures are phonologic in nature. Furthermore, speech perception and speech production processes use a common repertoire of motor

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primitives that, during speech production, are at the basis of articulatory gesture generation, while during speech perception, are activated in the listener as the result of an acoustically evoked motor “resonance”. Thus, sounds conveying verbal communication are the vehicle of motor representations (articulatory gestures) shared by both the speaker and the listener, on which speech perception could be based upon. In other terms, the listener understands the speaker when his/her articulatory gestures representations are activated by verbal sounds. Fadiga et al. (2002), in a TMS experiment based on the paradigm used in 1995 (Fadiga et al. 1995), tested for the presence in humans of a system that motorically “resonates” when the individuals listen to verbal stimuli. Normal subjects were requested to attend to an acoustically presented randomized sequence of disyllabic words, disyllabic pseudo-words and bitonal sounds of equivalent intensity and duration. Words and pseudo-words were selected according to a consonantvowel-consonant-consonant-vowel (cvccv) scheme. The embedded consonants in the middle of words and of pseudo-words were either a double ‘f ’ (labio-dental fricative consonant that, when pronounced, requires slight tongue tip mobilization) or a double ‘r’ (lingua-palatal fricative consonant that, when pronounced, requires strong tongue tip mobilization). Bitonal sounds, lasting about the same time as verbal stimuli and replicating their intonation pattern, were used as a control. The excitability of motor cortex in correspondence of tongue movements representation was assessed by using single pulse TMS and by recording MEPs from the anterior tongue muscles. The TMS stimuli were applied synchronously with the double consonant of presented verbal stimuli (words and pseudo-words) and in the middle of the bitonal sounds. Results (see Figure 1) showed that during speech listening there is an increase of motor evoked potentials recorded from the listeners’ tongue muscles when the listened word strongly involves tongue movements, indicating that when an individual listens to verbal stimuli his/her speech related motor centres are specifically activated. Moreover, word-related facilitation was significantly larger than in the case of pseudo-words related to. These results indicate that the passive listening to words that would involve tongue mobilization (when pronounced) induces an automatic facilitation of the listener’s motor cortex. Furthermore, the effect is stronger in the case of words than in the case of pseudo-words suggesting a possible unspecific facilitation of the motor speech centre due to recognition that the presented material belongs to an extant word. The presence of “audio-visual” mirror neurons in the monkey and the presence of “speech-related acoustic motor resonance” in humans, indicate that independently from the sensory nature of the perceived stimulus, the mirror-resonant system retrieves from action vocabulary (stored in the frontal cortex) the stimulusrelated motor representations.

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Figure 1. Average value (+ SEM) of intrasubject normalized MEPs total areas for each condition. Data from all subjects; ‘rr’ and ‘ff ’ refer to verbal stimuli containing a double lingua-palatal fricative consonant ‘r’, and containing a double labio-dental fricative consonant ‘f ’, respectively.

Conclusions Mirror neurons represent the neural basis of a mechanism that creates a direct link between the sender of a message and its receiver. This mechanism, by transforming an action done by an individual into a representation of the same action in the motor cortex of the observer, creates, a direct, non-arbitrary link between two communicating individuals. Actions done by other individuals become messages that are understood by an observer without any cognitive mediation. On the basis of this property, Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) propose that the mirror-neuron system represents the neurophysiological mechanism from which language evolved. Their theoretical proposal is consistent with theories that postulate that speech evolved mostly from gestural communication and that sound was a late communicative acquisition developed on the top of it, with no link with ancient calls (see Armstrong et al. 1995; Corballis 2002). The novelty of the theory proposed by Rizzolatti and Arbib consists in their indication of a neurophysiological mechanism that creates a common (parity requirement), non-arbitrary, semantic link between communicating individuals.

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An alternative view, based on the fact that humans mostly communicate by sounds, is that language evolved form the sound-based animal communication. In fact, human speech and animals’ calls are widely different phenomena. First of all, the anatomical structures underlying speech and primates’ calls are different. Primates’ calls are mediated primarily by the cingulate cortex and by subcortical structures (see Jürgens 2002). In contrast, human speech network is located on the lateral cortical surface. Second, speech is not necessarily linked to emotions, whilst animals’ calls are. Third, speech is endowed with combinatorial properties that are absent in animal communication. Finally, the anatomical heterogeneity of speech and animals’ calls represents an enormous difficulty for theories that claim that speech derived from animals’ calls. How could speech centres in evolution have “jumped” from one side of the brain to another? A complete theory on the origin of speech, however, is well beyond the scope of this chapter. Our aim in writing was to suggest to the readers some stimulating starting points and to make an attempt to conciliate two streams of research, which start from very different positions: the study of speech representation in humans and the study of hand action representation in monkeys. These two approaches reach a common target: the premotor region of the inferior frontal gyrus where Paul Broca first localized its “frontal speech area”.

Acknowledgements This work has been supported by EU (ROBOT-CUB and CONTACT) and MIUR grants.

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Buccino, G., Binkofski, F., Fink, G. R., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L. et al. (2001). “Action observation activates premotor and parietal areas in a somatotopic manner: An fMRI study.” European Journal of Neuroscience, 13, 400–404. Carey, D. P., Perrett, D. I., & Oram, M. W. (1997). “Recognizing, understanding and reproducing actions.” In M. Jeannerod & J. Grafman (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology, Vol. 11: Action and Cognition (pp. 111–130). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Cochin, S., Barthelemy, C., Lejeune, B., Roux, S., & Martineau, J. (1998). “Perception of motion and qEEG activity in human adults.” Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 107, 287–295. Cochin, S., Barthelemy, C., Roux, S., & Martineau, J. (1999). “Observation and execution of movement: Similarities demonstrated by quantified electroencephalograpy.” European Journal of Neuroscience, 11, 1839–1842. Decety, J., Chaminade, T., Grezes, J., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2002). “A PET exploration of the neural mechanisms involved in reciprocal imitation.” Neuroimage, 15, 265–272. Decety, J., Grezes, J., Costes, N., Perani, D., Jeannerod, M., Procyk, E., Grassi, F., & Fazio, F. (1997). “Brain activity during observation of actions: Influence of action content and subject’s strategy.” Brain, 120, 1763–1777. Fadiga, L., Craighero, L., Buccino G., & Rizzolatti, G. (2002). “Speech listening specifically modulates the excitability of tongue muscles: A TMS study.” European Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 399–402. Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Pavesi, G., & Rizzolatti, G. (1995). “Motor facilitation during action observation: A magnetic stimulation study.” Journal of Neurophysiology, 73, 2608–2611. Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., & Rizzolatti, G. (1998). “Neurons responding to the sight of goal directed hand/arm actions in the parietal area PF (7b) of the macaque monkey.” Society of Neuroscience Abstract, 24, 257.5. Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Rizzolatti, G. (1996). “Action recognition in the premotor cortex.” Brain, 119, 593–609. Gastaut, H. J., & Bert, J. (1954). “EEG changes during cinematographic presentation.” Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 6, 433–444. Gentilucci, M., Benuzzi, F., Gangitano, M., & Grimaldi, S. (2001). “Grasp with hand and mouth: A kinematic study on healthy subjects.” Journal of Neurophysiology, 86, 1685–1699. Grafton, S. T., Arbib, M. A., Fadiga, L., & Rizzolatti, G. (1996). “Localization of grasp representations in humans by PET: 2. Observation compared with imagination.” Experimental Brain Research, 112, 103–111. Grèzes, J., Armony, J. L., Rowe, J., & Passingham, R. E. (2003). “Activations related to “mirror” and “canonical” neurones in the human brain: An fMRI study.” Neuroimage, 18, 928–937. Grèzes, J., Costes, N., Decety, J. (1998). “Top-down effect of strategy on the perception of human biological motion: A PET investigation.” Cognitive Neuropsychology, 15, 553–582. Grèzes, J., Decety, J. (2001). “Functional anatomy of execution, mental simulation, observation, and verb generation of actions: A meta-analysis.” Human Brain Mapping, 12, 1–19. Hari, R., Forss, N., Avikainen, S., Kirveskari, S., Salenius, S., & Rizzolatti, G. (1998). “Activation of human primary motor cortex during action observation: A neuromagnetic study.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 95, 15061–15065. Hari, R., & Salmelin, R. (1997). “Human cortical oscillations: A neuromagnetic view through the skull.” Trends in Neuroscience, 20, 44–49. Iacoboni, M., Koski, L. M., Brass, M., Bekkering, H., Woods, R. P. et al. (2001). “Reafferent copies of imitated actions in the right superior temporal cortex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 98, 13995–13999.

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Iacoboni, M., Woods, R. P., Brass, M., Bekkering, H., Mazziotta, J. C., & Rizzolatti, G. (1999). “Cortical mechanisms of human imitation.” Science, 286, 2526–2538. Jürgens, U. (2002). “Neural pathways underlying vocal control.” Neuroscience Biobehavioral Review, 26, 235–258. Kohler, E., Keysers, C., Umiltà, M. A., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (2002). “Hearing sounds, understanding actions: Action representation in mirror neurons.” Science, 297, 846–848. Koski, L., Iacoboni, M., Dubeau, M. C., Woods, R. P., Mazziotta, J. C. (2003). “Modulation of cortical activity during different imitative behaviors).” Journal of Neurophysiology, 89, 460–471. Koski, L., Wohlschlager, A., Bekkering, H., Woods, R. P., & Dubeau, M. C. (2002). “Modulation of motor and premotor activity during imitation of target-directed actions.” Cerebral Cortex, 12, 847–855. Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). “Perception of the speech code.” Psychol. Rev., 74, 431–461. Liberman, A. M., & Mattingly, I. G. (1985). “The motor theory of speech perception revised.” Cognition, 21, 1–36. Liberman, A. M., & Whalen, D. H. (2000). “On the relation of speech to language.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 (5), 187–196. Maeda, F., Kleiner-Fisman, G., & Pascual-Leone, A. (2002). “Motor facilitation while observing hand actions: Specificity of the effect and role of observer’s orientation.” Journal of Neurophysiology, 87, 1329–1325. Manthey, S., Schubotz, R. I., & von Cramon, D. Y. (2003). “Premotor cortex in observing erroneous action: An fMRI study.” Cognitive Brain Research, 15, 296–307. Nishitani, N., & Hari, R. (2002). “Viewing lip forms: Cortical dynamics.” Neuron, 36, 1211–1220. Paget, R. (1930). Human Speech. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. Perani, D., Fazio, F., Borghese, N. A., Tettamanti, M., Ferrari, S. et al. (2001). “Different brain correlates for watching real and virtual hand actions.” Neuroimage, 14, 749–758. Perrett, D. I., Harries, M. H., Bevan, R., Thomas, S., Benson, P. J. et al. (1989). “Frameworks of analysis for the neural representation of animate objects and actions.” Journal of Experimental Biology, 146, 87–113. Petrides, M., & Pandya, D. N. (1997). “Comparative architectonic analysis of the human and the macaque frontal cortex.” In F. Boller & J. Grafman (Eds.), Handbook of Neuropsychology, Vol. IX (pp. 17–58). New York: Elsevier. Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. A. (1998). “Language within our grasp.” Trends in Neuroscience, 21, 188–194. Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). “The mirror neuron system.” Annual Review Neuroscience, 27, 169–192. Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Matelli, M., Bettinardi, V., Paulesu, E. et al. (1996). “Localization of grasp representation in humans by PET: 1. Observation versus execution.” Experimental Brain Research, 111, 246–252. Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (2001). “Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 661–670. Salmelin, R., & Hari, R. (1994). “Spatiotemporal characteristics of sensorimotor neuromagnetic rhythms related to thumb movement.” Neuroscience, 60, 537–550. Strafella, A. P., & Paus, T. (2000). “Modulation of cortical excitability during action observation: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study.” NeuroReport, 11, 2289–2292. Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Altercentric infants and adults On the origins and manifestations of participant perception of others’ acts and utterances Stein Bråten University of Oslo

In contrast to the Piagetian attribution of an egocentric point of departure for child development which would require decentration to achieve intersubjectivity as the child matures in ontogeny, we have now found evidence of intersubjective capacity for self-with-other resonance and altercentric mirroring which appears to be inborn and to require sensitizing by nurture during the first months of life (Bråten 1998, 2002; Stern 2000, 2004). Manifestations of such a capacity for other-centred participation and resonating with the perceived performer or patient have been revealed in such apparent different phenomena as infant learning by imitation in face-to-face situations, infants affording and reciprocating care, toddlers completing incomplete model acts, and listeners completing statements aborted by the speaker. And what is more, when you are watching another about to perform something, and you wish for the other to succeed in whatever he or she is doing, you will tend to show by your own accompanying muscle movements your virtual participation in the other’s effort as if you were a helper or a co-author of the other’s effort or doing. Here are examples of how participant perception by infants and adults is manifested by their overt behaviours, entailing anticipatory or concurrent matching or completing moves: Lecture audience:

When watching on the screen Kugiumutzakis’ (1983) video of a newborn (20 minutes old) trying to imitate his wide mouthopening (cf. Fig. 1) some of the spectators open their own mouth. When returning to my speaker’s platform I point out what many in the audience [unwittingly] have been doing, and laughter breaks out (Bråten 2003: 267).

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Norwegian boy:

Yanomami-girl:

Sports spectator:

Sartre as listener:

Beauvoir: Sartre:

Having been spoon-fed by his sister, the infant boy (11 3/4 month), when allowed to take the spoon with food in his own hand, reciprocates his sister’s spoon-feeding, and as he reaches out the spoon with food towards his sister’s mouth he opens his own mouth (Bråten 1996b, 1998c) (cf. Fig. 2 (bottom left). Infant girl (probably about same age as the above boy) in an Amazonas tribe, when offering a morsel to her big sister opens her mouth as she extend the morsel towards her sister’s mouth, and tightens her lips as her sister’s mouth closes on the food (photo recordings by Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979) (cf. Fig. 2 (right)). When standing in the spectator box at the summer Olympics 2000 in Sidney, watching her horse in the competition ridden by an Englishman, the Norwegian princess, Märtha Louise, jumps high in the air as her horse and rider begin the jump to cross the last high obstacle (Norwegian Broadcast television NRK1 2000). In the conversations between Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, reported in Adieux, these passages occur in which Sartre completes her utterance (one of several instances): “[I] say it’s odd, this contrast between your stiffness and a welcoming attitude, a kindness, a warmth a soon as . . . .” “As soon as anyone turns to me to ask for something, it vanishes” (Beauvoir 1986: 289).

In spite of differing with respect to whether infants or adults are involved, what all the above episodes have in common is the overt manifestations, entailing preenacting or co-enacting movements, anticipant or concurrent mirroring or simulation of what the perceived patient or performer or partner is about to do or say, as if being a co-author of the newborn’s attempt to imitate, or of the other’s intake of the afforded food, or of the crossing of the obstacle, or of the conversation partner’s statement. Adam Smith (1759) had noticed how spectators watching a French line dancer would sometimes wriggle and other ways move their own bodies as if helping the dancer to keep the balance as he walked on the slack line. He saw this as a manifestation of what he termed ‘sympathy’ (which is not a bad term when considering the Greek roots of ‘sym’ for joint and ‘pathos’ for feelings or suffering). More than a hundred years later, Darwin (1872), in his work on expression of emotions in animal and in man, mentions that he has heard of sport event spectators of high jumping who move their own legs when watching the high jumper take off, but he

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doubted that girls would do such a thing. Darwin was of course wrong as attested by the television glimpses showing how the Norwegian princess in the spectator box at the summer Olympics 2000 in Sidney, jumps high in the air as her horse, ridden by an Englishman, is about to cross the last high obstacle. So, what she was doing when watching what the horse and rider were trying to do, and what some of the lecture audience were doing when watching what the newborn girl was trying to do, or what the feeder often unwittingly does when the patient prepares to mouth grasp the afforded food, is to show by such pre-enacting or co-enacting muscle activation and semblant part movements or co-movements (termed Mitbewegungen by Eibl-Eibelsfeldt 1997: 486) that they take a virtual part in what the other is trying to do, as if sharing the bodily centre of the other’s muscular activity. This is other-centred participation entailing altercentricity – the very reverse of egocentricity. As the very reverse of perception of other subjects from an ego-centric perspective, the above are all instances of ‘altercentric participation’ which entails the empathic capacity to identify with the other in a virtual participant manner that evokes co-enactment or shared experience as if being in the other’s bodily centre: Altercentric participation: Ego’s virtual participation in Alter’s act as if Ego were a co-author of the act or being hand-guided from Alter’s stance. This is sometimes unwittingly manifested overtly, for example, when lifting one’s leg when watching a high jumper, or when opening one’s own mouth when putting a morsel into another’s mouth . . . (Bråten 2000: 297–298)

A more general definition is given by Stern in the glossary of his book on The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. In the glossary he gives this definition: Altero-centered participation (Bråten 1998b) is the innate capacity to experience, usually out of awareness, what another is experiencing [. . . ] as if your center of orientation and perspective were centered in the other. [. . . ] It is the basic intersubjective capacity that makes imitation, empathy, sympathy, emotional contagion, and identification possible. (Stern 2004: 241–242)

Whether manifested in the modus of pre-enactment, of co-enactment, or of reenactment, as in learning by imitation, this intersubjective capacity for participant perception entails that the perceiver resonates with what the other is doing or experiencing as if the perceiving Ego’s frame of reference were centred in Alter. That is why I found the term ‘alter-centric’ appropriate when identifying such occurrences in line with this virtual other postulate: (P) The infant’s body-centred (ego-centric) embodied perspective is accompanied by a virtual companion perspective, a virtual Alter, allowing for altercentric participation in actual others in the mode of felt immediacy (Bråten 1988, 2000).

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It is entailed by the primary infant intersubjective capacity defined by Trevarthen (1979, 1986), which Stern endorses “in light of new evidence of other-centred participation shown by infants in their many forms of imitation, as well as the new findings on mirror neurons and adaptive oscillators” (Stern 2000: xx– xxii/2003: xx). This impressive intersubjective capacity of altercentric participation is probably partly subserved by a mirror neuron system which, when evoked by participant perception of object-oriented acts, would have presupposed sensitizing nurture in the first year of life, and must have been prepared for in human evolution. This I shall take up in terms of the hominin infant decentration hypothesis (Bråten 2002, 2004).

Newborn imitation The pre-enacting or co-enacting mirroring of what the patient or performer is about to do or to attempt, exemplified by the above instances, should not be confused with imitation, i.e. with re-enacting mirroring of the model’s act after having been exposed to that act. However, both the episode with the lecture audience’s pre- and co-enactment, as well as the newborn’s re-enactment which they may be seen to virtually try to help come about, occur at the layer of primary intersubjectivity (cf. the prologue with Trevarthen, this volume), and as distinct from object-related pre- and re-enactments, such as elicited by spoon-feeding situations.

Figure 1. A newborn girl (20 minutes old) exposed to and imitating a mouth opening gesture, occurring in Crete 1983 and as recorded and recounted by Kugiumutzakis (1998). When lecture audiences are shown this video, some in the audience will open their own mouth slightly in advance of the recorded newborn’s attempt to imitate (Bråten 2003).

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When Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1983) published their reports on neonatal imitation this came as a chock to many of those who had been socialized in the traditional Piagetian and object-relations theories to view infants as asocial or egocentric. What is reported in their now classical Science paper is how each of the newborns (between 12 and 22 days old), when exposed to the lightened face of Andrew Meltzoff exhibiting tongue protrusion, or lip protrusion, or wide mouth opening, took after his gesture in a manner that could not be explained away as a reflex act or a coincidence. What Kugiumutzakis did a few years later at Crete was to invite such and other imitations, such as eyebrow moves and sounds, from much younger ones – some between 20 and 45 minutes old. That was in 1983 (the same year which Meltzoff and Moore reported gestural imitation in one-hour-olds). He even tried to invite imitation of the sounds /a/, /m/, and /ang/. Only the former non-front vowel /a/ was attempted imitated by such young newborns, while at two months they managed better (Kugiumutzakis 1998: 74). A closer study of the video recordings of those episodes will rule out reflex actions. They reveal the newborns’ intense scrutiny of his whole face, not just of the mouth or eyebrow used in the movement, and the time they need and the effort it takes to come up with a semblant gesture. Take for example the girl, twenty minutes old, gazing intensely at his face as he does a wide mouth-opening and then, after a while, coming up with a semblant mouth movement with an obvious effort (Fig. 1). In one way, the newborn may be seen intuitively to try to reach for the centre of the other’s mind; in another way by a deliberate effort to come up with a gestural match (cf. Kugiumutzakis 1998: 80–81). Meltzoff and Moore (1998: 58) suggest that infants have a self-oriented code for interpreting that the other is ‘Like Me’. I have rather suggested that they are engaged in other-oriented perception resonating with the feeling of ‘Like You and Liking You’ – as if in the double sense to show that ‘I am like you’ and ‘I like you’, so ‘Please, take care of me!’. In phylogenetic terms of survival: they are making a case for being picked up because of their being like (and liking) the potential caretaker. Being unable to physically cling, as pointed out by Bowlby (1984), they have to speedily connect by ‘mental clinging’. This is suggested by the fact that it is easer to elicit neonatal imitation in the first hour after birth, when survival would have been at stake in the wilderness, than later on.

When infants have learnt by imitation to feed a companion Regard the mouth of the infant feeders in Figure 2. Three impressive features are revealed here:

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First, these infants show themselves capable of affording proto-care or reciprocating caregiving in the mode of feeding another. Second, by doing so they demonstrate to have learnt to feed another from having been subjected to feeding by their caregivers. Third, by their mouth movements they even manifest their virtual participation in the patient’s intake of the food afforded by the infants. Notice how they are opening their own mouth as their companions open the mouth to receive the food offered, and notice how the Yanomami girl tightens her

Figure 2. Infants from diverse cultures feeding their caregivers. (Top left) Norwegian girl (11 1/2 month) reciprocating her mother’s spoon-feeding when allowed to take the spoon with porridge in her own hand. (Bottom left) Norwegian boy (11 3/4 months), reciprocating his elder sister’s spoonfeeding. Notice how he opens his own mouth as he reaches out with the spoon to put it in his sister’s mouth (Bråten 1996). (Right) Yanomaomi girl of about the same age, feeding her elder sister (EiblEibesfeldt 1979, 1997: 486). Notice how the infant opens her own mouth as she offers the morsel to her sister’s mouth, and tightens her lips as her sister’s mouth closes on the morsel.

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lips as her big sister’s mouth closes on the morsel. Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1997) wonders if this is “playful imitation”. I would rather say that what you see revealed here, like what you yourself may unwittingly exhibit when feeding a child or a patient, is taking a virtual part in the patient’s intake of the food, as if participating in the other’s eating from the other’s stance, or virtually helping the other to grasp by mouth the food offered.

Learning by altercentric participation leaving the learner with an ‘e-motional’ memory What is common here in the above instances is the manifestation of an intersubjective capacity for participant perception, entailing that the perceiver resonates with what the other is doing or trying to do or say as if the perceiver’s frame of reference were bodily centred in the other. Hence the term ‘alter-centric’. This innate capacity, sensitized by nurture, underlies the incredibly efficient social learning exhibited by infants and toddlers, who by virtue of their participant perception in what the model is doing are left with the memory of having been a virtual co-author as if they had been hand-guided even when in a face-toface situation. Sensory-motor perception in a participatory sense, involving virtual co-enactment of the model’s movements as if the infant were the co-author of the model’s movements and moved with the model’s movements in the same direction, leaves the infant learner with a pre-dispositional kind of memory of having unwittingly participated in the model’s movements, as if from the model’s bodily centre. This deserves the term ‘e-motional memory’ (combining the root sense of emotion (‘out of ’ ‘motion’) with the participatory sense of moving with the model’s ‘motion’) (Bråten 1998: 106, 119), or may also be termed ‘participatory memory’, as suggested by Fogel (2004). The infants reciprocating spoon-feeding, as illustrated in Figure 2, may do so from e-motional or participatory memory of not just having been spoon-fed by their caregivers, but from having been virtual co-authors of their caregiver’s spoon-feeding. Their other-centred participation in the previous spoon-feeding by their caregivers has left them with an implicit memory of having co-authored that spoon-feeing, inviting circular re-enactment, for example, by way of reciprocating. When infants reciprocate in this manner they demonstrate that while having been previously spoon-fed they have not just participated by receiving and eating the food, but actually having virtually partaken in the caregiver’s spoonfeeding from the caregiver’s stance. This entails altercentric participation, just like what occurs when the caregiver unwittingly opens his or her mouth when the baby opens the mouth to receive the food. The reciprocating infants’ circular reenactment of what they have experienced as recipients of spoon-feeding show that they must have been able to participate in the feeder’s movements from the feeder’s

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stance – the very reverse of what is seen from an outside, egocentric stance in such face-to-face situations. In order for infants to be able reciprocate the spoonfeeding they must have been able to virtually partake in their caregivers’ previous spoon-feeding activity as if they were co-authors of the feeding, even though their caregivers have been the actual authors.

On mirror reversal in face-to-face situations and computational simulations Such other-centred participation enables the infant learners (i) to transcend a selfcentred stance and engage from the performer’s stance (ii) as a virtual co-author of the performance (iii) leaving an e-motional or participatory memory inviting (iv) imitative re-enactment. The mirror neuron system affords a likely partial support of such other-centred participation. Moreover, when the perceiver is face-to-face with the performer and then prepares for circular re-enactment of what has been perceived in an altercentric modus, a mirror reversal is entailed when the perceiver transform from an other-centred frame of reference to the body-centred (egocentric) frame of reference required for execution of the re-enactment.

Mirror reversal entailed in imitative face-to-face situations Consider the simple imitation example of raising arms in the face-to-face situation depicted in Figure 3 (left), and which actually is not so simple at all, at least not for some subjects with autism who understand the adult model’s request ‘Do as I do!’ and try to comply (cf. Ohta 1987; Whiten & Brown 1998). What some of these subjects with autism will do is to notice the inside of the model’s raised hands, relate this to the inside of own hands, and then raise the hands with palms inward, while ordinary children have no problems with doing what the model does, raising their arms with palms outwards, as illustrated by the drawing. It appears to be simple. In a face-to-face situation, however, this actually entails a mirror reversal of what the child sees done by the model (palms inwards towards the child) to what the child does when re-enacting (palm outwards from the child). It is a case of transformation from the child’s other-centred perception of the adult’s model act, as if the child were a co-author of that act from the adult’s bodily centre, to the child’s executed re-enactment within the child’s own body-centred frame of reference co-ordinates. Both these face-to-face cases entail a transformation from the child’s othercentred perception of the adult’s model act, as if the child were a co-author of that act from the adult’s bodily centre, to the child’s executed re-enactment within the child’s own body-centred frame of reference co-ordinates. Hence, there is a mirror reversal from the altercentric frame evoked in the perception to the body-centred

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Figure 3. Instances of simple imitation and of complex learning by imitation. (Left) Simple imitation of arm raising which actually entails a mirror reversal of what the child sees done (palms inwards towards the child) to what the child does (palm outwards from the child), and which some subjects with autism find difficult (after Bråten 1998a: 117 (Fig. 5.4)) (cf. also the visualized example for the computational model of imitation by Billard & Arbib 2002: 346 (Fig. 1)). (Right) Complex imitative learning by other-centred perception (based on video record and photo of the Norwegian girl, Emilie (11 1/2 month) and her mother in Bråten (1998b: 15 (Fig. 1.2)).

(egocentric) frame of reference required for the executed re-enactment, or in terms of Billard and Arbib’s (2002) computational model of imitative learning to which I shall return: frame of reference transformation from ‘eccentric’ to ‘egocentric’.

Computational ‘network’ simulation model explorations In terms of everyday life behaviours, there is nothing extraordinary about such an imitation, and I had expected that it should be relatively easy to explore such processes by connectionist modelling and simulation. In the autumn 1996 we made an attempt in my CAS-group to implement and “train” neurocomputational networks to process the hand-raising input pattern (pictured in Fig. 3 (left)) as exposed to and transformed by mirror reversal. However, it turned out to be too

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cumbersome to simulate the arm raising movements with our simplistic models (implemented in Java 1.02), and we turned instead to a simple hand sign, devoid of moves, to which two alternative competing networks were exposed. So-called “Ego-nets” were “trained” to reproduce the image without reversal, while “Alternets” were “trained” for mirror reversal. Given the same frequency of “training” sweeps (400 presentation of the input pattern) I was surprised to see that the Egonet and the Alter-net did not differ much in terms of error of time. From this I reached the preliminary expectation that “an evolved system sensitized to altercentric (mirror) perception may be as speedy in operation as a system operating from an egocentric perspective, incapable of reversal” (Bråten 2000: 295).1

Another computational model entailing mirror reversal from ‘eccentric’ to egocentric Clearly, such a sensitized system, allowing for imitative learning to listen and to cope from a distance and in face-to-face situations, would have afforded a critical advantage to hominin infants deprived of the instructive and protective advantage enjoyed by other back-riding primate offspring. This was one my points in a talk at the conference on mirror neurons and the evolution of brain and language, which Vittorio Gallese and Maxim Stamenov organized in Delmenhorst July 5–8 2000. Here, a computational model by Aude Billard and Michal Arbib was presented which offers an illustration of the frame of reference transformation entailed in an imitation of arm-raising in face-to-face situations of the kind portrayed in Figure 3 (left). Proposing that the mirror neurons system afford neural mechanisms crucial to learning by imitation, they focus on the capacity for representation underlying imitation and investigate the neural mechanisms that may be involved, for example, when the imitator is re-enacting the arm-raising done by the demonstrator in a face-to-face situation. In one of the module concerned with input of visual data, a frame of reference transformation is carried out: from the ‘eccentric’ frame in terms of which the demonstrator’s arm raising is viewed to the ‘egocentric’ frame of reference required for the imitator’s subsequent own execution (cf. Billard & Arbib 2002: 346 (Fig. 1)).

On partial neurosocial support and the hominin infant decentration hypothesis A question about the potential role of cerebellum An interesting feature of the Billard-Arbib model is the way in which they explicitly include a cerebellum module in addition to primary, premotor and temporal

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cortex modules and such that the learning of new combination of movements is modelled to be done in the premotor cortex and in the cerebellum modules, pertaining specifically to the temporal move sequences. Thus, neurons in the premotor cortex respond to both visual recognition of movements and to the corresponding motor modulation commands produced by the cerebellum. This pertains to a question about cerebellum raised in a seminar talk of mine in Parma (June 2000) concerning the potential role of the cerebellum in a bodily frame of reference transformation. It is well documented that spinocerebellum subserves adjustment of own body-centred movements (Ghez 1991). The spinocerebellum is evoked to subserve adjustment of ongoing movements, probably making use of body mapping in two different areas, the anterior lobe and the posterior lobe, of the spinocerebellum cortex. Two different somatosensory maps of the body appear to be involved, inverted relative to one another: One in the anterior lobe with feet forward and face extended backwards, while the other with a forward and possibly divided mapping of the head and limbs (Brodal 1995: 399; Ghez 1991: 634 with reference to the findings of Adrian 1943; and of Snider & Stowell 1944). If these findings are still accepted to apply also the human cerebellum, then we may ask: May cerebellum play a part role, in conjunction inter alia with the adapted mirror neuron systems, in subserving the kind of mirror reversal that is entailed in face-to-face imitative situations? And furthermore, in which evolutionary conditions may such a mirror neurons systems adaptation have played a particular critical role? To the latter question I shall now turn.

From comparative studies of infant-adult interaction in humans and chimpanzees Piaget had to conceptualize the notion of “de-centration” of the originally attributed egocentricity: children were assumed to gradually acquire a competence for de-centration of their attributed initial egocentricity, in order for their being able to take the perspective of others later in ontogeny. Now, in view of our findings on altercentric learning even in 11-month-olds infants, we have to assume that de-centration must have occurred in human phylogeny, and that the mirror neuron system identified in the modern chimpanzee (Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998), is the likely candidate for such an adaptation. The question is how and when such an adaptation would have made most critical selective advantage. From the beginning of the 1990’s I have been studying infant-adult interaction in humans (in home environment) and chimpanzees (in the Kristiansand Zoo and Wildlife Park in Southern Norway) by observation, video- and photorecording, followed by drawings. Some of this has been succinctly reported in

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Bråten (2000: 282–285). Here follows just some brief observations that pertains to the above question.

Rudimentary imitative learning? I have observed the following: A young chimpanzee (7 years old) inserts a bent and slim stick into a hole of a tree trunk, pulls the stick out and lick it for honey. He repeats this operation several times, before his mother comes and takes the stick. But while he was operating with the stick, he is observed from behind and from the side by his little sister (22 months old) who, when he let go of the stick (taken from him by his mother who then drops it), picks it up and tries to insert it into the hole while licking it. Here is a sort of potential imitative learning in a restricted sense but not in any way of the kind that entails frame-of-reference reversal. Observing the elders, Tobias has even learnt to strip a branch of its leaves and hence making it a tool for honey retrieval. And again, this is a kind of imitative learning, but not of the advanced kind shown by human infants, as illustrated earlier, who are able to learn from observing the model in face-to-face situations. Gaze-following from the back while virtual absence of prolonged eye-contact. The above pertains to the preference of from behind positions, for example in grooming, and the rare occurrences of face-to-face contact. Pertinent in this respect is the virtual absence of prolonged eye-contact (as also stressed by Bruner (1996: 163 with reference to Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1993). When clinging to the mother’s back, offspring of great apes learn to orient themselves in the world in which they operate from the carrying mother’s stance. Moving with her movements, they may even be afforded the opportunity to learn by copying her movements (perhaps in the way that Byrne 1998 terms “program-level imitation”) without having to transcend own (egocentric) body-centred perspective. In my periodic studies of captive chimpanzee-offspring relations, I observe how the infants, when old enough to cling to the mother’s back, not only bodily move with the mother’s movements but often adjust their head to her movement direction, appearing to be gazing in the same direction as she does. When a mother holds the infant in front of her for grooming (which adults more often do from behind one another), a sort of face-to-face situation is established, but not for the kind of reciprocal interplay entailing mutual gazing and gesticulation which we observe in human infant-adult pairs. The Hominin Infant Decentration Hypothesis That must have been prepared for in human evolution. Thus, based inter alia on my comparative studies of infant-adult relations in humans and chimpanzees, I have offered this Hominin Infant Decentration Hypothesis about how a decentred

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mirror neurons system subserving learning to cope and take care by (m)othercentred participation would have made a critical difference for hominin infants who had lost the protective and instructive advantage of riding on their mothers’ back, as enjoyed by ape offspring. An evolved decentred capacity for learning by altercentric perception to cope and take care would have overcome and compensated for the loss of the instructive and protective advantage enjoyed by back-clinging offsprings of other primates (Bråten 2002: 289–290, 2004: 508–509). In the volume on Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (ed. by Stamenov & Gallese 2002), and in a Behavioral and Brain Science commentary, I have proposed that the efficient speech perception that may be observed in early human ontogeny may be subserved by a phylogenetically afforded and adapted resonant mirror system, decentred in phylogeny to subserve (m)other-centred participation by hominin infants. This is acknowledged by Falk (2004) in her response to commentators on her target article on “Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins”: Bråten’s hominin infant decentration hypothesis is particularly significant because it specifies how mirror neurons could have been of major importance during the period of evolution when hominin infants lost the ability to ride clinging to their mothers’ backs [allowing them] to automatically share perceptions from (literally) her point of view. (Falk 2004: 532)

i.e. without having to transcend own (egocentric) stance. In fact, modern chimpanzee offspring appears only to be able share the mother’s perception when riding on her back and looking in the same direction (which they tend to do), and possibly, as they grow older, to transcend own egocentric perspective in an allocentric direction, which would be required for rudimentary imitative learning when not facing the same direction as the model. Tomasello, who earlier has declared the chimpanzee as incapable of imitative learning, acknowledges that enculturated chimpanzees appear to more advanced in this respect, and later modifies his position also with respect to non-cultivated chimpanzees. There is still a leap, however, to the kind of frame of reference reversal that human infant learners are capable of when learning by imitation from face-to-face situations, while back-riding chimpanzee infants are afforded instruction and protection without having to transcend their body-centred perspective. In any case, before the invention of baby slings or other baby-carrying facilities (attributed by Leakey 1995: 94 to early Homo erectus), hominin species may have been faced with extinction when turning bipedal, I have submitted, if their young offspring were unable to listen and learn to cope and take care by (m)other-centred mirroring and participation (Bråten 2000: 275).

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From (pre)verbal learning and listening to simulation of mind in human ontogeny Such a capacity is at play, as we have seen, even in early human ontogeny, facilitating the ontogenetic path to speech in the culture into which the child is born. This path comprises inter alia these steps: Mutually attuned protoconversation in the first months of life, and speech perception by the efficient infant learner entailing that already by six months the infant may disregard sound distinctions that make no sense in the ambient language (Kuhl 1998). Patricia Kuhl points out that as they listen to speech they appear to include more than the auditory characteristics; “the infants store ‘polymodal’ aspects of speech – the auditory and visual speech they experience, and the motor patterns they themselves produce” (Kuhl 1998: 300). She suggests that infants acquire a life-long native-language accent inter alia by virtue of an innate link between perception and action, extending the influence of linguistic experience beyond perception to the motor patterns acquired in speech (cf. also Conboy & Kuhl this volume). If that is the case, then this may perhaps invite a specification in terms of learning by altercentric perception of ambient speakers and virtual participation in their speech production. Once established, Kuhl points out, the perceptual and perceptual-motor system underlying speech is difficult to alter. This would somehow entail that the learner, perhaps even the pre-verbal learner, be capable of altercentric perception of and participation in the sound-producing movements of the ambient speech performers. This kind of learning can hardly be accounted for in terms of perspective-taking in a social-cognitive sense, but rather in an emotive and participatory sense of more primitive subjective experience evoking temporal feeling flow patterns that are shared by the speaker and the learner. Subserving verbal learning by (m)other-centred participation, this altercentric capacity is supportive of verbal conversation to come with its reciprocal and participant characteristics. Not only may the speaker co-process his own production from the listener’s stance. The listener may co-articulate the speaker’s production as if she or he were a coauthor. Such virtual co-articulation from the other’s stance is manifested when a listener completes the speaker’s aborted sentence or answers a half-spoken question. It is supported by the capacity for other-centred mirroring and resonance that we see at play in protoconversation and response to motherese (Bråten 1988, 2002, 2003; Trevarthen 1998; Stern 2000, 2004a).

On the path to mind-reading It seems reasonable to assume that an other-centred mirror system for matching or simulating others’ acts, coming to virtual aid by simulating and realizing its com-

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pletion, such as done by the 18-month-old in Meltzoff ’s behavioural re-enactment experiment, may afford a precursory and nurturing path to simulation of other minds, and that such preverbal capacity for virtual participation in what others are doing are likely to support the kind of inner feedback loops manifested even in verbal conversation when for example, the listener completes the speaker’s aborted statement or replies to a question only partly formulated. Meta-understanding of others’ minds and emotion (Dunn 1998) opens for perspective-taking and emotional absorption, even in fictional others (Harris 1998), probably supported by the capacity for altercentric participation, identified already in infants (cf. chapters by Bråten, by Dunn, and by Harris in Bråten (Ed.) 1998).

Listening to fairytales. For example, in an Oxford study, Rall and Harris (2000) find that when 3- and 4-year-olds are asked to retell fairytales, say about Cinderella, they manage best when the verbs in the stories listened to are consistent with the stance of the protagonist with whom they identify, inviting their altercentric participation in ‘Cinderella’s slippers’, as it were. The children have trouble when the verbs in the stories told are used from the reverse perspective, at odds with their perspective-taking: [it] would be plausible to conclude that listeners engage in what we might call ‘altercentric participation’ (Bråten 1998). This would allow us to make sense of the fact that listeners not only encode movements and location in relation to the protagonist, they also anticipate the emotional implications of impending events. (Rall & Harris 2000: 207)

The listener during verbal conversation Now, above is an indication of how the listener may take the stance of the main character in a story listened to. We may, of course, also observe the manifestations of such virtual participation during verbal conversation between speechcompetent partners. In verbal conversation partners, such simulation of mind (Bråten 1973, 1974) by virtue of altercentric perspective-taking enables them to complete one another’s utterances and to reply to one another’s half-spoken questions. Conversation partners manifest their virtual other-centred participation inter alia by sentence completion as an overt manifestation of such virtual participation in the other’s production.

When the listener completes the speaker’s statement. In conversations taped during the fall and summer 1974 between Sartre (JPS) and de Beauvoir (SdB) there sometimes occur passages in which one of them completes the unfinished utterance made by the other. An example quotation was given in the beginning of this chapter. Below is another quote from Simone de Beauvoir (1984) Adieux (Quota-

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tions within [ ] in italics is taken from the French edition La cérémonie des adieux (1981)). At some point in their conversations de Beauvoir asks Sartre about the book he wrote about Genet, a writer friend of Sartre and of Cocteau, and she asks Sartre about how Genet took the book Sartre had written about him, and Sartre replies (on p. 273 in the English edition): JPS: In a very odd fashion [. . . ] When I had finished I gave him the manuscript. He read it, and one night he got up and went over to fireplace with the intention of burning it [. . . ] It disgusted him because he felt that was as I had described him, and although he was not disgusted with himself, yet . . . [Ca le dégoûtait parce qu’il se sentait bien tel que je l’avais décrit et il n’était pas dégoûté de lui, mais . . . ] SdB: Yet he was disgusted that a book should be written about him [ . . . ] [Mais il était dégoûté qu’on écrive un livre sur lui [ . . . ] (p. 389)]

In terms of a simulation of mind conversation model. Such sentence completion, reported also by Rossnes (2004) in his study of expert groups, may be accounted for in terms of a co-actor simulation model, put forward in the early 1970’s (Bråten 1973, 1974). That was the first model to articulate the simulation version of the theory-of-mind approaches which later came in focus of psychology and philosophy. Drawing inter alia upon Mead’s (1934) notion of anticipatory response and my own computer simulations of dialogues studied in the laboratory early 1970’s, my simulation of mind conversation model was partly in line with Rommeveit’s (1972) psycholinguistic emphasize of the complementarity of the speech act, entailing the listener’s re-construction of the speaker’s message, and partly in line with Liberman’s (1957) motor theory of speech perception. As I originally formulated the model, I offered the conjecture that through implicit simulation of the coactor’s coding the actor regulates own coding from criteria serving conversational understanding (Bråten 1973: 77), or as voiced in a cybernetic conference at Namur: the actor regulates his encoding through covert predictory simulation of coactor’s decoding, and regulates his decoding activity through covert postdictory simulation of coactor’s encoding. (Bråten 1974: 328)

As I phrase it today in terms of altercentric simulation, when you find yourself more or less unwittingly completing what your conversation partner is about to say, you overtly manifest your participant perception of the other’s speech act, simulating what the other is about to say as if you were a virtual co-author, enabled by an altercentric mechanism, supported by an other-centred mirror system decentred in phylogeny to subserve preverbal and verbal conversational efficiency.

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On self- or other-simulation of mind Simulation of mind or theory of mind? Gallese and Goldman (1998) finds the discovery of mirror neurons to support the simulation version, and not the theory version, of theory of mind assumptions. Their conjecture is that the mirror neurons found in the macaque monkey brain do not constitute a full-scale realization, but only a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of the simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading as simulation of mind. The kind of matching occurring in mirror neurons experiments between states or process in the observer and the observed, implies processes of simulation (ST), not theory deductions (TT). A further link between mirror neuron activity and simulation can be inferred from the fact that, as the TMS experiment by Fadiga et al. [1995] demonstrates, the human equivalent matching system facilitates in the observer that same muscle groups as those utilized by the target [ . . . ] if ST were correct, and a mind-reader represents an actor’s behavior by recreating in himself the plans or movement intentions of the actor, then it is reasonable to predict that the same muscular activation [when not entirely inhibited] will occur in the mind-reader. As matching muscular activation is actually observed in the observer, this lends support to ST [simulation of mind] as opposed to TT. (Gallese & Goldman 1998: 498)

But then, there is the question of whether such simulation is carried out in terms of a body-centred (ego-centric) map, which would be the case for the macaque in the observer’s position, or in terms of an other-centred map which would pertain to ordinary human observers in face-to-face situations.

Self-simulation versus other-simulation Laying out what he terms ‘the architecture of intersubjectivity’ in his book, On Message Structure, Rommetveit (1974: 59) with reference to my simulation of mind model of coding simulation circuits during conversation, anticipates the current debate on the simulation variant versus the theory variant of ‘theory of mind’ (cf. Davies & Stone (Eds.) 1991, 1995), and raises the question of whether selfsimulation or other-simulation is entailed when the speaker takes the listener’s perspective by way of anticipatory decoding. When formulating the conversational model of coding simulation circuits it never occurred to me that this could be seen as self-simulation. I now realize that this came to be a question in the later debate on theory of mind versions. For example, rejecting that simulation of mind be founded on the implicit inference from oneself to others, Gordon (1995: 53, 63) emphasizes that simulation of other

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minds entails identification with the mental state of the other by virtue of “our capacity for recentering our egocentric maps.” This is his conclusion: [a]scent routines, coupled with our capacity for recentering our egocentric maps, enable us directly, rather than by inference from our own case, to identify the mental state of others. (Gordon 1995: 63)

In the case of conversational partners, conversation would break down I would say, if the participants all the time were to draw on egocentric maps in attempts to understand what the other is saying. Even though de Beauvoir and Sartre in the above example have a lifelong partnership to draw upon and, hence, have a solid experiential grounding for anticipating what the other is going to say, they do not simulate themselves in the other’s shoes. They simulate processes in one another, showing themselves sometimes to be a virtual coauthor of what the other is about to say.

Altercentricity manifested at various layers of intersubjectivity In this chapter we have seen how perception of others’ acts invites participatory perception as if being a virtual co-author of the perceived act, entailing anticipatory or concurrent simulation and virtual co-enactment, or subsequent imitative re-enactment. I have offered some illustrations of other-centred participation in another’s performed or attempted act, manifested by the perceiver’s co-movements. In the prologue (with Trevarthen, this volume) various layers of intersubjectivity were distinguished. The illustrated occurrences may now be qualified according to the proper layer of intersubjectivity at which they occur, and according to their temporal relation to the perceived or anticipated (attempted) performance by which they are evoked.

Manifestations of altercentricity at the layer of primary intersubjectivity One of these episodes, comparable to the way in which spectators may engage in the efforts of a performer at the sports arena, is the way in which some in the lecture audience unwittingly opened their own mouth when watching on the screen one of the newborns preparing itself for imitating Kugiumutzakis’ wide mouth opening apparently to try to come to virtual aid of the newborn’s effort. Unlike the detached mode of perception by an unmotivated observer, evoking no muscle activation, the motivated viewers and participants in the above episodes exhibit accompanying movements, with inhibition lifted by their engagement in the successful outcome of the performance. Identifying with the performer, they may be seen to be unwittingly pre- or co-enacting parts of the performance. At this layer of

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intersubjective engagement the innate capacity for other-centred participation enables them (i) to transcend a self-centred stance and engage from the performer’s stance (ii) as a virtual co-author of the performance or (iii) unwittingly coming to “virtual” assistance. Involving neither objects, nor symbolic narratives, such sympathetic or empathic identification, like the lecture audience reaction in our initial example, when some open their mouth as the video-recorded newborn is preparing herself to imitate the adult model’s wide mouth opening. should be properly allocated to the primary layer of intersubjectivity. Furthermore, such anticipatory and concurrent manifestations of sympathy reactions should be clearly distinguished from imitative re-enactment, even though both involve participant perception.

Manifestations of altercentricity at the layer of secondary intersubjectivity The same applies to the caregiver or reciprocating infant who opens own mouth slightly in advance or concurrently with the food or spoon with food being fed into the patient’s mouth. For example, when spoon-feeding, also adult caregivers often unwittingly open their own mouth as the mouth of the infant or patient begins to open to take in the afforded food, reflecting how they identify with the patient’s performance, virtually participating in the patient’s preparation to eat or coming to “virtual” aid of the patient’s effort to eat. As we have seen, not only adult caregivers do this. I have offered episodic illustrations of infants, between 11 and 12 months, who when allowed to take the spoon full of food in own hand, reciprocate the caregiver’s spoon-feeding and sometimes open their mouth as they clumsily offer the spoonful to the caregiver’s opening mouth. Such accompanying mouth movements deserve the German label ‘Mitbewegungen’ (co-movement; moving with) used, for example, to describe a recorded Yanomamo-infant who opens the mouth when offering a morsel to the big sister’s mouth, and tightens own lips as her mouth closes on the offered morsel (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1997: 486). This is not imitation, but an anticipatory and concurrent manifestation of virtual participation in the other’s intake of the afforded food. The feeder’s mouth movements attest to anticipatory simulation of the other’s food intake. On the other hand, imitative learning by other-centred participation entails circular re-enactment of the preceding model action of feeding. When the infant reciprocates spoon-feeding from e-motional memory of having been a virtual co-author of spoon-feeding, this attests to imitative learning by other-centred participation in the caregiver’s previous spoon-feeding, for example as illustrated in Figure 3 (right). Another example that may properly be allocated to the object-oriented layer of secondary intersubjectivity is provided by the toddlers in Meltzoff ’s behavioural re-enactment experiment (cf. Meltzoff & Brooks this volume (9)). When exposed

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to the adult demonstrator’s (pretending to try and) failing to pull a dumbbellshaped object apart and when handed the dumbbell these 18-month-olds pull it apart. They may be seen to be doing so by re-enacting from their e-motional memory of having simulated internally the successful completion of the attempted act, evoked by their virtual participation in the experimenter’s effort to pull it apart. Like imitation by other-centred participation, re-enactment occur after the demonstrated (failed) act, but unlike learning by imitating a demonstrated act, an internal mental simulation of the successful completion of the demonstrated failed effort is required.

Manifestations of altercentric simulation of mind at the layer of tertiary intersubjectivity What the toddlers prove themselves capable of doing, successfully realizing and completing an act that the experimenter failed to bring to a successful conclusion, may be compared to the way in which listeners sometimes complete a half-spoken utterance. When you more or less unwittingly complete covertly or overtly what you experience that the other is about to say, you do so by virtue of altercentric participation in the other’s speech act. Even though the other is the initial author of the incomplete sentence, your virtual co-author participation in what is about to be said enables you to overtly join in the co-authorship. The listener may be seen to be virtually co-authoring the speaker’s talking as soon as the listener realizes the end-point towards which the utterance is headed. This is illustrated by the snapshots from the conversations between Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, reported in Adieux, and quoted above and in the beginning of this chapter. Here, Sartre manifests by his completion of her statements, his other-centred participation in what she is about to utter. Even though the other is the initial author of the incomplete sentence he is listening to, his virtual co-author participation in what has already been said enables him to overtly join in the co-authorship.

Note . These neurocomputational “network” exploration simulations was done in my group at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) in the Autumn 1996, with Anders Nöklestad as my assistant, and initially through the use of Java 1.02. The limited objective was just to demonstrate the operational feasibility of ‘training’ different version of implemented ‘neural net’ simulators to reproduce the input patterns, corresponding to the arm raising Gestalt pictured in Figure 2 (left) in these two formats: “in a copying (egocentric) manner and in a reversed (altercentric) manner” (Bråten 2000: 293). Although we managed to “train” for reversal, it turned out be too cumbersome to explore further, and we switched instead to connectionist simulation of responses by trained ‘Ego-nets’ and ‘Alter-nets’ to a hand sign pattern (actually the hand-sign for ‘Jesus’ as

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presented to the ‘perceiving’ net, inviting mirror reversal, corresponding to how it is re-enacted from an egocentric stance). While in one experimental run (with 400 training sweeps, using the tlearn network developed at Oxford (cf. Plunkett & Elman 1997)) the Ego-net was trained to reproduce the image of the input pattern without any reversal, while the Alter-net was trained to reproduce the reverse image. The result was that the two competing networks did not differ much in terms of time or numbers of errors. Relative time and errors increased, however, given the same number of training sweeps, when the Alter-net was trained to respond both in terms of ego-input and a mirror reversal.

References Adrian, E. P. (1943). “Afferent areas in the cerebellum connected with the limbs.” Brain, 66, 289–315. Beauvoir, S. de (1986). Adieux. A Farewell to Sartre (transl. by Patrick O. Brian). Hamondsworth: Penguin Books. (In French: Le Céremonie des adieux Édition Gallimard 1981.) Billard, A., & Arbib, M. (2002). “Mirror neurons and the neural basis for learning by imitation: Computational modeling.” In M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 343–352). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bowlby, J. (1984). Attachment and Loss. Reading: Pelican Books. Bråten, S. (1973). Tegnbehandling og meningsutveksling (On sign processing and simulation of mind during conversation). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget / Scandinavian University Books. Bråten, S. (1974). “Coding simulation circuits during symbolic interaction.” In Proceedings of the 7th International Congress on Cybernetics 1973 (pp. 327–336). Namur: Assocation Internationale de Cybernetique. Bråten, S. (1988). “Dialogic Mind: The Infant and Adult in Protoconversation.” In M. Carvallo (Ed.), Nature, Cognition and System, I (pp. 187–205). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bråten, S. (1998a). Kommunikasjon og samspill – fra fødsel til alderdom (Communication and Interplay from Birth to Old Age). Oslo: Tano-Aschehoug. (Danish edition: Dafolo Forlag 1999.) Bråten, S. (1998b). “Infant learning by altercentric participation: The reverse of egocentric observation in autism.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 105–124). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bråten, S. (2002). “Altercentric perception by infants and adults in dialogue.” In M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 273–294). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bråten, S. (2003a). “In Gegensatz zu Piagets Theorie: Spracherwerb und Sprachentwicklung von einem alterzentrischen Standpunkt.” In N. Psarros, P. Stekeler-Weithofer, & G. Voruba (Eds.), Die Entwicklung sozialer Wirklichkeit (pp. 61–88). Weilerswisst: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Bråten, S. (2003b). “Participant perception of others’ acts: Virtual otherness in infants and adults.” Culture & Psychology, 9 (3), 261–276. Bråten, S. (2004). “The hominin infant decentration hypothesis: Mirror neurons system adapted to subserve mother-centred participation.” Commentary Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27 (4), 508–509.

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Bråten, S., & Trevarthen, C. (1994/2000). “Beginnings of cultural learning.” Talk at the ZiF symposium on The Formative process of society, Bielefeld 17–19 Nov. 1994. In S. Bråten (Ed.), Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn. Essays on Dialogue in Infant & Adult (pp. 213– 218). Bergen: Sigma 2000. Bråten, S., &. Gallese, V. (2004). “On mirror neurons systems implications for social cognition and intersubjectivity” (Interview by the journal editors L. T. Westlye & T. Weinholdt). Impuls, 58 (3), 97–107. Brodal, P. (1995). Sentralnervesystemet. Bygning og funksjon. Oslo: Tano Aschehoug. Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Byrne, R. W. (1998). “Imitation: The contribution of priming and program-level copying.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 228–244). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, M., & Stone, T. (Eds.). (1995). Mental Simulation. Oxford: Blackwell. Darwin, C. (1872/1955). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: Philosophical Library. Di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., &. Rizzolatti, G. (1992). “Understanding motor events: A neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research, 91, 176–180. Dunn, J. (1998). “Sibling, Emotion and the Development of Understanding.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 158–168). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1979). “Human ethology: Concepts and implications for the sciences of man.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2, 1–57. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1997). Die Biologie des menschlichen Verhaltens. Weyarn: Seehamer Verlag. Falk, D. (2004). “Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: Whence motherese?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27 (4), 491–503. (Cf. also Author’s response in the same issue: 527–534.) Falk, D. (2004). “The “putting the baby down” hypothesis.” Author’s response to commentaries. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27 (4), 527–534. Fogel, A. (2004). “Remembering infancy: Accessing our earliest experiences.” In G. Bremner & A. Slater (Eds.), Theories of Infant Development (pp. 204–230). Cambridge: Blackwell. Gallese, V., & Goldman, A. (1998). “Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mindreading.” Trends in Cognitive Science, 2 (12), 293–450. Ghez, C. (1991). “The Cerebellum.” In E. R. Kandel et al. (Eds.), Principles of Neural Science (3rd ed.) (pp. 626–646). New York/Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gordon, R. M. (1995). “Simulation without introspection or inference from me to you.” In M. Davies & T. Stone (Eds.), Mental Simulation (pp. 53–67). Oxford: Blackwell. Harris, P. L. (1998). “Fictional absorption: Emotional response to make-believe.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 336–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kugiumutzakis, G. (1998)). “Neonatal imitation in the intersubjective companion space.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 63–88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhl, P. (1998). “Language, culture and intersubjectivity.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 297–315). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leakey, R. (1995). The Origin of Humankind. London. Phoenix. Liberman, A. M. (1957). “Some results of research on speech perception.” J. of Acoustic Soc. Am., 29, 117–123.

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Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1977). “Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates.” Science, 198, 75–78. Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. (1983). “Newborn infants imitate facial gestures.” Child Development, 54, 702–709. Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1998). “Infant intersubjectivity: Broading the dialogue to include imitation, identity and intention.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 47–62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NRK1 (Norwegian Broacasting Corporation) (2000). Report from the Summer Olympic Games, Sidney. Ohta, M. (1987). “Cognitive disorder of infantile autism.” J. of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 17, 45–62. Piaget, J. (1926/1959). The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge. Plunkett, K., & Elman, J. E. (1997). Exercises in Rethinking Innateness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rall, J., &. Harris, P. L. (2000). “In Cinderella’s slippers? Story comprehension from the protagonist’s point of view.” Developmental Psychology, 36, 202–208. Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. (1998). “Language within our grasp.” Trends in Neurosciences, 21 (5), 188–193. Rommetveit, R. (1972). Språk, tanke og kommunikasjon. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Rommetveit, R. (1974). On Message Structure. New York: Wiley. Rommetveit, R. (1998). “Intersubjective attunement and linguistically mediated meaning in discourse.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 154–371). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rossnes, R. (2004). “I think I understand what you mean: Negotiating intersubjective understanding.” In A. Carlen, R. Klev, & G. von Krogh (Eds.), Living Knowledge (pp. 99– 113). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Savage-Rambaugh, E. S., Sue, E., Murphy, J., Seveik, R. A., Brakke, K. B., Williams, S. L., & Rambaugh, D. M. (1993). “Language comprehension in ape and child.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58 (3–4), Serial No. 233. Smith, A. (1790/1976). The Theory of Moral Sentiments (6 ed., published 1976). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Snider, R. S., & Stowell, A. (1944). “Receiving areas of the tactile, auditory, and visual system in the cerebellum.” J. Neurophysiology, 7, 331–357. Stamenov, M., & V. Gallese, V. (Eds.). (2002). Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stern, D. N. (2000). “Introduction to the paperback edition.” In D. N. Stern (Ed.), The Interpersonal World of the Infant (pp. xi–xxxix). New York: Basic Books. (Also London: Karnac 2003.) Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton. Tomasello, M., Kruger, A. C., & Ratner, H. H. (1993). “Cultural learning.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 495–525. Trevarthen, C. (1979). “Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity.” In M. M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before Speech (pp. 321–347). New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1986). “Development of intersubjective motor control in infants.” In M. G. Wade & H. T. A. Whiting (Eds.), Motor Development in Children (pp. 209–261). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Trevarthen, C. (1998). “The concept and foundations of infant intersubjectivity.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 15–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whiten, A., & Brown, J. (1998). “Imitation and the reading of other minds.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 260–282). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Appendix On the difference between imitation and anticipatory embodied simulation As we saw in the openings episodes, when committed to a positive outcome by the performer, the spectator may come to manifest semblant movements in advance of or concurrent with the performer’s movements, much like a feeder does who opens her mouth slightly in advance of her patient’s opening the mouth to receive her food. This is strictly speaking not imitation which more or less entails copying a preceding act, and differs in terms of time with what a spectator may reveal by virtue of his empathic identification in sympathy with a performer’s effort through anticipatory or concurrent simulation of what the other is about to do or utter. Return again to Figure 2. When the feeding children mirror by their mouth movements the recipient’s mouth movements what we see manifested here, just like what feeding adult unwittingly do, is other-centred participation in an unwitting mode of anticipatory or concurrent simulation. Again, this is not imitation. In terms of time and execution one may distinguish between imitation and simulation – while imitation entails an executed re-enactment of the whole model act after the fact of the model’s enactment of that act, simulation entails an internal virtual enactment which may, but need not be, accompanied by overt manifestations of any kind. While a model act, occurring at t, is followed by an imitative act at t + 1, by virtue of altercentric participation at t, simulation may be concurrent at t or even anticipatory, at t – 1. For example, the Yanomami-girl (probably about 12 months of age) (Fig. 2), opens her mouth as she extends the morsel towards her sister’s mouth, and tightens her lips as her sister’s mouth closes on the food (shown by photo recordings by Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979: 15, 1997: 486 (Fig. 4.88)). This is a manifestation of other-centred anticipation of what the other is about to do. The baby anticipates by her mouth movements what the other is going to do when taking in the food. Imitative learning by other-centred participation, on the other hand, entails circular re-enactment of the pre-ceding model action following from the learner virtual participation in the feeding to which the learner has been subjected to. Let E.p denote the executed manual act of feeding and E.q the executed mouth act of taking in the food, while *A.*p’ and *A.*q’ mark altercentric participation in respectively alter’s feeding and food-intake, involving the virtual-Alter mechanism *A. Then we may specify:

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Caregiver: Execution of feeding (E.p) and anticipatory simulation by altercentric participation in Alter’s intake of food:

Infant learner: While food intake (E.q) othercentred participation in Alter’s spoon-feeding (*A.*p’) invites circular re-enactment

Infant re-enacting: Spoon-feeding reciprocated from e-motional memory of been a virtual co-author of preceding spoon-feeding

Caregiver (E.p; *A.*q’)

→ Infant learner (E.q; *A.*p’) → Re-enacting infant (E.p’)

Figure 4. Spoon-feeding situations evoking imitative learning by altercentric participation. (Left) (Middle) (Right)

The caregiver reveals by her mouth opening to take a virtual (other) part in the baby’s food intake. While receiving the food the infant experiences to be a virtual co-author of the feeding, leaving the baby with an e-motional memory. The baby reciprocates the spoon-feeding from his e-motional memory of having been a virtual co-author of the spoon-feeding subjected to (Here could be added the symbolic logic expression for his, in turn, taking a virtual part in her food-intake: Anticipating infant (*A.*q”)).

Thus, the caregiver execution of feeding (while participating in the baby’s food-intake) evokes in the infant concurrent intake of food and virtual participation in the caregiver’s feeding, which in turn invites and enables the baby – when allowed to take the spoon in own hand – to feed the caregiver in a semblant manner. This is learning by imitation, while the feeder’s anticipatory mouth movements revealing virtual other participation in the patient’s food intake is anticipatory or concurrent embodied simulation (cf. Bråten 2002: 290–291).

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chapter 

From speech to gene The KE family and the FOXP2 Faraneh Vargha-Khadem*, # and Frédérique Liégeois* *University College London Institute of Child Health, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Unit / #Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK

Introduction Although neuroimaging studies over the past two decades have shed light on the neural basis of speech and language function, the genetic basis of this unique human ability has remained elusive. Recently, a gene involved in the neurodevelopmental process that culminates in speech and language was identified (Lai et al. 2001). This discovery was made possible mainly through the study of the three-generational KE family, half of whose 30 members suffer from a severe verbal and orofacial dyspraxia. Here, we review the neuropsychological as well as the structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings in the KE family (see also Vargha-Khadem et al. 2005). We will consider the putative role of the FOXP2 gene on brain structure and function, and, ultimately, on speech and language development. The disorder in the affected KE members was first reported by geneticists at the University College London Institute of Child Health (Hurst et al. 1990) who described serious communication difficulties in several members of the family. The disorder was characterized as a severe form of developmental verbal dyspraxia. In 1992, Marcus Pembrey described the regular Mendelian transmission of the disorder with autosomal mode of inheritance. The pedigree of the KE family is shown in Figure 1a.

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 Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and Frédérique Liégeois

Figure 1a. From Vargha-Khadem, F. et al., PNAS 1998. Pedigree of KE family. Roman numerals indicate the generation, and Arabic numerals, the member’s pedigree number within a generation. Affected members, filled shapes; unaffected members, open shapes; females, circles; males, squares; /, deceased; ^, twins.

The behavioural phenotype It was initially claimed that the affected family members had a selective impairment in applying the morphosyntactic rules of grammar. The deficit was characterized as “feature blindness” (Gopnik 1990), for example, an inability to apply the “ed” rule and inflect regular verbs to indicate past tense. This claim was largely negated, however, when on a test of past tense production the affected members were found to commit a high number of errors across both regular and irregular verb categories (Vargha-Khadem et al. 1995). Furthermore, the affected members showed many over-regularization errors, suggesting that they had acquired knowledge of the ‘ed’ rule for inflecting verbs but they were applying the rule inappropriately just as younger children do when their language skills are developing (Vargha-Khadem et al. 1995). Throughout the investigations of the affected KE members, a primary goal was to establish the core phenotype of the disorder through quantitative tests that revealed affected versus unaffected status. As a group, the affected mem-

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Figure 1b. Adapted from Vargha-Khadem, F. et al., PNAS 1998. (a) Word and nonword repetition. Bars indicate mean percent correct for the groups of affected and unaffected family members (n = 13 and 10, respectively). Dark bars, affected group; light bars, unaffected group; small squares, scores of individual family members. Note the absence of overlap between the scores of the two groups on both tests. (b) Simultaneous and sequential orofacial movements to command. Bars indicate mean percent correct for the group of affected family members and the normal control group (n = 11 and 52, respectively). Dark bar, affected group; light bar, control group; small squares, scores of individuals (for clarity, the same score obtained by two or more control subjects is marked by a single square). Again note the absence of overlap between the scores of the two, groups, except for one statistical outlier in the control group.

bers were impaired relative to the unaffected members on virtually every measure of expressive and receptive language, grammar, and even nonverbal intelligence (Vargha-Khadem et al. 1995). However, among the 30 neuropsychological tests administered, two showed no overlap between the scores of the affected and the unaffected individuals, thus clearly identifying the status of each family member. The first was the ‘Word and Non-word’ Repetition Test, providing a measure of phonological short term memory (Gathercole & Baddeley 1990), while the second was a test of orofacial movement imitation that did not require the production of speech sounds (Alcock et al. 2000). Scores obtained from these two tests clearly distinguished the performance of the affected from the unaffected members thus establishing the core phenotype of the disorder (Figure 1b).

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When the Word and Non-word Repetition results were further examined, it was found that complex words and non-words (both types consisting of consonant vowel combinations) considerably taxed the articulation capacity of the affected members. Furthermore, their difficulties with articulation became more pronounced as the number of syllables in words and nonwords increased (Watkins et al. 2002a). Similarly, the affected members’ difficulties became especially prominent during the execution of sequential movements on the orofacial imitation test (Alcock et al. 2000). In summary, the core phenotype in the affected members is a verbal and an orofacial dyspraxia evident during execution of movement sequences. There are associated deficits, however, but it remains to be determined whether these are a direct result of the core deficits or independent deficits.

Comparison with adult-onset aphasia and speech dyspraxia A subsequent study compared the affected members’ performance on the Word and Nonword Repetition Test with that of patients with adult-onset of aphasia and speech dyspraxia caused by left hemisphere stroke (Watkins et al. 2002a). Through this comparison, a neurodevelopmental disorder was investigated, even though this disorder is different from one that results from damage to the left hemisphere of the brain in the case of adult stroke patients. The results showed a three-step gradation: the unaffected members performed best, followed by the aphasic patients, followed by the affected KE members. This pattern, however, was seen in the case of words only and not of non-words where the performance of the affected KE and adult aphasic patients was similarly impaired relative to the unaffected group. It is possible that, unlike words, the non-words were equally novel to the stroke patients and to the affected family members neither of whom had prior experience with repeating the novel speech sequences. The same pattern was also apparent on complex versus simple syllables. From these results it is clear that prior knowledge of speech sequences is only helpful when words are familiar, but not when they are novel. A different pattern emerged when semantic fluency, phonemic fluency, and written fluency were tested. Although, as expected, the unaffected members’ scores were highest, the affected members performed significantly better than the aphasic patients in all three instances. This may be a reflection of the increased plasticity in the production of speech that is available in the case of the developmental disorder in affected family members as compared with adult-onset speech dyspraxia.

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The two patterns just described thus appear to reflect the fact that: i.

developmental plasticity in the affected members leads to greater fluency than in the aphasic patients; ii. this plasticity does not confer any advantage in word repetition, on which, instead, the stroke patients perform better, presumably because of prior knowledge; iii. neither developmental plasticity nor prior knowledge yields an advantage in repetition of non-words, where both groups are impaired about equally.

The neural basis of the phenotype Having identified the phenotype, the brain implications of this disorder were next investigated. Here the critical question was which regions of the brain, and in particular which regions likely to be part of the circuitry that produces coherent and intelligible speech, did not develop properly. In addressing this question, the issues of age at injury and laterality of function must be first considered in relation to two hypotheses about the phenotype in the affected KE members. In adulthood, injury to the left hemisphere alone is sufficient to produce a chronic and severe aphasia. In contrast, in childhood, chronic aphasia results only if there is bilateral pathology of the perisylvian regions, with unilateral pathology leading to only subtle language deficits at most (Bates et al. 2001). Since it is unusual to sustain bilateral lesions to the speech and language areas of the cerebral hemispheres during development, cases of congenital aphasia are extremely rare (but see, Vargha-Khadem et al. 1985). Given that the chronic speech and language disorder in the affected KE members is neurodevelopmental, the first hypothesis was that the brain pathology would be bilateral. The second hypothesis was that the brain regions affected would include one or more components of the motor system, because one of the core deficits is an orofacial dyspraxia. Thus, the two hypotheses called for bilaterality and involvement of the motor system.

Morphological brain abnormalities Although the brains of the affected members appeared radiologically normal, morphometric abnormalities on MRI scans were detected (Watkins et al. 2002b) using a method of image analysis known as voxel-based morphometry (VBM). This method, which maps grey matter density in voxels across the entire brain using Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) procedures, allows the investigation of subtle yet statistically significant brain abnormalities that would otherwise remain undetected on clinical radiological examination. MRI scans were acquired from

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ten affected and seven unaffected family members, as well as from 17 age- and sex-matched normal controls. Findings included comparisons of affected with unaffected members, and affected with controls. The results were mostly consistent across both sets of comparisons. The most important finding was that the caudate nucleus had decreased grey matter density bilaterally. In terms of increased grey matter, three sites of abnormality were indicated – the putamen bilaterally, left frontal operculum and the left anterior insula. A newly-designed voxel-based morphometry analysis aimed at detecting abnormalities that affect homotopic regions of the left and right cerebral hemispheres was used to identify loci of bilateral abnormalities in the affected members (Salmond et al. 2000). When this technique was applied to the above MR data sets, the previous bilateral findings were replicated (Belton et al. 2003), with less gray matter density in the inferior frontal gyrus, precentral gyrus, temporal pole, caudate nucleus and cerebellum. More gray matter was found in the posterior superior temporal gyrus, angular gyrus, and the putamen.

Volumetric analyses On the basis of these findings, volumetric analyses of the caudate nucleus were carried out (Watkins et al. 2002b). The results, corrected for intracranial volume, indicated significant reduction in the affected compared to unaffected KE family members. However, there was overlap between the datasets of the two groups in terms of individual caudate volumes, suggesting that this measure is not as accurate as the behavioural phenotype in differentiating affected from unaffected status. Overall, there was about 25% reduction of volume in the caudate nucleus bilaterally in the affected group.

Brain functional abnormalities In the affected members of the KE family, numerous cortical and subcortical regions involved in speech and language showed subtle structural abnormalities on morphometric analyses. To investigate whether these abnormalities impacted on the functioning of those brain regions, especially during speech and language tasks, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was carried out (Liégeois et al. 2003) addressing the following questions: 1. Is brain activation during language tasks typical or atypical in the affected members? 2. If brain activation is atypical, are the functional abnormalities located in regions that are also morphologically abnormal? 3. Are the regions activated by language distributed abnormally?

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Two experiments were conducted. The first examined brain activation during a silent word retrieval task where single verbs were generated in response to nouns presented (i.e. covert verb generation). In the second experiment, two overt tasks were used where this time responses were spoken, namely, overt verb generation and word repetition.

Functional abnormalities during covert verb generation The four groups studied consisted of a group of affected members and their matched controls, and a group of unaffected members and their matched controls (n = 5 in each group). Verb generation requires word comprehension, as well as semantic search and word retrieval. When contrasted to a rest period that does not involve language (e.g., listening to bursts of noise), normal participants typically show left hemisphere activation, including Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Average maps of activation indicated that the unaffected group and the control groups showed this typical pattern of activation. In contrast, the activation map in the affected group was atypical and diffuse, and distributed posteriorly and bilaterally relative to that of the other groups. Interestingly, no activation was detected in Broca’s area or its homologue in the right hemisphere. In order to localize regions of functional abnormality, an interaction analysis was conducted. This analysis enabled the comparison of activation in the unaffected and affected groups, while controlling for factors such as sex, age and handedness. Some regions were significantly less (underactive) while others were significantly more (overactive) active in the affected group than in the other groups. Significant underactivation was detected in several regions of the left hemisphere implicated in language and motor functions, namely, the posterior part of Broca’s area (pars opercularis), the primary motor cortex, and the supramarginal gyrus. In addition, underactivation was detected in the right putamen/globus pallidus, and right inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann’s area 45). There were numerous areas of overactivation located in the occipital, parietal and temporal regions. These are difficult to interpret since they may reflect compensatory strategies to perform the task, or indicate functional reorganization to those regions that are not usually involved in subserving language.

Functional abnormalities during overt generation and repetition task Results from the covert verb generation task revealed areas of functional abnormality during a task that requires motor planning and programming as well as semantic search and retrieval, but not articulation per se. In view of the phenotype of verbal and orofacial dyspraxia, it was important to determine whether functional abnormalities were also observed during tasks requiring the execution

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of orofacial sequences, be they retrieved or repeated. Since responses were spoken in the overt word generation and word repetition, it was possible to monitor speech production in these tasks, and confirm that performance in the affected and unaffected groups did not differ. Results from the overt verb generation task indicated that the pattern of activation of the unaffected group was typical, with left hemisphere activation involving perisylvian cortices, including Broca’s area. In contrast, activation in the affected group was once again atypical, viz., bilateral and diffuse, with just detectable activation in the anterior part of the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area). However, when average activation in the two groups was statistically compared, significant fMRI underactivation was detected in that region, as well as in the putamen bilaterally. No regions of overactivation were identified. During the overt word repetition task, activation in the unaffected group was more bilateral than during the overt generation task, including the inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally. In contrast, activation in the affected group was more posterior, and no activation was detected in the left or right inferior frontal gyrus. When the two activation maps were statistically compared, significant underactivation was detected in the left inferior frontal gyrus, pars triangularis, and in the upper part of the precentral gyrus. The left anterior insular cortex was found to be overactive. In summary, when performing language tasks, the affected members showed abnormally weak activation of Broca’s area, as well as the putamen bilaterally. These results suggest that in the KE family the FOXP2 abnormality is associated with both morphological and functional abnormalities of the frontostriatal network.

The frontostriatal system and speech and language function In contrast to the pattern of right hemisphere activation during language tasks observed in some children after extensive left hemisphere injury (e.g. Liégeois et al. 2004), no activation was detected in the homologue of Broca’s areas on the right during the verb generation tasks. As indicated earlier, the two hypotheses guiding the neuroimaging investigations of the affected KE members called for bilaterality and involvement of the motor system, including the frontostriatal circuits. Both the structural and functional imaging results suggested that as a result of the FOXP2 mutation, the development of the frontostriatal circuitry has been disrupted bilaterally. There is currently only indirect evidence suggesting that bilateral damage to the neostriatum results in speech and language deficits. One adult case with bilateral abnormality of the basal ganglia due to hypoxemia has been reported. This patient was found to suffer from speech and language deficits, with difficulties sequencing articulatory gestures (Pickett et al. 1998). Similarly, a young boy with congenital damage to the head of the caudate nuclei was reported

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to have delayed speech acquisition, articulation deficits, and language difficulties, with impairments noted in the production of verbal and nonverbal motor sequences (Tallal et al. 1994). In adults, unilateral subcortical stroke on the left can be associated with aphasia (see Nadeau & Crosson 1997), but it is now increasingly accepted that it is the cortical hypoperfusion associated with stroke that causes the language deficits (Hillis et al. 2004a), emphasizing the interaction between cortical and subcortical systems. Altogether, these data indicate that the frontostriatal circuit is critical for speech and language functions. The fact that Broca’s area was found to be functionally abnormal during language tasks is consistent with findings indicating that the language profile of the affected KE members is similar to that of adults with lesions in that region (Watkins et al. 2002a). Interestingly, a study by Hillis and colleagues (2004b) indicated that apraxia of speech in adults with left hemisphere stroke is associated with a lesion in this circuit. Furthermore, considering that in primates mirror neurons have been found in area F5 (i.e. the homologue of Broca’s area in the monkey), it can be speculated that the frontostriatal circuit has been critical for the emergence of early communicative behaviour (Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998). How this circuit becomes adapted in humans to subserve the exquisitely fast and precise function of articulate speech remains a mystery. Nevertheless, attempts to unravel the neuroanatomy of FOXP2-dependent speech and language will continue to cast new light on the neural mechanisms of human oral communication.

References Alcock, K. J., Passingham, R. E., Watkins, K. E., & Vargha-Khadem, F. (2000). “Oral dyspraxia in inherited speech and language impairment and acquired dysphasia.” Brain Lang, 75, 17–33. Bates, E., Reilly, J.,Wulfeck, B. et al. (2001). “Differential effects of unilateral lesions on language production in children and adults.” Brain Lang, 79, 223–265. Belton, E., Salmond, C. H., Watkins, K. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., & Gadian, D. G. (2003). “Bilateral brain abnormalities associated with dominantly inherited verbal and orofacial dyspraxia.” Hum. Brain Mapping, 18, 194–200. Gathercole, S. E., & Baddeley, A. D. (1990). “Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: Is there a causal connection?” Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 336–360. Gopnik, M. (1990). “Feature-blind grammar and dysphagia.” Nature, 344, 715. Hillis, A. E., Barker, P. B., Wityk, R. J. et al. (2004a). “Variability in subcortical aphasia is due to variable sites of cortical hypoperfusion.” Brain Lang, 89, 524–530. Hillis, A. E., Work, M., Barker, P. B., Jacobs, M. A., Brees, E. L., & Maurer, K. (2004b). “Reexamining the brain regions crucial for orchestrating speech articulation.” Brain, 127, 1479–1487. Hurst, J. A., Baraitser, M., Auger, E., Graham, F., & Norell, S. (1990). “An extended family with a dominantly inherited speech disorder.” Dev Med Child Neurol, 32 (4), 352–355.

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Lai, C. S., Fisher, S. E., Hurst, J. A., Vargha-Khadem, F., & Monaco, A. P. (2001). “A forkheaddomain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder.” Nature, 413, 519–523. Liegeois, F., Baldeweg, T., Connelly, A., Gadian, D. G., Mishkin, M., & Vargha-Khadem, F. (2003). “Language fMRI abnormalities associated with FOXP2 gene mutation.” NatNeurosci, 6 (11), 1230–1237. Liegeois, F., & Connelly, A., Cross, J. H. et al. (2004). “Language reorganization in children with early-onset lesions of the left hemisphere: An fMRI study.” Brain, 127, 1229–1236. Nadeau, S. E., & Crosson, B. (1997). “Subcortical aphasia.” Brain Lang, 58, 355–402. Pembrey, M. E. (1992). “Genetics and language disorders.” In P. Fletcher & D. Hall (Eds.), Specific Speech and Language Disorders in Children: Correlates, Characteristics, and Outcomes (pp. 51–62). London: Whurr. Pickett, E. R., Kuniholm, E., Protopapas, A., Friedman, J., & Lieberman, P. (1998). “Selective speech motor, syntax and cognitive deficits associatedwith bilateral damage to the putamen and the head of the caudate nucleus: A case study.” Neuropsychologia, 36, 173–188. Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. A. (1998). “Language within our grasp.” Trends Neurosci., 21, 188– 194. Salmond, C. H., Ashburner, J., Vargha-Khadem, F., Gadian, D. G., & Friston, K. J. (2000). “Detecting bilateral abnormalities with voxel-based morphometry.” Human Brain Mapping, 11, 223–232. Tallal, P., Jernigan, T. L., & Trauner, D. (1994). “Developmental bilateral damage to the head of the caudate nuclei: Implications for Speech-Language pathology.” Journal of Medical Speech-Language Pathology, 2, 23–28. Vargha-Khadem, F., Watters, G. V., & O’Gorman, A. M. (1985). “Development of speech and language following bilateral frontal lesions.” Brain Lang, 25, 167–183. Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K. E., Alcock, K. J., Fletcher, P., & Passingham, R. E. (1995). “Praxic and non-verbal cognitive deficits in a large family with a genetically transmitted speech and language Disorder.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 92, 930–933. Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K. E., Price, C. E., Ashburner, J., Alcock, K. J., Connelly, A. et al. (1998). “Neural basis of an inherited speech and language disorder.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 95, 12695–12700. Vargha-Khadem, F., Gadian, D. G., Copp, A., & Mishkin, M. (2005). “FOXP2 and the neuroanatomy of speech and language.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 131–138. Watkins, K. E., Dronkers, N. F., & Vargha-Khadem, F. (2002a). “Behavioural analysis of an inherited speech and language disorder: Comparison with acquired aphasia.” Brain, 125, 452–464. Watkins, K. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Ashburner, J. et al. (2000b). “MRI analysis of an inherited speech and language disorder: Structural brain abnormalities.” Brain, 125, 465–478.

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From preverbal to verbal intersubjectivity in child development

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chapter 

Intersubjectivity before language Three windows on preverbal sharing Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks University of Washington

There has been a revolution in our understanding of intersubjectivity. This revolution has many roots. Three findings of special interest are represented in the present volume: (a) the landmark work on preverbal intersubjectivity by Trevarthen (1979), Trevarthen and Hubley (1978), Stern (1985), and Bråten (1998a, 2003); (b) the findings of neonatal imitation, which demonstrates a social connectedness that is literally present at birth (e.g., Heimann 2002; Kugiumutzakis 1998; Meltzoff 2006; Meltzoff & Moore 1983, 1997); and (c) advances in neuroscience, particularly the report of a mirror neuron system (e.g., Gallese 2003, 2005; Iacoboni, Woods, Brass, Bekkering, Mazziotta, & Rizzolatti 1999; Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety 2006; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Gallese 2002; Rizzolatti 2005). All three suggest a close coupling between self and other with profound implications for shared emotions (e.g., Hobson 2002; Hobson & Meyer 2005; Meltzoff 2007; Rochat & Striano 1999; Tomasello 1999). The revolution did not occur at the dead of night, but was well discussed. For example, there has been (a) a discussion of the relevance of the new findings for clinical psychology in a special issue of the Psychoanalytic Dialogues (Beebe, Sorter, Rustin, & Knoblauch 2003), (b) a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences concerning social neuroscience (Frith & Wolpert 2003), and (c) several edited books in the past 5 years examining the implications of infant intersubjectivity for topics ranging from artificial intelligence to sociology (Nehaniv & Dautenhahn 2007; Hurley & Chater 2005; Meltzoff & Prinz 2002; the current volume).

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The myth of the asocial infant The intellectual ferment derives in large measure from the fact that, within our lifetimes, we have witnessed the overturning of one of the most pervasive myths in social science – the myth of the asocial infant. On classical views of human development, the newborn is cut off from others. Freud and his followers proposed a distinction between a physical and psychological birth. When the baby is born there is a physical birth but not yet an interpersonal birth (Freud 1911; Mahler, Pine, & Bergman 1975). The baby is like an unhatched chick, incapable of interacting as a social being because a ‘barrier’ leaves the newborn cut off from external reality. Freud struggles to find a metaphor for the newborn-parent relationship and ended up likening the child’s situation to the isolation found inside a shell: “A neat example of a psychical system shut off from the stimuli of the external world... is afforded by a bird’s egg with its food supply enclosed in its shell; for it, the care provided by its mother is limited to the provision of warmth” (Freud 1911: 220). Piaget’s (1952, 1954) newborn is similar, but he uses a philosophical rather than biological metaphor. He believed that the baby is ‘radically egocentric’ or even ‘solipsistic.’ The neonate has only a few reflexes at her disposal (e.g., sucking, grasping), and people are registered only to the extent that they can be assimilated to these action schemes. The child breaks free of the inborn solipsism by 18 months. It is a very long and hard journey from solipsism to establishing intersubjective understanding of others’ minds and emotions: “During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist... This primitive relation between subject and object is a relation of undifferentiation... when no distinction is made between the self and the non-self ” (Piaget 1954: 352–355). Skinner (1953) claimed that the newborn had even less to work with. One cannot quote from Skinner about how children come to feel a sense of intersubjectivity with others, because, in a sense, he does not think they ever do. Even adults are described as reacting to behaviours and not to participating in the hearts and minds of their interactive partners. Human beings have exquisite contingency detectors, and that is all there is. To use Skinner’s phrase, intersubjectivity is largely a ‘matter of consequences’ (Skinner 1983), by which he means that people are important only as shapers of the child’s behaviour. In theory, a Skinner box would do just as well as a mother’s embrace if the contingencies were programmed correctly. Against all three of these views are precursors to the modern-day findings of an innate intersubjectivity. Philosophers such as Husserl (1950/1960) and MerleauPonty (1945/1962) and psychologists such as Baldwin (1906) and Mead (1934) refused to portray the human from an ‘isolationist’ perspective and saw a deep connection between self and other. Modern-day findings support and elaborate the ideas of these pioneers (see Gallagher & Meltzoff 1996 for an analysis of

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Merleau-Ponty’s points on intersubjectivity in light of recent psychological findings).

Our journey in this chapter In this chapter we wish to discuss three phenomena that illuminate the nature of preverbal intersubjectivity: (a) action imitation, (b) joint visual attention, and (c) sensitivity to intentionality. These phenomena make manifest the intrinsic bonds infants have with social others. Bråten (2004) calls it ‘participant perception’ and Hobson (Hobson & Lee 1999; Hobson & Meyer 2005) discusses ‘identification’ – but, regardless of the label, the convergent point is that infants respond to the actions of people in special ways revealing a desire for sharing in their experiences. We discuss three kinds of social sharing that are interconnected developmentally and philosophically. First we discuss imitation, which shows a sharing of actions. This action sharing is literally present at birth and tells us much about the intersubjectivity that infants bring to their first encounters with embodied others. Second, we discuss joint visual attention. A momentous development in the first year is the onset of gaze following. Infants begin to turn to look at another’s target of attention. They seem to want to share the viewpoint of others, to have the same perceptual experience of others, with important implications for emotions and language. Third, we discuss experiments showing that in the second year of life infants have a growing sense of intentionality. They respond to the unfulfilled goals and intentions of others – what people mean to do, not simply what they actually do. People are intentional agents and as such are not always to be taken literally. A principal purpose of this chapter is to show that Seattle’s laboratory research, which is sometimes misinterpreted as exclusively cognitive in nature, actually provides three windows onto the nature and development of infant intersubjectivity. By coupling experimental work and theorizing we can get a fuller picture not only of infants’ initial state but also of the mechanisms of change in socio-emotional development (Meltzoff 2007; Repacholi & Meltzoff in press).

Sharing others’ actions: Newborn imitation Background and significance Being caught up in others’ movements, imitating what you see, is an essential aspect of human intersubjectivity. Although other primates learn from observation, they are more proficient at adopting the outcomes/results than in duplicating the

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means and mannerisms we use to achieve these results (Meltzoff 1996; Povinelli 2000; Tomasello & Call 1997; Williamson & Markman 2006; Whiten 2002). Action imitation is also impaired in children with autism (e.g., Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, & Rinaldi 1998; Hobson & Lee 1999; Hobson & Meyer 2005; Meyer & Hobson 2005; Rogers 1999; Toth, Munson, Meltzoff, & Dawson 2006; Whiten & Brown 1998). The imitation of simple body actions is sometimes dismissed as ‘mere mimicry,’ and this language has caused generations of psychologists to miss its essence and importance. Such action imitation is important for building social rapport and the maintenance of caring communication. It is well-known that body mirroring occurs between patient and therapist in successful psychotherapy sessions (Beebe, Rustin, Sorter, & Knoblauch 2003). Similarly, many of the customs, rituals, greetings, and everyday emotional exchanges revolve around acts of reciprocal imitation. The duplication of the action patterns, mannerisms, and gestures others use is part of the fabric of human communication. It runs in the background and fosters emotional cohesion in everyday interactions, oftentimes outside of explicit awareness (Bargh & Chartrand 1999; Chartrand & Bargh 1999; for related brain imagining work, see Decety, Chaminade, Grèzes, & Meltzoff 2002).

Data and theory Meltzoff and Moore (1983, 1989) reported that newborns imitate facial acts. The mean age of these infants was 36 hours old. The youngest child was 42 minutes old at the time of test. Newborn facial imitation suggests an innate mapping between observation and execution in the human case. Moreover, the studies provide information about the nature of the machinery infants use to connect observation and execution. It is important to realize that this is genuine imitation and not simply a diffuse arousal response, which would have far fewer implications for intersubjectivity and neuroscience. Meltzoff and Moore (1977) demonstrated that 12- to 21-dayolds didn’t confuse either actions or body parts. They differentially responded to tongue protrusion with tongue protrusion and not lip protrusion, showing that the specific body part can be identified. They also differentially responded to lip protrusion versus lip opening, showing that differential action patterns can be imitated with the same body part. This was extended by research showing that infants differentially imitate two different kinds of movements with the tongue (Meltzoff & Moore 1994, 1997). In all, there are 30 studies of early imitation from more than a dozen independent laboratories across a range of gestures (see Meltzoff & Moore 1997 for a systematic review). To be sure, there is development in imitation, for example the neonate is less self-conscious about imitating than the toddler

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(Meltzoff & Moore 1997), but the evidence clearly shows that human infants are born imitating. The nature of the imitative response is informative for theories. First, many labs have reported that infants do not imitate the social other immediately (Heimann 1998, 2002; Kugiumutzakis 1998; Meltzoff & Moore 1994, 1997). The infant’s first response to seeing a facial gesture is activation of the corresponding body part. For example, when infants see tongue protrusion, there is a quieting of other body parts and an activation of the tongue. They do not necessarily protrude the tongue at first, but may elevate it or move it slightly in the oral cavity. The important point is that the tongue, rather than the lips or fingers, is energized before the movement is isolated. Meltzoff and Moore (1997) call this ‘organ identification.’ Neurophysiological data show that visual displays of parts of the face and hands activate specific brain sites in monkeys (Desimone 1991; Gross 1992; Gross & Sergent 1992; Jellema, Baker, Oram, & Perrett 2002; Perrett, Hietanen, Oram, & Benson 1992) and related work is emerging in human studies (Buccino et al. 2001). Specific body parts could be neurally represented at birth and serve as a foundation for infant imitation. An embryonic body scheme is drawn on in imitation (Gallagher & Meltzoff 1996).

AIM hypothesis. Meltzoff and Moore proposed that early facial imitation is based on active intermodal mapping (AIM) (Meltzoff & Moore 1977, 1997). This is not a complex mechanism that requires cognitive machinations by the infant. The principal claim is that imitation is a matching-to-target process. The active nature of the matching process is captured by the proprioceptive feedback loop. The loop allows infants’ motor performance to be compared against the seen target and serves as a basis for infants’ correcting the response and homing in on the target act. AIM proposes that such comparison is possible because the observation and execution of human acts are coded within a common framework. We call it a ‘supramodal’ act space, because it is not restricted to modality-specific information (visual, tactile, motor, etc.). Metaphorically, we can say that exteroception (perception of others) and proprioception (perception of self) speak the same language; there is no need for associating the two through prolonged learning because they are bound together at birth. A more detailed analysis of the metric of equivalence between acts of self and other is provided elsewhere (Meltzoff 2006; Meltzoff & Moore 1997). This hypothesis of a supramodal framework for coding of acts that emerged from developmental psychology nearly 30 years ago fits well with modern proposals from cognitive science (Prinz 2002, 2005) and neuroscience (Decety 2002; Iacoboni et al. 1999; Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese 2001). Some effort is being made to analyze the commonalities and differences in the models proposed from these different fields (Gallese 2003; Meltzoff & Decety 2003; Rizzolatti et al. 2002). But

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even at this time, we can say that they all converge on the idea of a close coupling between perception and action that undergirds intersubjective engagement with others. The unique contribution from developmental science is that newborn imitation demonstrates that self-other connectedness is functional at birth in the human case. Imitation is a marker of innate intersubjectivity in action.

Sharing others’ attention Background and significance The blissful state of dyadic interaction does not last for long. Soon there are interlopers as the infant becomes aware that third parties are vying for mother’s affection. For example, infants begin to pay attention to the fact that mothers do not always look at them, but also cast their gaze to external objects, siblings, and spouses in the environment. One measure of this dawning realization is infants’ gaze following, that is, their tendency to follow mother’s gaze to an external target in order to see what she is looking at. This is not the duplication of exact bodily movement, but rather a taking into account that her behaviour is directed toward an external target. Gaze following is the leading edge of what some refer to as ‘secondary intersubjectivity’ (Bråten 1998b, 2003; Trevarthen & Hubley 1978) and others call ‘triadic’ communication (Bakeman & Adamson 1984; Hobson, Patrick, Crandell, García-Pérez, & Lee 2004). Through gaze following there is the creation of a preverbal referential triangle – mother-baby-object – in which the mother’s visual glances refer infants to selected external targets. Among adults, detecting the direction of another’s gaze is a crucial component of social interactions (Argyle & Cook 1976; Kleinke 1986; Langton, Watt, & Bruce 2000). The onset of gaze following has profound implications both for language and emotions. It is relevant for understanding the meaning of an emotional display, because a person’s emotion is often engendered by what he or she sees in the external world (e.g., that object is appealing or disgusting). By following your partner’s gaze you can grasp the cause of her emotional display (Moses, Baldwin, Rosicky, & Tidball 2001; Repacholi 1998; Repacholi & Meltzoff in press). Language acquisition is also facilitated by understanding another’s line of regard. In the prototypical case, a verbal label refers to the object being looked at, and not the other objects in the room. Individual infants who follow mother’s gaze may be given a boost in language learning (Baldwin 1995; Brooks & Meltzoff 2005; Morales, Mundy, & Rojas 1998; Mundy, Fox, & Card 2003; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello 1998). Beyond all this, some, like Ginger Rogers, would argue that gaze following is an intersub-

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jective act that allows us to take the perspective of another: “When two people love each other, they don’t look at each other, they look in the same direction.” It is well established that young typically developing infants turn in the direction that an adult has turned, but there is a debate about the underlying mechanism and developmental time course (Butterworth 2001; Moore & Dunham 1995). One conservative proposal suggests that following where another looks has nothing to do with intersubjective sharing. On this view, the behaviour is based on infants’ visually tracking the adult’s head movements because the head produces salient/large displacements in the visual field. Inasmuch as infants visually follow head movements, they are automatically ‘dragged’ to the correct half of space. Once in the correct hemi-field they latch onto whatever attractive object is there, usually the same one at which the adult is looking. On this account, infants are not responding intersubjectively and are simply processing physical movements in space caused by the head, regardless of what the eyes, are doing. They would be just as likely to follow the movements of an inanimate object.

Data and theory We developed a test procedure that zeroed in on the importance of eyes in infant gaze following (Brooks & Meltzoff 2002, 2005). In this procedure, an adult turned to look at one of two targets. The principal manipulation was that the adult turned to the target with eyes open for one group and with eyes closed for the other group. If infants relied simply on head motions, they should turn in both cases. If, however, infants appreciate that the eyes are relevant for connecting a ‘perceiver’ and object, then they should differentiate the two conditions and turn to look at the target in one situation and not the other. The reason such a manipulation is crucial for theory is that we do, in fact, see with our eyes and not with our head. It is an important step forward in intersubjective understanding for infants to put special emphasis on eyes. It is, after all, the eyes that are the ‘window to the soul’ – the head is not such a portal. Brooks and Meltzoff (2002) used the Gaze Following: Eyes Open/Closed test to assess 12, 14, and 18-month-old infants. Each infant at each age was randomly assigned to a condition in which the adult turned to the target with either open or closed eyes. The targets were silent 3-D toys placed equidistant from the infant and the adult turned to the objects on four separate trials (two to the left and two to the right) for each infant. The main findings are depicted in Figure 1. As shown, infants carefully observed the adult and followed the adult’s gaze to its terminus in the object (Fig. 1a). Infants at all three ages followed the adult significantly more often when the adult turned with open than closed eyes (Fig. 1b). We also scored three behaviours beyond the traditional measure of where the infant looked. First, we scored in-

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Figure 1a. An infant and adult make eye contact, the adult turns to look at the target, and the infant follows and looks at the correct target.

Figure 1b. The looking score is a total of correct looks, incorrect looks and ‘non-looks.’ Thus, when an infant looks at correct targets, she receives a higher total score; however, if she looks at incorrect targets, she lowers her total score. Infants look at the correct target more often in the open-eyes than the closed-eyes condition. Adapted from Brooks and Meltzoff (2002).

fants’ average duration of correct looks. This revealed that infants inspected the target for a longer duration when the adult turned to it with open versus closed eyes. Second, analysis of infant vocalizations showed that they vocalized more toward the correct target in the open-eyes as opposed to closed-eyes condition. Third, significantly more infants pointed to the targets in the open-eyes condition than in the closed-eyes condition (Figure 2). This latter behaviour is particularly striking because it is ostensive – the results show that infants are taking into account the perceptual status of the audience. Infants point when the social partner can see the objects but refrain when the partner cannot (eyes closed), which Brooks and Meltzoff (2002) interpreted as ‘proto-declarative’ pointing (see also: Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra 1979; Camaioni, Perucchini, Bellagamba, & Colonnesi 2004; Franco & Butterworth 1996; Liszkowski, Carpenter, Henning, Striano, & Tomasello 2005). We return now to the rationale for conducting this study. The non-social interpretation of gaze following is that a visible movement simply drags infants’

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Figure 2. (a) A 12-month-old boy points at the target. (b) Infants selectively point to the target when the adult has her eyes open rather than closed. This suggests that points are used to share with others in a ‘proto-declarative’ manner and not produced solipsistically.

attention to a hemifield of space where they happen to see an interesting object. The current findings disprove this interpretation, because head movement was controlled, and show that infants were more likely to look at the correct target when the social partner can see it. We also discovered that the inanimate object takes on a special valence when it is looked at by a social other (i.e., it attracts looks of longer duration). It is as if having the adult shine her social spotlight on an inanimate object leaves a trace on it, an invisible mark. Such is the power of intersubjectivity – being ‘visually touched’ by a social other transforms the object from a boring blob to an object of desire that cries out ‘Look at me!’

Developmental shift – Roots of secondary intersubjectivity. When does gaze following begin? Brooks and Meltzoff (2005) conducted a study of infants during a period of developmental transition, from 9 months to 11 months of age (Bates et al. 1979; Bråten 2003; Carpenter et al. 1998; Trevarthen 1979). The infants were recruited to fall at three discrete ages: 9, 10, and 11 months old, with each infant ±1 week of the target age, which allowed careful monitoring of the shift to secondary intersubjectivity. The same Gaze Following: Eyes Open/Closed test was used. The results showed that the 9-month-olds did not discriminate between the open- versus closed-eyes conditions. They turned equally often in both cases. However, there was a clear developmental shift 30 days later. For 10-month-olds, the looking scores in the open-eyes condition were significantly greater than in the closed-eyes condition; and 11-month-olds did the same. This sharp change leads us to wonder about possible neurological underpinnings. By about 10 months of age infants begin to understand others as ‘visually connected’ to the external world and that the

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eyes are the critical organ. This is an important step in secondary intersubjectivity because the infant is coming to regard eyes as special.

Psychology versus physics: The eyelid-blindfold distinction. There is a further important development that occurs at about 12 months of age. Eye closure is only one way to block a person’s line of sight. Another way is to use an inanimate object. From an adult perspective, an opaque physical barrier has the same function as closed eyes – both prevent visual access. Our results suggest that infants understand the consequences of eye closure (a biological motion) before they understand blindfolds (an inanimate barrier). This is fascinating because it opens the possibility that infants’ reactions to an intersubjective other are richer, deeper, and in some cases more advanced than their reactions and understanding of inanimate things. In the study of inanimate occluders, the person turned toward a target wearing either a headband or a blindfold (Brooks & Meltzoff 2002; Experiment 2). In both instances, the same cloth covered part of the experimenter’s face, but in one situation the opaque cloth was on the forehead and in the other it was over the eyes. We tested 12-, 14- and 18-month-old infants using the same room set-up as in eyes open/closed studies. If infants were flummoxed by the novelty of the opaque cloth, they would stare at the adult and not look at the targets in either condition. If infants are simply following head turns, they would look at the external target but do so indiscriminatingly in both conditions. If infants recognize that a blindfold blocks visual access but headbands do not, they would look significantly more often at targets indicated by an adult wearing a headband compared to a blindfold. The results showed that 14- and 18-month-old infants looked at the adult’s target significantly more often in the headband than the blindfold condition. In contrast, the 12-month-olds infants did not distinguish between the two conditions. They systematically looked at the indicated target whether the adult turned wearing the blindfold or the headband. These findings are interesting, especially when compared to the eyes open/ closed test. Recall that the 12-month-olds had succeeded admirably on the eyes closed/open test. Yet when the adult’s vision was blocked by an inanimate object (blindfolds), they did not. This is not just a matter of blindfolds causing a general suppression of activity. Rather, infants make the mistake of following the ‘gaze’ of the adult wearing the blindfold. In other words, they acted like the 9-month-olds did in the closed-eyes case. It is as if they recognize that the human act of eyeclosure blocks contact with external objects, but do not yet understand the same about inanimate occluders.

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‘Like me’ and ‘like you’: The importance of shared experiences Background and significance The foregoing research indicates that at least one kind of occluder to vision, eye closure, is understood quite early. One hypothesis is that this is because infants themselves have ample prior intrasubjective experience with the perceptual effects of eye closure. When they do so, the world goes black. They may be able to use this experience to imbue the eye closures of others with meaning. If true, the non-biological occluders should become more meaningful as a block to others’ perception if infants are themselves given opportunities to learn that they block their own vision.

Data and theory Meltzoff and Brooks (2004) gave 12-month-olds experience that blindfolds lead to psychological effects – that the infants themselves cannot see through a blindfold. Infants were randomly assigned to a baseline condition or two treatment groups, one of which involved blindfolds and the other involved the same black cloth but with a ‘peeking window’ cut out of the middle. The infants experienced that the blindfold blocked their view. Their perception of the world was blocked when the blindfold was held in front of their eyes, and was restored again when the blindfold was removed. This intrasubjective experience had nothing to do with the experimenter’s viewpoint; it was a first-person experience. In the critical test, the adult put the blindfold over her own eyes. This was the first time the infants were presented with the blindfolded adult. The results showed that infants now appreciated the consequences of blindfolds for the other. They did not turn when the adult wore the blindfold. In the control groups (baseline and cloth with peeking window) the infants were allowed to familiarize themselves with the cloth, but without the perceptual experience of a loss of vision. These two experiences had no effect on how they treated the other. As we expected, the control-group infants still mistakenly followed the blindfolded adult’s ‘gaze.’ This is the first study showing that infants use first-person experience about a mental state such as “seeing” to grasp the experience of others. We believe that first-person experience with blindfolds changes infants’ appreciation of the other’s situation. These effects provide a nice demonstration of a ‘like me’/‘like you’ interpersonal mechanism at work. This mechanism and its philosophical and developmental implications are elaborated in more detail elsewhere (Meltzoff 2006, 2007).

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The relation between gaze following and language acquisition Background and significance On theoretical grounds, there is good reason for thinking that secondary intersubjectivity embodied in gaze following may be an important component of language acquisition. Infants who understand adult gaze as an ostensive act are in a better position to use everyday interactions with adults to learn words as labels for external objects (e.g., Baldwin & Moses 2001; Bruner 1983; Meltzoff & Brooks 2006; Tomasello 2003). Not all language refers to tangible entities that can be looked at (Gopnik 1982, 1988; Gopnik & Meltzoff 1986). Nonetheless one basic format in the “initial word learning game” (Bruner 1983) is for parents to point out salient objects through gaze and then to label them. Infants who are advanced on gaze following in particular (and perhaps in understanding referential intent in general), may have a leg up on learning language (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll 2005). In order to pursue this idea within our own data set we conducted a longitudinal follow-up of the children who came into the lab at 10–11 months of age – the infants we caught right at the onset of gaze following.

Data and theory Brooks and Meltzoff (2005) assessed whether gaze-following behaviour at 10– 11 months predicted later language development. Language development was assessed with the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI) (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal, & Pethick 1994). The results showed that gaze-following behaviour at 10–11 months predicted language development over 1 year later. This was powerfully demonstrated by the relationship between the average duration of looking to the correct target at 10–11 months and subsequent language. During the follow-up test at 2 years of age, this infant gazefollowing score at 10–11 months predicted a significantly larger productive vocabulary size (r = .63, p < .01) and sentence complexity (r = 57, p < .05). For example, infants who had previously had poor gaze-following scores one year earlier produced utterances that included structures such as “want more” or “cars voom.” In contrast, infants who had high scores had sentences that included, “Sit right down here mommy, legs out, and play with spinning tops.” This research supports the proposition that intersubjectivity and language learning are deeply connected (e.g., Bråten 2003; Rommetveit 1998). The current findings complement other empirical reports that infant gaze following predicts language development (Carpenter et al. 1998; Heimann, Strid, Smith, Tjus, Ulvund & Meltzoff 2006; Morales, Mundy, Delgado, Yale, Messinger, Neal, & Schwartz 2000; Mundy et al. 2003).

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Sharing others’ goals and intentions Background and significance In mature adult social cognition, I not only share behavioural actions and line of regard with others, but I also share in their goals and unspoken intentions. Intentions are particularly interesting for developmentalists. A first question is whether infants have any inkling of the distinction between the actions someone performs and their intention in performing these actions. Wittgenstein (1953) clarifies this distinction with this pithy insight: ‘What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?’ Answer: ‘Intention.’ Is there any evidence that infants have a feel for human action that penetrates below the surface behaviour to the intentions that lay behind them? To address these questions, it is not enough to explore whether young children act intentionally themselves; we need to investigate whether they appreciate the intentions and goals of others.

Data and theory Seeing goals in others’ actions. The ‘behavioural re-enactment procedure’ was created to investigate infants’ reactions to the goals and intentions of others (Meltzoff 1995). The procedure capitalizes on children’s natural tendency to re-enact or imitate, but uses it in a more abstract way to investigate whether infants can read below the literal surface behaviour to something like the goal or intention of the actor. The procedure involves showing infants an unsuccessful act. For example, the adult accidentally under- or overshoots his target, or he tries to pull apart a dumbbell-shaped toy but his hand slips off the ends and he is unsuccessful. Thus the goal-state is not achieved. Adults immediately sense the actor’s intentions although he never fulfills them. The question is whether children see beyond the literal body movements to the goal or intention of the act. In a sense, the ‘correct answer’ is to not copy the literal movement, but the intended act that remains unfulfilled and invisible. Meltzoff (1995) showed 18-month-old infants an unsuccessful act. The study compared infants’ tendency to perform the target act in several situations: (a) after they saw the full-target act demonstrated, (b) after they saw the unsuccessful attempt to perform the act, and (c) after it was neither shown nor attempted. The results showed that 18-month-olds can infer the unseen goals implied by unsuccessful attempts. Infants who saw the unsuccessful attempt and infants who saw the full-target act both produced target acts at a significantly higher rate than controls. Infants seemed to ‘see through’ the surface behaviour to the underlying

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goals or intentions of the actor. Evidently, toddlers can understand our goals even if we fail to fulfill them.

Seeking social help. In further work, 18-month-olds were shown similar displays, but were handed a trick toy that prevented them from performing the intervention (Meltzoff 2006). For example, the dumbbell-shaped object was surreptitiously glued shut. If infants attempted to pull it apart, their hands slipped off the ends, duplicating the adult’s behaviour. The question was whether this satisfied infants. It did not. They varied the way they yanked on the dumbbell, systematically changing their strategies to find one that worked. They also appealed to their mothers and the adult for help. About 90% of the infants looked up at an adult within 2sec after failing to pull apart the trick toy and many vocalized while staring at the adult’s face. Why were they appealing for help from the social other? They had matched the adult’s surface behaviour, but evidently they were striving toward something else – the adult’s intended goals. This fits with Meltzoff ’s (1995) hypothesis that infants had grasped the goal of the act, clearly differentiating it from the literal surface behaviour that was observed. The goals of people; the motions of machines. In the adult framework, only certain types of entities are ascribed to intention and purposiveness. Chairs and boulders rock and roll, but their motions are not seen as intentional. Most prototypically, human acts are the types of movement patterns that are seen as caused by intentions. What do infants think? To begin to examine this, Meltzoff (1995) tested how 18-month-olds responded to a mechanical device that mimicked the same movements as the actor in the failed-attempt condition. An inanimate device was constructed that had poles for arms and mechanical pincers for hands. It did not look human but it could move very similarly to the human (Fig. 3, bottom panel). For the test, the pincers ‘grasped’ the dumbbell at the two ends just as the human hands did. One mechanical arm was then moved outwards, just as in the human case, and its pincer

Figure 3. Human demonstrator (top panel) and inanimate device mimicking these movements (bottom panel) (from Meltzoff 1995).

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slipped off the end of the dumbbell just as the human hand did. The movement patterns of machine and man were closely matched from a purely spatiotemporal description of movements in space. The results showed that infants did not attribute a goal or intention to the movements of the inanimate device. Although they were not frightened by the device and looked at it as long as at the human display, they simply did not see the sequence of actions as implying a goal. Infants were no more (or less) likely to pull apart the toy after seeing the failed attempt of the inanimate device than in baseline conditions when they saw nothing. We think 18-month-olds cast the person’s actions within an intersubjective framework that differentiates between the visible behaviour and a deeper level of felt experience involving human goals and intentions. When they watch a person’s hands slip off the ends of the dumbbell they immediately see what the adult was ‘trying’ to do. When they see the inanimate device slip off the end of the dumbbell, they see it as mere mechanical slippage with no implications for purposiveness.1 The appreciation of others’ goals and intentions is intersubjectivity in action.

Conclusions. The centrality of preverbal intersubjectivity Posing the problem According to classical developmental theory, from Freud to Piaget, newborns lack any inkling that other humans have psychological properties. They did not appreciate that humans are ‘subjects’ different from the ‘objects’ in the environment. It was claimed, for example, that the child is born a solipsist (Piaget 1954) or is in a state of ‘normal autism’ (Mahler et al. 1975), treating people the same as things. Philosophers have argued for centuries about the initial state of human beings, but in the modern era, three constraints have been put on the debate (see also Gallagher 2001, 2004; Goldman 2005; Gordon 2005). First theorists have begun to take seriously the developmental question: ‘how can we get here from there.’ If it were true that we are born solipsistic or autistic, what sort of experiences could ever get us to the rich state of empathy and shared emotions for our fellow humans that we all experience as adults (Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff, & Decety 2006)? No one has been able to provide an adequate learning account. Second, the relevant selective-rearing experiments have been done. There is no evidence that home-reared chimpanzees or children with autism who undergo extensive intervention programs develop the intrinsic feelings of intersubjectivity that is felt by typical adults. Thus, without a certain biological endowment, it does not appear that intersubjectivity can be created by cultural emersion. Intersubjectivity is a precondition for culture not the outcome of it.

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Third, experiments with human infants belie the premise of infantile solipsism. We have accumulated massive evidence not only for preverbal intersubjectivity, but for innate intersubjectivity.

Mirror neurons Before returning to the behavioural examples of imitation, joint visual attention, and intention, it is worth considering the recent breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience, which offer complementary findings to those discussed here. There is an explosive growth in the neuroscience literature concerning the equivalent coding for actions of self and other. Mirror neurons are perhaps the most celebrated example. There are ample reviews of mirror neurons elsewhere in this volume. Here we only focus on one often-ignored question – the Developmental Question. Are mirror neurons innate? This is a thorny problem, and the role of experience in forming mirror neurons has not been fully examined. Mirror neurons are activated whether a monkey observers or executes an act such as grasping an object (e.g., Gallese 2003; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi 1996; Rizzolatti 2005). However, adult monkeys have repeatedly watched themselves grasping objects. Mirror neurons could code visuomotor associations forged from such learning experiences (the same for auditory mirror neurons that fire when an action such as tearing is seen or heard). Such gradual learning, if it occurs, would deeply impact the philosophical implications that can be drawn. This is where is where bringing together developmental science and neuroscience can be especially informative (Meltzoff & Decety 2003). Developmentalists would suggest that there are two ways of testing whether mirror neurons develop through experience. One is to test newborn monkeys, just as we have tested newborn infants only minutes old, before they have had a chance to forge the associations in question. A second approach is selective rearing in which the experimenter arranges a situation that prevents monkeys from visually monitoring their own grasps, for example, by wearing a collar that blocks the view of their hands. The critical question for theory is whether mirror neurons can be found in the brains of such animals. If both populations have functioning mirror neurons, it would suggest that mirror neurons do not emerge from learned associations of repeatedly seeing oneself grasp an object. At this juncture we simply don’t know whether mirror neurons are the result of experience or are brought to experience.

Innate human intersubjectivity The philosopher’s queries about man’s original nature are not definitively answered by tests of adults (whether monkey or man). These need to be supple-

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mented with tests of newborns. Facial imitation provides such an opportunity. Human infants have a natural collar; they cannot see their own faces. If they are young enough, they will never have had a chance to see themselves in a mirror or to learn the associations in question. Neonatal facial imitation provides a direct test of whether the observation and execution of action are closely knitted together prior to associative experience. The results show that the observation and execution of actions are intrinsically intertwined in the human case. Newborn imitation indicates that, at some level of processing no matter how primitive, infants can map actions of other people onto actions of their own body. Because human acts are seen in others and performed by the self, the infant can grasp that the interpersonal connection: You can act ‘like me’ and I can act ‘like you,’ which Meltzoff (2006, 2007) describes as the ‘Like Me’ bridge. This selfother equivalence provides a privileged access to people not afforded by things. It provides a framework of sharing and communication. It has long been thought that the equivalence between self and other is integral to our adult commonsense psychology (Husserl 1950/1960; Mead 1934; Smith 1759/1976). Empathy, perspective-taking, and all varieties of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes emotionally seem to depend on this. The problem has always been that this equivalence was thought to be a late achievement in ontogeny, possibly dependent on language. The findings from developmental science, suggest that infants already register the equivalence between acts of self and other. It is not a derived, complex, or cognitively advanced analysis of the world. There is an intrinsic relation to others that infants feel preverbally. This ‘felt connection’ colours infants’ very first interactions and interpretations of the social world and is foundational for human communication and development.

A mechanism of change for enriching intersubjectivity That young infants can interpret the acts of self and other within the same framework provides them with enormous leverage and an engine for interpersonal development. For example, the infant knows that when she wants something she reaches out and grasps it. The infant experiences her own internal desires and the concomitant bodily movements (hand extension, finger movements, etc.). The experience of grasping to satisfy desires gives infants leverage for ‘feeling with’ the other who grasps for things. When the child sees another person reaching for an object, she sees the person extending his hand in the same way. These movements are imbued with experiential meaning, in part because of the child’s own experience with these acts. A similar argument applies to the goal-directed ‘striving’ and ‘try and try again’ behaviour in Meltzoff ’s (1995) studies using the behavioural re-enactment procedure. Infants have subjective desires and act intentionally. They have experi-

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enced their own thwarted desires, failed plans, and unfulfilled intentions. Indeed in the second half-year of life they are obsessed with the success and failure of their plans: They mark such self-failures with verbal labels such as “uh-oh,” “no,” or as recorded in a British child, “oh bugger” (Gopnik & Meltzoff 1986). More strikingly, they actually play with failed efforts by repeating the solution (and the failure) numerous times until the solution comes under voluntary control (Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997; Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl 1999; Moore & Meltzoff 2004). During such episodes of testing why they failed, infants often vary their strategies and ‘try and try again.’ This intrasubjective exploration deepens their intersubjective grasp about the motivation and meaning of others’ behaviour. Specifically, when an infant sees another act in this same way, the infant’s self-experience could suggest that there is a purpose, desire, or intention beyond the surface behaviour. Thus infants would see the adult’s failed attempts, and the behavioural envelope in which they occur, as a pattern of ‘strivings’ rather than ends in themselves. Gaze following admits to a similar theoretical analysis. The understanding of another’s looking behaviour could benefit from intrasubjective experiences – in this case, experience of oneself as a perceiver. Infants in the first year of life can imitate head movements and eye blinking (Meltzoff 1988; Meltzoff & Moore 1989; Piaget 1962). As unlikely as it seems at first, these data indicate that infants can map between the head movements and eyelid closures they see others perform and their own head movements and their own eye closures. The infant’s experience is that eye closure cuts off the infant’s own perceptual access. This experience may provide a basis for imbuing the eye-closures of others with felt experiential content. This theorizing can also can help us make sense of the finding that young infants have more advanced understanding of eye-closure than blindfolds (Brooks & Meltzoff 2002). Certainly, 1-year-olds are well versed with voluntary looking away and eye closing to cut off unwanted stimuli. This bodily act is well mastered. Its meaning when used by others may therefore be in advance of the understanding of inanimate occluders. Our intervention experiment training infants with blindfolds gave them the experiential basis for appreciating the situation of another person who wore a blindfold.

Overturning the myth of the asocial newborn A stumbling block for classical theories was that the self-other equivalence was postulated to be late developing – emerging from language or complex cognitive analyses. The last quarter century of research stands this proposition on its head. It indicates that young infants register the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. The recognition of self-other equivalences is the starting point for social cognition – a precondition for infant development, not the outcome of it.

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Given this facile self-other mapping, early social encounters are more interpretable to infants than supposed by Freud, Skinner, and Piaget. Infants have a storehouse of experience from which to draw: They can use the experienced subjectivity of self as a scaffold for the subjectivity of others. The child’s intersubjectivity is thus not restricted to decoding minds in isolation or abstraction through ‘cool cognition,’ but involves felt immediacy through bodily actions as well. The neural circuits underlying this preverbal human intersubjectivity are still being sought. Some of the most interesting advances in next decade may come from developmental social neuroscience. The task will be to consider intersubjectivity, imitation, mirror neurons, empathy, and much more, collaboratively from both a developmental and neuroscience perspective. Our joint purpose will be to crack one of the most urgent and ancient cries for human meaning: Am I alone? Do others feel what I’m feeling? This also is the baby’s quest.

Acknowledgments This work was supported by a grant from NIH (HD-22514), NSF (SBE-0354453), and a gift to the University of Washington from the Tamaki Foundation. We thank Stein Bråten for his gracious hospitality at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Theory Forum that spawned this chapter; and also for being such a good ‘virtual other’ – gently planting a voice within our brains that continues to remind us about the importance of intersubjectivity.

Note . It is possible that displays can be constructed that fool infants, as they do adults. Can a computer be considered intentional? Or is it just an inert hunk of plastic and silicon? We do not know the necessary and sufficient conditions for infants ascribing purposiveness to entities. There is research, however, indicating that in certain circumstances infants see purposiveness in the actions of pretend humans (stuffed animals and puppets, Johnson 2000) and dynamic displays that may be ambiguous as to animacy (e.g., researchers have used 2-D spots that leap and move spontaneously on a TV screen, Csibra 2003 and Gergely 2002). This does not run against the thesis suggested here, but underscores the need for research on boundary conditions. The inanimate 3-D object used by Meltzoff (1995) gives a lower boundary (infants fail) and real people with whom the infant has an intersubjective relation give an upper boundary (infants succeed). There is a lot of room in between for more empirical research.

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chapter 

Early speech perception Developing a culturally specific way of listening through social interaction Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl University of Washington

Throughout the first year of life, infants experience dramatic changes in speech sound perception that reflect a move from universal to specific ways of listening appropriate for their language community. In this chapter, we explore the role of social experience in this important transition in language development. Focusing on the phonetic aspects of language acquisition, we ask: what aspects of language experience serve as agents of change in helping infants to become perceptually attuned to other speakers of the language? We begin with a brief summary of the literature on the development of speech perception, which illustrates the importance of language experience during infancy for establishing native-like speech perception abilities (more extensive reviews of infant speech perception research are available from Goodman & Nusbaum 1994; Kuhl 2004; Jusczyk 1997; Werker & Tees 2005). Next, we review studies in which we have applied the “Conditioned Head Turn” technique to investigate the role of language experience in influencing developmental patterns of speech perception. We then review the results of a recent study that suggest that when a new language is introduced towards the end of the first year, infants participate through social interaction in the process of phonetic learning, rather than learning solely through passive listening. Thus, the language experience required for effective phonetic learning has a highly social nature. We suggest that particular social cues play an important role in heightening infants’ attention to relevant language stimuli in such early second language learning situations, and may also be essential for first language phonetic learning. Based on studies of social-cognitive development during the first year and its relationship to early language acquisition, we suggest that the process of attunement to social information and a sharing of perception throughout the first year direct infants’ at-

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tention to various types of relevant language stimuli. We close by discussing some working hypotheses being tested in our ongoing research.

Overview of developmental speech perception research Three decades of research on infant speech perception have shown that shifts in speech sound perception occurring over the course of the first year are driven by experience with ambient language. Following a landmark study in which categorical perception of speech sounds was discovered in 1-month-old infants (Eimas et al. 1971), researchers began to explore how perception of particular speech contrasts varied as a function of the language spoken to the infant (e.g., Aslin et al. 1981; Eilers, Gavin & Oller 1982; Eilers, Gavin Wilson 1979; Lasky et al. 1975; Streeter 1976; Trehub 1976; Werker et al. 1981). The work of Werker and Tees (1984a) indicated a developmental progression from similar discrimination of native and nonnative contrasts at 6–8 months, to lack of discrimination of the same nonnative contrast at 10–12 months. Further research replicated these results, leading to a now widely cited developmental pattern of speech perception: infants’ ability to discriminate a variety of speech sounds occurring across the world’s languages is initially unconstrained by the language of their community; this subsequently gives way to language-specific patterns of discrimination as early as 6 months of age for vowels (Kuhl et al. 1992) and by 10–12 months for consonants (Best, McRoberts, & Sithole 1988; Best et al. 1995; Bosch & SebastiánGallés 2003; Burns, Werker, & McVie 2003; Conboy et al. 2005; Kuhl et al. 2001; Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu 2003; Pegg & Werker 1997; Werker & Lalonde 1988). Recent studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure brain activity have provided additional evidence for changes in speech perception over the first year of life (Cheour et al. 1998; Kuhl et al. 2007; Rivera-Gaxiola, Silva-Pereyra, & Kuhl 2005a). Several studies have shown that this well-documented reduction in the perception of nonnative phonemes does not reflect a loss of sensory ability due to mere lack of exposure to the sounds of nonnative languages (see Werker 1994). First, adults retain the ability to discriminate some nonnative phoneme contrasts under certain testing procedures (Carney, Widin, & Viemeister 1977; Werker & Logan 1985; Werker & Tees 1984b), and can learn to discriminate many other nonnative phonemes given training (e.g., Jamieson & Morosan 1986, 1989; Logan, Lively, & Pisoni 1991; McClaskey, Pisoni, & Carrell 1983; McClelland, Fiez, & McCandliss 2002; Morosan & Jamieson 1989; Pisoni et al. 1982, 1994; Tees & Werker 1984; Zhang et al. 2005). Second, reduction in the perception of nonnative phonemes is not uniform, but rather appears to be modulated by acoustic salience (Burnham 1986), by the relationship of the nonnative phonemes to phonemic categories in the adult’s native language (e.g., Best 1994; Best & McRoberts 2003;

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Best, McRoberts, & Goodell 2001; Best, McRoberts, & Sithole 1988; Best et al. 1995; Guion et al. 2000; Strange et al. 1998), or by acoustic factors and/or phonetic familiarity (Polka 1991, 1992; Polka, Colantonio, & Sundara 2001).

Native language learning drives the development of native-like speech perception While most previous studies have focused on the decline of nonnative speech perception, we have proposed that native language perception improves over the first year of life, and furthermore, that changes in nonnative speech perception are linked to such sharpening of perception for the native language (Kuhl 2000). Our lab has conducted a series of behavioural studies that indicate that improvement in native language phonetic perception throughout infancy accompanies a reduction in nonnative perception (Kuhl et al. 2005). For these behavioural studies, we have used the “Conditioned Head Turn Procedure” (HT), a widely used method for testing infant speech perception (Eilers et al. 1979; Kuhl 1979, 1985; Polka, Jusczyk, & Rvachew 1995; Werker et al. 1981). In our version of the HT task, infants sit on their parent’s lap while an assistant, seated to the right, manipulates silent toys to attract the infant’s attention. Infants are trained to turn away from the assistant and toward a loudspeaker on their left when they detect a change from the repeating background sound to the target sound. An experimenter observes the infant on a video monitor in a control room during testing and judges the head turn responses. Correct head turn responses are reinforced with presentation of a mechanical toy (e.g., bear tapping on a drum) next to the loudspeaker. The HT procedure consists of a conditioning phase followed by a test phase (Figure 1). In the conditioning phase, all trials are change trials, allowing the infant to learn the association between the target sound and visual reinforcement. During conditioning, the target sound is initially presented with an intensity cue to draw the infant’s attention to the stimulus change. Following two consecutive correct head-turn responses to the target sound in anticipation of the reinforcer, no-intensity cue trials

Figure 1. Conditioned head turn paradigm

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are administered until three consecutive correct head-turn responses have been achieved. In the test phase, change (sound change) and control (no sound change) trials occur with equal probability (50%). For change trials, head-turns are scored as “hits” and failure to turn as “misses”; for control trials, head-turns are scored as “false alarms” and failure to turn as “correct rejections.” Several measures are taken to control bias: (a) all contingencies and trial selection are under computer control; (b) the parent and assistant wear headphones and listen to music that masks the speech sounds and prevents them from influencing the infants’ responses; and (c) the experimenter’s headphones, which allow monitoring of the experimental room, and are deactivated during trials so that the experimenter cannot hear the stimuli during the trial. In addition, the results are analyzed using signal detection measures that take both hit and false alarm rates into account. Using the HT technique, along with a parent-report inventory of language development – the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, or CDI (Fenson et al. 1993) – we have shown that individual variation across infants in the attainment of native-like speech perception is linked to advances in other aspects of language development. As early as 6 months of age infants display language-specific ways of perceiving vowel contrasts (Kuhl et al. 1992). Infants who are better at vowel discrimination at 6 months have better language skills throughout the 14 to 30 month period (Tsao, Liu, & Kuhl 2004). For consonants, the shift to language-specific processing takes several months longer (Conboy et al. 2005; Kuhl et al. 2001, 2005). Infants who are more language-specific listeners for consonants at 7-months also tend to have faster growth in language development from 14 to 30 months (Kuhl et al. 2005, 2007). In this research, better performance on native language phoneme discrimination was positively correlated with later CDI scores, whereas better performance on nonnative phoneme discrimination was negatively correlated with later CDI scores. Infants who have higher nativelanguage speech discrimination scores relative to their nonnative discrimination scores also have higher concurrent CDI vocabulary scores (Conboy et al. 2005). Studies using event-related potentials have likewise shown that the attainment of native-like speech perception is linked to subsequent language skills (Kuhl et al. 2007; Rivera-Gaxiola et al. 2005b). These results indicate that the shift to a language-specific way of listening may be considered a developmental milestone that is continuous with subsequent learning in that language. Infants who more quickly learn to tune out phonetic contrasts that are not meaningful for their native language are also more proficient at detecting contrasts that are phonemic in their language. Infants who reach the milestone of native-like speech perception sooner have an advantage in other aspects of language acquisition. Experience with the native language, and the uptake of information from such experience, appears to influence language acquisition on several levels, beginning with the phonetic level. Although these correlational

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results do not necessarily establish that phonetic learning drives other aspects of language acquisition, they suggest, at a minimum, that there is continuity across domains and that learning from experience may be essential for each (see also Jusczyk 1997; Werker & Curtin 2005). We have suggested elsewhere (Kuhl et al. 2005, 2007) that both the decline in the perception of nonnative phonemes during the first year, and constraints on learning at later ages, arise from native-language learning that begins during the first year of life. On this view, native-language learning produces dedicated neural networks that code the patterns of native-language speech, resulting in a “warping” of perceptual representations of the acoustic properties of speech sounds (Kuhl 2000; Kuhl 2004; Kuhl et al. 2005). The result of such neural commitment is resistance to learning phonetic features that are in opposition to those of the native language. Although early proposals regarding “critical periods” for language acquisition (e.g., Lenneberg 1967) asserted that a second language could be acquired without a foreign accent anytime until puberty, more recent research suggests that optimal learning of a second language’s phonology occurs much earlier than puberty. For example, Flege and colleagues have shown that learning a second language after approximately 5 years of age leads to more difficulty perceiving particular speech sounds in that language when compared to acquisition that takes place before that age (Flege, Bohn, & Jang 1997; Flege & Eefting 1987; Flege & MacKay 2004; Flege, MacKay, & Meador 1999). For vowels, acquisition as early as 3–4 years of age may still not result in native-like perception (Bosch, Costa, & Sebastián-Gallés 2000; Pallier, Bosch, & Sebastián-Gallés 1997). Adults may be trained to perceive nonnative phonemic contrasts, but this does not always result in native-like speech perception (Polka 1991). In the rest of this chapter we explore some of the factors that might be important for phonetic learning in infancy to be successful. We start with the assumption that brain plasticity remains open for second language acquisition throughout infancy, but also suggest that certain environmental conditions are important for learning to ensue.

Phonetic perception in infants exposed to a second language at 9–10 months Kuhl and colleagues (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu 2003) applied the HT technique to address the question of how infants who are well within the “critical” or “sensitive” period for second language acquisition learn to perceive speech sound contrasts from a nonnative language. In Experiment 1, two groups of 10–11-month-old infants growing up in Seattle in monolingual English-speaking homes were tested on a phonetic discrimination HT task using the Mandarin alveolar-palatal /./ vs. /t.h / fricative/affricate contrast, two sounds that are not English phonemes. Although English uses a fricative/affricate phonemic contrast (“sh” vs. “ch”), it does so at

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a different place of articulation (palato-alveolar). All of the infants came into the laboratory for play sessions for approximately one month prior to testing, a total of twelve 25-minute sessions. The first group (Mandarin live-exposure) heard Mandarin from live native speakers who interacted with the infants in a naturalistic way, while showing them toys and books. The second group of infants (Englishonly control group) came into the laboratory exactly the same number of sessions but heard only English, from live speakers who interacted with the infants in a naturalistic way and showed them the same toys and books. Remarkably, the infants who received live exposure to Mandarin showed phonetic learning as assessed using the HT task, even though their total amount of exposure was only 5 hours over a month’s time. Their results were compared to the results of a separate study in which the same phonetic contrast was tested in infants of the same age from either monolingual Mandarin-speaking homes in Taiwan or monolingual Englishspeaking homes in Seattle (Kuhl et al. 2001, Figure 2). The infants who received live exposure to Mandarin showed a statistically identical level of performance on the Mandarin contrast as the infants growing up in Taiwan. This result could not be explained simply by familiarity with going to the laboratory and interacting, since the infants who received live English exposure during play sessions with adults did not show better performance on the Mandarin phonetic contrast than those who had never been to the laboratory prior to testing. These results suggested that even a relatively small amount of naturalistic exposure to a new language could result in significant learning at this age. Towards the end of the first year of life, infants are well-equipped for learning to map the phonetic patterns of a new language when it is introduced in a naturalistic way, through social interaction with speakers of that language. Although their speech perception has already begun to show native-like processing at this age, as reviewed above, their systems seem to remain sufficiently plastic for the learning of a new language. But the results left open the question of whether live exposure through social interaction was necessary for such learning to ensue. Numerous studies of younger infants had shown that infants could learn from audio-only exposure to a small number of artificial language stimuli presented in a disembodied voice, based on the statistical properties of the input (e.g., Aslin, Saffran, & Newport 1998; Goodsitt, Morgan, & Kuhl 1993; Maye et al. 2002; Saffran 2003; Saffran, Aslin, & Newport 1996; Saffran et al. 1999). Perhaps infants could learn to perceive the Mandarin phonetic contrast just as well if they were exposed to speakers of the language via audiotapes. Alternatively, perhaps they would learn in audio-only conditions, but would learn better if they had both audio and visual information, presented in a television format. Previous studies had shown that audiovisual information is also important for early phonetic learning in infancy (Kuhl & Meltzoff 1982, 1996). Experiment 2 was designed to test these possibilities.

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Figure 2. (A) Experiment 1. Mandarin Chinese speech discrimination tests conducted on infants after exposure to Mandarin Chinese (left stripes) or American English (right stripes) show significant learning for the Mandarin exposed infants when compared with the English controls. (B) Experiment 2. Mandarin Chinese foreign-language exposure in the absence of a live person (AV or A) shows no learning. (C) Results of the same Mandarin speech discrimination tests on monolingual Mandarin-learning (grey to the left) and English-learning (black to the right) infants. (From Kuhl, P. K., Tsao, F.-M., & Liu, H.-M. (2003), “Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100 (15). Copyright (2003) National Academy of Sciences, USA.)

In Experiment 2, two groups of infants were brought to the lab for twelve 25minute sessions. The first group (Mandarin audiovisual-exposure) watched DVDs of the same Mandarin speakers who were used in Experiment 1, showing the same toys and books, but there was no live interaction. The second group (Mandarin audio-exposure) listened to the audio channel of the same DVDs, but received no visual input from speakers of the language. Both groups heard the same amount of Mandarin as the live-exposure group from Experiment 1, delivered in the same naturalistic infant-directed speech by the same speakers. These two groups of infants were then tested on the same Mandarin fricative/affricate contrast used in Experiment 1. The results of the testing were surprising. The Mandarin-audio-only and Mandarin-audiovisual groups both performed similarly to the English-only control group from Experiment 1; all three groups performed similarly to a separate group of monolingual-English infants who were tested at the same age but had never been to the laboratory before (Figure 2). These results show that something special happened during the live Mandarin exposure sessions. Passive listening to

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Mandarin from a television did not induce learning, even when visual as well as audio cues were available. All three learning conditions were similar in the sense that language input was provided using a natural voice, and the infants were not required to do anything except sit and listen. Yet phonetic learning was not triggered simply by auditory, or even audio-visual, exposure to Mandarin, in contrast to the previous studies that found that 6–8-month-old infants could learn statistically from small amounts of audio-only exposure to language stimuli. As discussed previously by Kuhl and colleagues (2003), naturalistic exposure to multiple speakers presents infants with a much more complex learning situation than controlled exposure to isolated instances of speech stimuli during an experiment. Learning occurs in both instances. However, learning in the natural exposure experiments requires much more from infants; they must extract phonetic information for the target contrast over a much broader and more variable range of exemplars. For example, infants in the exposure experiments heard between 26,000 and 42,000 (mean = 33,000) syllables over the course of the experiment, spoken by 4 different people with different voices and styles of speaking. In the statistical learning task conducted by Maye et al. (2002), infants heard tokens of 10 computer-synthesized syllables. The infants exposed to Mandarin in the live condition were shown books and toys that they could track visually. The pairing of auditory and visual information in meaningful interactive contexts may have engaged infants in the live-exposure group in a way that did not occur for the infants in the group that simply watched and listened to the same material over a television screen, or the infants who only heard the speakers’ voices but did not have visual cues. In complex naturalistic situations, social interaction could be a useful mechanism for heightening infants’ attention to relevant linguistic cues in the input. Previous studies have suggested that attention affects speech processing in infants (see Jusczyk 1997). The attainment of native-like speech perception between 9 and 11 months (as reflected in decreased sensitivity to nonnative contrasts to which infants have had no exposure) has been linked to performance on problem-solving tasks that require attentional control (Conboy, Sommerville, & Kuhl 2006; Lalonde & Werker 1995). This suggests an underlying role for attention in both sets of skills. Perhaps infants’ attention to audiovisual speaker cues, shown in previous studies to be important for phonetic learning (Kuhl & Meltzoff 1982, 1996), was enhanced during the live interactions but not during passive viewing of the DVDs. Indeed, attention rating scores on a 4-point scale indicated that infants in the live condition were more attentive to the speakers and their materials than those in the audio-visual group, and the latter group was more attentive than infants in the audio-only condition. Kuhl and colleagues have argued that attention and motivation are key elements for communicative learning in humans and other species, and are enhanced by social contact (Doupe & Kuhl 1999; Kuhl et al. 2003, 2007).

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For example, several studies of songbirds have demonstrated the importance of live interaction from tutors for learning (Adret 1993; Baptista & Petrinovich 1986; Eales 1989; Immelmann 1969; Tchernichovski, Mitra, Lints, & Nottebohm 2001).

The social and cultural relevance of shared speech perception According to Rogoff (2003), human development takes place through participation in cultural communities, and can only be understood in cultural terms. We propose that one aspect of human development, phonetic learning, is shaped through a sharing of perception in social and cultural contexts. The embedding of phonetic information in meaningful communicative interactions motivates learning in infants by enhancing attention to relevant acoustic features. Social cues are generated during dynamic, live interactions found in the successful instance of second language learning from live short-term exposure reported by Kuhl et al. (2003), and are also present in first language acquisition contexts. The 12 25-minute sessions used in the Kuhl et al. (2003) study were not completely naturalistic – the speakers talking to the infants followed a script while reading books and played with preselected toys – but they closely simulated learning in the real world, and were very distinct from studies of statistical learning in which infants listen to synthetic syllables presented auditorily for short periods of time. Thus the social cues generated when these sessions were live, as opposed to pre-recorded, may have been necessary for successful intake of the complex audiovisual information provided. Social cues are important for language learning throughout the first year, but the importance of particular cues may increase with age as advances in social cognition allow infants to make better use of such information and as learning environments become more complex. The role of social interaction in infant language acquisition has been discussed by numerous scholars (e.g., Bates 1976; Bloom 1993; Bornstein 1996; Bruner 1983; Gallaway & Richards 1994; Hart & Risley 1995, 1999; Rommetveit 1998; Snow 1977, 1999; Snow & Ferguson 1977; Tomasello 2003; Trevarthen 1998; Vygotsky 1978). A growing body of evidence has suggested that face-to-face communicative interactions occurring between infants and their caregivers in the first months of life set the stage for subsequent social, cognitive, and language development (e.g., Baumwell, Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein 1997; Beckwith et al. 1976; Beckwith & Rodning 1996; Bornstein et al. 1990; Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda 1989, 1997, 2001; Bråten 1998b; Clarke-Stewart 1973; Jaffe et al. 2001; Klein, Weider & Greenspan 1987; Nicely, Tamis-LeMonda, & Bornstein 1999; Sigman & Beckwith 1980; Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein 2002; Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell 2001; Trevarthen & Aitken 2001). During the earliest face-to-face interactions infants and adults mutually and reciprocally attend and attune to each

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other’s states with remarkably high levels of coordination (Bateson 1979; Beebe et al. 1988; Crown et al. 2002; Jaffe, Stern, & Peery 1973; Jaffe et al. 2001; Murray & Trevarthen 1986; Stern 1977; Stern et al. 1975; Trevarthen 1979, 1998). The spontaneous, rhythmic “protoconversations” that take place during the first few months of life, marked by mutual eye gaze, smiling, and vocalizations (Bateson 1979; Stern 2002), appear to reflect the infant’s desire for communication with other humans, and thus prepare infants for the acquisition of language (Trevarthen 1998). Moreover, they are meaningful in the sense that they are embedded in a cultural collectivity, a community of meaning provided by the adult (Rommetveit 1998). Thus, even during the earliest stages of infancy, a primary intersubjectivity entailing some sense of a “virtual other” is present, and appears to form a foundation for learning via participation with other humans (Bråten 1998b). Such reciprocal attunement with other humans may underlie the infant’s earliest successes at learning to perceive speech in culturally specific ways. As early as 6 months, the perception of vowels reflects the influence of the language environment (Kuhl et al. 1992). In a previous chapter, Kuhl (1998) suggested that an ability to share perception with other speakers of their language allows such early language-specific learning to take place. In that chapter, it was argued that a sharing of perception allows infants to “mentally align themselves with adults of the culture” (p. 297). In other words, infants learn mental maps, or filters, through which to perceive language, which resemble the mental maps of other members of the language community. Exposure to the sounds used by the community’s language and distributional properties of those sounds in the ambient language provide additional cues that allow infants to form such culturally specific perceptual filters or “native language perceptual magnets” (Kuhl 1993, 2000). Thus when the infant experiences multiple exemplars of a phonetic prototype (the most representative instance of a phonetic category), his/her perception of other speech sounds in nearby acoustic space is influenced by that prototype. The prototype functions as a “perceptual magnet,” perceptually pulling the other sounds towards it so that all of the sounds are perceived as members of the same category by speakers of that language. The infant becomes a member of the language community by sharing in this language-specific perceptual warping. At the time of that writing, little was known about the nature of the language experience needed for such learning to occur. It had been established that infants as young as 6–8 months of age could learn certain properties of a language from passive exposure to the statistical properties present in disembodied speech directed at them during structured experiments (e.g., Aslin et al. 1998; Goodsitt et al. 1993; Maye et al. 2002; Saffran et al. 1996, 1997). It had also been established that a yoking of visual information (mouth shape) to the auditory information in speech was important for perception (Kuhl & Meltzoff 1982, 1996). The more recent finding that 9–10-month-olds do not learn phonetically from passive expo-

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sure to more naturalistic forms of speech presented in audiovisual formats (Kuhl et al. 2003) compel us to address (a) the differences between passive exposure to a language and experience with language in meaningful sociocultural contexts, and (b) the different ways language learning occurs at different developmental stages. We have already discussed what it means for an infant to experience language in natural communicative interactions with members of their language community. Such protoconversations are characterized by reciprocal attunement and attention to each others’ states. We now turn to what it means to experience language towards the end of the first year of infancy, when advances in cognitive skills allow infants to take in more information and participate more fully in a sharing of perception.

Social-cognitive factors in the development of speech perception Shifts in social cognition occurring in the second half of the first year have been linked to important transitions in language development. Most notably, the infant’s increasing ability to understand another person’s reference to an object of joint attention is crucial for the acquisition of a meaningful, referential lexicon (Akhtar & Tomasello 1998; Bakeman & Adamson 1984; Baldwin 1995; Baldwin & Markman 1989; Brooks & Meltzoff 2002; Bruner 1983; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello 1998; Gogate, Walker-Andrews & Bahrick 2001; Tomasello 1999; Tomasello & Farrar 1986; Tomasello & Todd 1983). Several key developments coincide with this ability to understand reference. By 9 months infants begin to engage in triadic “person-person-object games” – they systematically combine purposes directed to objects with those that invoke interest from another human, reflecting a “secondary intersubjectivity” (Trevarthen & Hubley 1978; Trevarthen 1998). Bråten (1998a) has demonstrated that towards the end of the first year, infants display an “altercentric” participatory perception of others, as seen in behaviours that require a reversal of the perspective of the other during face-to-face interactions. Tomasello and colleagues have further argued that shared perception of communicative intentions, which emerges at around 9 months of age, is crucial for the acquisition of language (Akhtar & Tomasello 1998; Tomasello 1999). The ability to attend to objects of another person’s reference appears to be linked to the infant’s ability to understand others as intentional agents (Tomasello 1999). Around the same time that infants begin to display such abilities, they also begin to display comprehension of the meanings of words (Fenson et al. 1994). We suggest that attunement to the communicative intentions of other humans enhances attention to linguistic units at several levels. Attention to the meaning of a communicative act enhances the uptake of units of language present in that act. For example, 9–10-month-old infants can follow the line of regard of others. When

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faced with a language learning situation, specific meaningful social cues provided by adults, such as eye gaze and pointing to an object of reference, may help infants segment words from ongoing speech, thus facilitating phonetic learning from the sounds contained in those words (Kuhl et al. 2003). This does not necessarily mean that infants this age are able to integrate all of the relevant information present in the signal at once. Indeed, recent studies have suggested that even at 14 months infants are unable to use fine phonetic detail when processing words with meaning (Mills et al. 2004; Stager & Werker 1997; Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager 2002), although infants this age can perceive such phonetic information in words (Swingley & Aslin 2002). Early language acquisition is most likely a piecemeal process in which multiple pieces of information are gradually integrated (Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff 2000). When faced with a new language learning situation, infants this age may tune into the meaningfulness of interactions with their interlocutors first, and this in turn may facilitate their learning of other aspects of the language. Situations in which meaning is mediated by the adult, via behaviours that are contingent on the infants’ behaviours, are thus more likely to induce learning than situations not mediated in this way. Infants’ understanding of the contingencies between their actions and those of adults may influence their attention to linguistic units at all levels. Infants’ behaviours, such as levels of general attention and arousal, may in turn enhance the quality of the input they receive from adults. The role of shared perception for phonetic learning may increase throughout development, as infants become increasingly aware of the communicative intentions of others and more in tune with the meaning of such communication. As such, older infants may be more attuned to information presented in situations in which their interlocutors’ responses are contingent upon their actions. Further research is needed to determine whether audiovisual information presented in a static, non-contingent format such as the DVD condition in the study reported by Kuhl et al. 2003) is more useful to infants at particular developmental stages, and whether a television format in which such contingencies are present would be equally effective for phonetic learning. In a study of 14- and 24-month-old infants, Meltzoff found that infants of both ages could imitate adult actions with objects presented over a television screen, even after a 24-hour delay (Meltzoff 1988). In that study the video presentations were timed so that they coincided with optimal levels of infant visual attention. Language exposure presented in a similar format, while not completely interactive, could nevertheless provide some level of responsivity to infants’ attentional levels. The phonetic learning that occurs in live, natural interactions with speakers of a language may also be more robust and durable than that which occurs through static, non-contingent exposure to speech. For example, infants in the live Mandarin exposure experiment were tested between 2 and 12 days after the final

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exposure session. A median split based on the number of days between infants’ last exposure session and the HT learning assessment session indicated that learning was not short-lived. Infants tested immediately after the last exposure performed similarly to those who were tested more than a week later. Learning in live interactions and controlled experiments may be fruitfully compared with regard to the durability and robustness of learning; our working hypothesis is that infants need exposure to multiple instances spoken by different talkers in natural settings to show phonetic learning that is robust and durable. Even the 5-hour exposure that infants experience in our experiments is not expected to be as robust as the learning shown by infants who have been raised listening to a particular language for 11 months. Further research is also needed to determine whether there are individual differences in the ability to shift to culturally/linguistically appropriate ways of listening to a language. As discussed previously, studies from our lab have shown that individual variation in the attainment of native-language perception is linked to other advances (Conboy et al. 2005; Kuhl et al. 2005; Rivera-Gaxiola et al. 2005b; Tsao et al. 2004). Individual variation in the learning of a new language may also be predicted by first language abilities, and by advances in other areas of cognition. For example, infants who display more joint attention behaviours during language learning situations may learn more than those who hear the same phonetic information but engage in fewer joint attention behaviours. Infants who display a greater number of contingent responses to the adults’ actions and speech may show a greater amount of learning than other infants. Furthermore, infants who are more advanced on problem-solving tasks that require high levels of attentional control may be better able to learn from second language exposure than infants who are less advanced on such tasks.

Current research and future directions We are currently exploring these ideas through a study in which infants from English-speaking homes are being exposed to Spanish at 9–10 months of age. Infants are brought to the lab for a total of twelve 25-minute sessions in which they hear Spanish from native speakers who interact with them naturally while showing them toys and picture books. In this research, we are also analyzing the social behaviours that occur in these second-language learning situations. Of interest to us is whether aspects of the interactions are predictive of the amounts of phonetic learning that occur. We are assessing the robustness and durability of learning by comparing performance on the HT task between infants who receive this shortterm exposure to Spanish and those who have had naturalistic exposure to Spanish for longer periods of time, both in monolingual and bilingual learning situations.

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We are also exploring whether infants are able to learn other aspects of language from these interactions. If they are attending to their language input at the word level, then this should also be reflected in the way they process words. Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) has established that infants as young as 9–11 months of age process words they have been familiarized with differently from unfamiliar words (Addy & Mills 2005; Mills, Coffey-Corina, & Neville 1994; Thierry, Vihman, & Roberts 2003). If infants attend to language at this level in second-language learning situations, then the ERPs to words they have heard during these sessions should be processed differently from words they have never heard. As with phonetic learning, such lexically based learning may be predicted by the social behaviours displayed by infants and their adult communicative partners during second-language learning interactions. We are also examining whether individual differences in the overall quality of dyadic behaviours during language exposure sessions are linked to later cognitive and language outcomes. Previous research has shown that infants who receive high levels of “mediated learning experiences” from their mothers show better performance on tests of language and cognitive development at 2, 3, 4, and 5 years of age (Klein & Alony 1992; Klein, Weider, & Greenspan 1987). In this research, interactions were said to be “mediated” by the adult when they contained the following elements: (1) intentionality (an act directed toward affecting the infant’s perception or behaviour) and reciprocity (an observable response from the infant that s/he saw/heard the intentional behaviour); (2) mediation of meaning (expressions of excitement, appreciation, or affect in relation to objects, concepts, etc.); (3) transcendence (attempts to expand the infant’s cognitive awareness); (4) mediation of feelings of competence (expressions of satisfaction with the infant’s behaviour); and (5) regulation of behaviour (matching tasks to the infant’s capacities, interests, etc.). Such experiences may be defined differently across cultures, but are believed to be found universally. Other research has shown that adult responsivity to infants predicts cognitive and language outcomes (e.g., Baumwell et al. 1997; Beckwith et al. 1976; Beckwith & Cohen 1989; Bloom 1993; Bornstein 1989; Bornstein et al. 1990; Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda 1989, 1997; Bornstein, Tamis-LeMonda, & Haynes 1999; Carew & Clarke-Stewart 1980; Clarke-Stewart 1973; Landry et al. 1997, 2001; Nicely, Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein 1999; TamisLeMonda & Bornstein 2002; Tamis-LeMonda et al. 1996, 2001). Based on this previous work and the results of our studies reviewed in this chapter, we predict that both the quality of infant-tutor interactions during language exposure, as measured by the amount of mediation provided by the adult and the responsivity of the adult to the infant’s behaviours, will influence infant second language learning. On the infant’s part, joint attention and engagement behaviours should enhance learning.

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A final note about cultural diversity in language learning We have suggested that social interactions between infants and adults provide a cultural context that moves infants into specific ways of listening to language and facilitates subsequent language learning from members of the cultural linguistic group. A key component of these interactions may be the degree to which infants and adults engage in contingent behaviours that enhance infants’ attention to relevant linguistic information. Thus, infants’ cognitive abilities, their understanding of social cues, and adult behaviours coincide to provide effective environments for phonetic learning. We have presented data that suggest how these factors might influence second language phonetic learning in infancy, and have generated hypotheses we are now investigating. We have also suggested that similar processes play an important role in first language phonetic learning. Additional research is needed to examine what kinds of phonetic information can be learned across first and early second language situations, and under what conditions. More work is also needed to assess the extent to which short-term exposure to language under conditions that simulate natural language interactions can result in robust, durable learning such as that found in primary language acquisition. We also wish to emphasize that there are likely to be differences across cultural groups in the ways in which phonetic learning occurs. Face-to-face interactions between infants and adults are not uniformly common across all cultures (e.g., Bornstein et al. 1990a, b, c; Heath 1983; Martini & Kirkpatrick 1981; Rogoff 2003; Schieffelin 1991); thus, they may not be as important for the development of shared perception as has been suggested by developmental research in middle-class Western cultures. The degree to which talk is valued compared to nonverbal forms of communication varies across cultures. Distal forms of communication involving sound, rather than more proximal nonverbal communication involving touch, may be emphasized to a greater extent in cultures in which infants are physically separated from other people compared to those in which infants are always kept close (see Rogoff 2003). It is well known that across many cultures the speech directed towards infants (often referred to as “motherese”) contains properties that attract and hold infant attention (Fernald 1984; Fernald & Kuhl 1989), and speech units that are exaggerated (Kuhl et al. 1997). Our work has recently shown that the degree of mothers’ speech clarity in these infant-directed episodes strongly correlates with infants’ speech discrimination in the HT task (Liu, Kuhl, & Tsao 2003), suggesting that the exaggerated language directed towards infants in social settings attracts infants’ attention and assists learning. Whether this process is consistent or different across cultures remains to be explored. In some cultures infants are not regarded as conversational partners, and little speech is directed at them (Heath 1983; Ochs & Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin 1991; Ward 1971). However, the infants are surrounded by the speech of others, and their actions or interests

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may be commented on by others in a contingent fashion (Schieffelin 1991). Infants in such communities may learn quite a lot about language by “listening in” or “eavesdropping” (Rogoff 2003). Older siblings and other children also function as important agents of language socialization in some cultures (Schieffelin 1991; Ward 1971; Zukow 1989); overlooking their influence could result in a misunderstanding of the developmental process germane to the development of speech perception. Dyadic interactions are also rare in some cultures (Rogoff et al. 1993; Whaley et al. 2002); in such cases, analyses at the level of the dyad would not be appropriate. Levels and types of participatory learning tend to vary across members of any given culture, and must be viewed as a cohesive whole to be adequately understood (Rogoff 2003; Whaley et al. 2002). Thus when we look at the ways in which speech perception is shared amongst members of a community, we must consider the interactions that occur at many levels within the community. Future research should consider the social processes that occur amongst members of diverse cultural communities in order to understand the universal mechanisms underlying the development of native language speech perception.

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chapter 

On theories of dialogue, self and society Redefining socialization and the acquisition of meaning in light of the intersubjective matrix Ivar Frönes University of Oslo

Socialization: Subject and structure The social sciences have always been faced with the challenge of understanding and describing the relation between individual and society, between structure and subject. Central to this relation is socialization: how a human being comes to be a member of a formative culture and society and in that process develops as a unique individual and an (inter)acting subject. Occuring in the intersection of innate capacities and environment, socialization constitutes the meeting point of the individual subject and the structures of a culture. Theories of socialization postulate how human beings are formed or shaped, affording not only theories of socialization as such, but also models and images of essential characteristics of human beings. Theories present children both as asocial and prosocial, as shaped by the nurturance of the family or by the influence of peers, as influenced by inherited genes or as dominated by the environment. Some theories picture man as an acting and reflective subject, others as a cultural puppet governed by normative strings. To analyze theories of socialization is to grapple with all these aspects and varieties of theories. While sociology and anthropology are mainly concerned with the socialized human being, a variety of psychological theories focus on the process of individual development. Even if socialization is a key concept in the social sciences, analysis of the process of socialization – the factual interaction between social and biological aspects, between the micro and macro in the various phases of the process – is in fact surprisingly absent. The myriad analyses of families and cultural mores, economic and cultural resources, family dynamics and cognitive development, subgroups and clinical protocols do not sum up to theories of socialization. They do, however,

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generate implicit premises for a general understanding of socialization, as well as for policymaking, educational programs, and clinical treatment. In this chapter, theories of socialization and approaches to meaning acquisition will be examined in the light of what Stern (2004, this volume (2)) terms ‘the intersubjective matrix’. As shown by contributions to the present volume, beginning with the prologue by Bråten and Trevarthen (this volume (1)), the intersubjective matrix entails much more than a new assumption amid the undergrowth of theories. It represents a new paradigm that challenges theories belonging to different social sciences.

Action and structure. Human beings conceived as over- and under-socialized Despite being a core concept of sociology, socialization is only rarely a topic for empirical studies in the field. Children and youth have been analyzed empirically as subcultures, as a child culture, as part of the family, as peer groups or as special groups, and only to a lesser degree in terms of socialization. This is not to criticize the choice of empirical topics in sociology, but to voice a concern about the consequences. The field has, only to a limited degree, subjected the formation of the (inter) acting social subject to the kind of scrutiny that extensive empirical analyses of the process of socialization would have garnered. As a result, aspects of socialization theory have been left with rather loose propositions or assumptions, or the topic of socialization has been left to psychology. The relation between subject and structure is in sociology primarily formulated in terms of “agency” and “structure”, rather than as an understanding of the dynamics of socialization, even if discourses on social action convey some key dimensions of socialization. Positing that societal norms and values are internalized and mirrored by the psychic mind, some in sociological theories entertain the concept of the oversocialized human being. This theory is well illustrated by Levi-Strauss, who said that it is not man who expresses himself by myths, but rather the myths that express themselves by man, or actors are recruited for their positions (as in Althusser’s “interpellation”) by the grand discursive formations that shape human actions and world images. The Marxist concept of “false consciousness” implies the same: cultural structures are internalized by virtue of the socialization process. Functionalist thought offers a different perspective, but within the same paradigm. The combination of Marxist and psychoanalytic thought affords a theoretical bind about the way in which the external society is transformed into internal motivation (see, e.g., Marcuse 1968) through unconscious psychological mechanisms. General theories in sociology seek to grasp the interplay between subject and structure. Examples are Talcott Parsons’ general theory of social action, and Berger and Luckmann’s dialectics between internalization and externalization. In both cases,

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they end up with a theory that conceptualizes how society is internalized rather than how acting subjects influence social structures. Bourdieu (1984) slightly relaxed the grip of structures with his notion of autonomous fields populated by beings both who are influenced by structural conditions and are actors. In a somewhat different perspective, Giddens (1984) conceptualized a dynamic relation between structure and subject in his theory of “structuration.” Even if anchored in a structuralist understanding, structures are also seen to be “in” the actors, enabling and constraining them. The structuration theory seeks to encompass both the dynamics of structural patterns and the constitution of the subject. In classic sociology, the theory of socialization centres largely on the family and as occurring primarily in infancy and early childhood. The notion of primary socialization implies that the first years of life are qualitatively different from other stages in life, designated as secondary socialization, and that the formation occurring during the first year in the family is radically different from later formation. Although human behaviour, according to structuralist and functionalist theories, reflects institutionalized structures, economic actors represent the undersocialized human being. Rather than an acting social being, economic man is an analytic model; man as a utility-function in a social landscape of uncertainty. Were not the actor’s internal preferences treated as individual relata, they would become norms, and optimalization would be seen as attempts to satisfy norms. The optimizing economic actor striving to realize his or her own interests, confronted with societal frames and constraints, may be viewed in a Hobbesian logic as the fight between human “nature” and self-interest and the constraining society. Over-socialized and under-socialized man have a lot in common. They are both theoretical constructs and models of understanding, rather than description of human beings living as acting subjects in a society. Both models afford explanatory power pertaining to action, but not to socialization. The under-socialized man is simply optimizing his interest, and in doing so creating the paradox that all actions will be defined as optimizing, since the actors internal preferences are unavailable. The model of the over-socialized man largely entertains the view of socialization as a series of given mechanisms of internalization explaining how man has become a part of the relevant culture. In both cases, the empirical dynamics of the process and differentiated mechanisms are lost.

Action and intersubjectivity In micro-oriented sociology, as presented by Goffmann and in symbolic interactionism, actors are both acting in and interacting with their contexts. Actions are

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embedded in the context, but actors develop vocabularies of strategies within the given social frames, the definitions of which are influenced by the strategies of the actors. This social context is also clearly expressed in ethnometodology, although more emphasis is placed here on actions based less on reflection and more on presumptions. In both perspectives, however, subject and context are interwoven in a complex whole. In symbolic interactionism, interaction is emphasized and, to a varying degree, intersubjectivity. Mead distinguishes between an active core process, an “I,” and the socially constituted “Me.” In a reflective human being, an active “I” relates in a reflective manner to the social “Me” and creates and recreate Me. According to Mead, “significant others,” by being a central part of a child’s social practice, are not only persons, but represent contexts and culture. Mead’s specifications of “I” and “Me” imply that the acting “I” acknowledges its “self ” by objectifying itself as “Me”, by seeing itself from the outside. This “outside” may be the other, as position and person; that is, “decentration” in the sense of Piaget. Decentration may also imply taking a position in which the actor is able to understand dialogues as those of “the third”: I reflect on my relation to the other. Thus, Mead’s logic becomes dialogical, the “I” reflects on the dialogue between the “I,” the social “Me,” and the general/significant other by comprehending the dialogue from the position of “the third.” Humans are anchored in their social dialogues, and reflections on dialogues take the form of inner dialogues. This does not mean that all human beings have the same reflective capacity. Although based on a general dialogical capacity, reflection is an acquired ability, linked in particular to the modern, socially composite, environment (Frönes 1995). Although language as symbolic structure has been the point of departure for structuralist understanding, the theory of speech and communicative action entails another perspective. Language becomes a tool for realizing an actor’s intentions. The focal relationship is not the structure-subject, but the subject-subject. When Habermas breaks with the structuralist approach of the “old” Frankfurter school, he is not doing so by virtue of escaping systemic impact, but through the concept of communicative action. Communicative action establishes a relation between subjects, thus intersubjectivity. Although a communicative action is anchored in cultural symbols and language, it is equally a part of a communicative contract with another party. Habermas’ dialog presupposes acting subjects. In a semiotic perspective, the addressee – the recipient constructed in the message – is underlined. The same recipient may have a series of possible positions, as an addressee varying with genres of communications or “language games.” A letter that never reaches anyone is yet directed to someone, and the same possible recipient may be addressed as lover, friend, or enemy, or as being in a formal position defining the genre of the communication. Between two subjects, a variety of genres of dialogues can be established.

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This perspective on dialogue illustrates the embeddedness in social context, as well as the construction of contexts by the subject. Sociological theory comprises various approaches to the relation between subject and social structure. Although macro-oriented sociology and action theory offer a conceptualization of action versus structure, symbolic interactionism and the theory of communicative action offer a much clearer elaboration of intersubjectivity. While these theories are not advanced to understand socialization, implicit in them are ideas on relationships between subject and society, which suggest conceptions of the little child’s meeting with the social and material world.

Nature and culture Macro-oriented theories offer an understanding of the process of socialization which, to put it simply, offer variants of how the external is made internal. Concepts of internalization, habitus, or embodiment entail different perspectives on this process. In several of such theories, the relation between individual and society is explicit or implicit understood as a relation between nature and culture. Theories of socialization often offer an image of society being pressed upon the child (Berger & Luckmann 1967). Freud’s description of culturalization as “unpleasant” seems to support this interpretation; the process entails civilizing the little animal, whose asocial nature fights back. To become human is a process to which the biological man only reluctantly agrees. Such an understanding may also invite an image of the society as a destroyer of the natural. Only if the culture is pealed off does one encounter the “natural” (and noble) man. The metaphor of being an actor or being “natural,” which is encountered in many cultures, reflects the cultural images of the natural. Although Freud’s writings do not directly offer such an interpretation, one can infer this interpretation from his concepts. The concept of the natural human being evokes notions of the child as the most authentic, natural being, least ruined by culture. The history of childhood portrays children as evil as well as innocent. In both versions, however, they are presented as being born with innate capacities that are not social. In the combination of psychoanalysis and Marxism is the idea of a healthy and sick society with the possibility of harmony between man and society, as illustrated by both Fromm and Marcuse and by more obscure figures such as Reich. “Simple” societies described in classical anthropology often act as the proof that this harmony and the “noble savages” can exist, illustrated by, for example, Malinowsky’s theory that cultural patterns are a function of biology.

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Subject and society: Child’s path into the social Development, according to psychological theory, unfolds in phases, and depending on the various perspectives, each phase includes particular dynamics. In psychoanalytic theory, the impact of earlier phases is with us and in us, influencing us in various ways; early childhood events are evident in later personality profiles. In cognitive developmental psychology, the earlier stages influence the succeeding ones in forms of competence development, not as formative shadows in personality. Developmental psychology focuses less on enculturation or socialization, and more on processes and mechanisms, regardless of the developmental schemata employed. Even in his early writings on language and the thought of the child, Piaget emphasizes that the child comes to acquire language through communicative interplay with other children. Despite a certain emphasis on maturation, Kohlberg’s understanding of development, inspired by Piaget, has a clear social anchorage (Frönes 1995). Although the infant is often not the focus in cognitive development theory, it is reasonable to assume that the infant is asocial in these theories (as in the earliest Piagetian stages), even if being an active subject in its own socialization. In object-relations theory (Hinshelwood 1997; Winnicott 1996), the infant reaches for the mother to satisfy its own needs, not as a participant in intersubjective communication. Lacking the capacity to distinguish between itself and the environment, the infant is not oriented toward other subjects as subjects, but toward itself, albeit also engaging with what Winnicott terms ‘transitional objects’. According to these theories, the infant develops from being amorphous to becoming intersubjective; the child learns to differentiate between itself and others on the basis of ethnocentrism. Although Freud would anchor formation dynamics in the family, Lacan anchors the individual and the formation of self in (family mediated) language and, hence, to a larger extent, in society. In the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan (1975), the infant lives in a sort of “real world” in which significance or “meaning” is not yet established, and where lived experience occurs without any stable sign value; the signifying and the signified fuse. Acquiring language entails that the child removes itself from the signless experience of needs and need satisfaction, while culture reveals itself to be disagreeable in that the child’s needs cannot fully be formulated in terms of linguistic and cultural categories. In development psychology the infant has been seen as asocial, while active in its socialization, driven by an inner motivation for development. Although not distinguishing between itself and its environment, the psychoanalytic child orients itself toward others (the mother) to satisfy its needs. Freud’s child meets the disagreeableness, the “Unbehagen”, of culture. Berger and Luckmann refer to socialization as a fight about upbringing between child and society. Psychological

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theories invite an understanding consistent with sociology’s idea of primary socialization: The child’s point of departure is not social; the little animal is being forced into the social world in the first years of life. Vygotsky’s (1962) point of departure is the child as a biological-social being who develops both as a societal and individual being through the process of socialization (cf. Veer & Valsiner 1991). Formulated in a partially abstract form, his conception of the relation between the social and the individual is given a general format. His foundational perspective is, however, clear: the human child is from the outset a social being – but there is no precise vocabulary constituting the intersubjectivity of the infant.

Communication, intersubjectivity, and dialogue Intersubjectivity has several dimensions (Bråten 1998). There is the immediate mode of interpersonal communion between subjects who acknowledge one another as subjects and mutually attune to one another. There is the object-oriented mode of intersubjectivity that entails joint attention, in which the participants focus on the same object or state, acknowledging their joint attention, which Trevarthen and Hubley (1978) termed “secondary intersubjectivity.” In a semiotic perspective, this means the existence of a joint addressee; communication is oriented toward a subject who can be construed in the communication itself, as when two persons through communication develop a desire for the same object. Whether or not a factual entity is referred to outside the communication is another question (as with the letter that is not answered). The nature of the action is nevertheless intersubjective. The active versus passive subject distinction has been a main concern of actorstructure discourses in sociology, while analytical examination has restricted of the issue as to whether the individual acts and reflects, or is a puppet pulled by the strings of norms, structures, or dominating discourses. The intersubjectivity perspective is concerned with interaction, relations, and dynamics. Against the background defined by Bakhtin we may describe human interactions and contexts as a series of concurrent, past, and expected future dialogues (cf. Holquist 1990). As subject, humans are participants in a number of dialogues, and they also are their own dialogue. Dialogues conceptualize a dynamic context or system of symbols. Even if the actor engages as a reflective subject, he or she cannot be conceived as being outside the dialogues, merely moving into them as an outsider’s strategic act. Vygotsky would suggest that man cannot be understood divorced from his or her activity. Activity may be portrayed as a series of dialogical processes crossing through dimensions of a given situation.

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Dialogical man portrays an individual as linguistically anchored, as in Lacan, but without the Freudian background and without the Lacanian-Freudian idea of perpetual quest for fulfilment rooted in the “lack” or longing within humans, anchored in the inevitable restriction imposed by language and culture on a presocial child’s more fundamental desires. The human longing and desire is by this postulated as rooted in the gap between nature and culture, between desire and cultural vocabularies. But the human desire and quest for the authentic and for what can be vaguely glimpsed behind the horizon can also be understood as rooted deeply in cultural narratives and symbolic vocabularies, as when the medieval icons point to the unknowable, or when the clichés of romantic love indicate feelings and experiences that can be envisioned but only infrequently realized, if at all (Eco 1994). The seeking for the divine behind the symbols cannot be fully expressed “in words,” but can nevertheless be created by the narratives of culture. The poet’s struggle to break the limits of language is rooted in the qualities of the symbolic vocabulary of humans, not in a presymbolic desire. This perspective on the social self as anchored in dynamic contexts conceptualized as dialogues (which may be identical to cultural discourses, but need not be) transfers the understanding of human motives from early years of life to across the entire life span, as a process. Socialization is conceptualized in a way that cancels the posited distinction between primary and secondary socialization (Kagan 2000). It is the signifier-aspect of the symbol with which the child is first confronted. The conventions linking expression and content are acquired step by step. Therefore, the symbolic world is necessarily in more flux for the child than for adults – denotations are not fixated, dialogues pass through subjects without a self-constituted linguistic and cultural convention. The motivational vocabulary develops by virtue of the child’s linguistic/symbolic development. The desire is developed through the life course as it develops historically, culturally, and biographically. The forms of the culture – as narratives, myths, metaphors, and images – transcend the simple denotatives that organize the languages found in dictionaries. The culture, thus viewed, is organized narratively, metaphorically, and poetically, not as a tight linguistic system of denotations.

The virtual other and the self as dialogue As a biological being with an intersubjective disposition, dialogical man comes to be fully conceptualized with Stein Bråten’s (1988) concept of the virtual other, and the model implied by the intersubjective matrix. In that model, an infant is biologically a socially oriented being, actively engaged in its own culturalization from the moment of birth, or the opposite of the “little animal” fighting back.

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In this view, both the development of dialogical capacity and the processes of social interpretation are dialogically structured in one’s mental capacity. In a communicative perspective, it is reasonable to talk about dialogical programming for communication. By virtue of an intersubjective disposition, the child interprets communication and relationships, which suggest that the child is born with capacity to decentre from the outset, that is, reaching out beyond itself. The complex modes of self-objectification that are gradually developed are congruent with the child’s essential nature, not in conflict with it. Not only is the child biologically equipped to engage and exist in streams of dialogues, but he or she may interpret the world as streams of dialogues. This is illustrated by the child’s capacity for other-centred participation and empathy (Bråten 1998). The little child is not driven toward others by inner needs or ethnocentrism, but enters the social world by virtue of its dialogical capacity. Thus collapses the image of the child-environment link in which the child sees the other as itself and who only later learns to distinguish between self and others. The little dialogical human being socializes itself by initiating communion from birth. This offers a new perspective on language development, with the child’s virtual other creating a child who wants to communicate. By virtue of empathy in felt immediacy (see, e.g., Bråten 1998), the actual other is constituted as a subject, not as an object grasped in egocentrism. This does not suggest that the child cannot behave in a self-centred manner, but that the child’s altercentric capacity provides the basis for empathy and decentration. This involves a further quantum leap related to the active and robust infant portrayed by infancy research only a few decades ago, in that the infant is not only self-driven, communicative, and robust, but also competent for communion by virtue of what Stern (2004) terms “the intersubjective matrix”. In the dialogical perspective, context is constituted not as social “environment,” or as “society” and “social structure,” but as a set of intersubjective structures. The subject exists in a series of shifting dialogues; the context includes not only present dialogues, but also past and planned potential dialogues. The intersubjective structure thereby creates and influence structures and meaning in the context. The potential meaning of a given context is thereby enriched, given that that meaning rests on several possible perspectives and the capacity of the interpreter. Contents emerge not only by virtue of the external world, but from the perspectives applied. Empathy in the mode of felt immediacy and the infant as an acting subject entail that the child encounters language and symbols not as incapable of distinguishing itself from the environment, but as an acting subject who parses the world in dialogical patterns. The altercentric infant who aids another child has a different relation to the sign than the posited egocentric child. The perspective of intersubjective altercentricity suggests a direction for the child’s formation of meaning and significance, in which the child is exposed to signifiers, or sign-expressions,

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without links to contents. The child forms patterns of significance by virtue of those patterns being different from prior patterns, and gradually from the realization that the patterns do not have the same reference. According to, or implicit in, theories of Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and Klein, the child moves from objectrelations to subject-relations. For the dialogical child, one might conceive a reverse sequence. First subjects are constituted, thereafter some are transformed into objects in secondary intersubjectivity. We are born with a disposition to perceive the world as intersubjective and – possibly – also with a proclivity to perceive the world as living in the sense of acting. In Winnicott’s understanding, the mother is both an object, related to the child’s needs, and an “environment.” In the latter respect, she may also represent the language and linguistic structures. In a dialogical matrix, the mother is constituted by the entailed intersubjectivity as a subject, not as an undifferentiated object. By virtue of her position as a subject, she also represents the environment. The child communicates with the symbolic nature of the environment by interacting with the mother as subject. In such a capacity, she offers an entrance to sign expressions, linking signifier and signified. As such she thus contributes to the creation of meaning. Those who occupy the “significant other” role in the child’s life during the first years come to influence the child’s formation of the first denotations and, not the least, connotations. It all happens in actual interaction with the active subject child. The dialogic child entails a dialogical relation between culture and nature. In such a theory, the inner dialogues will be structured in the same format as the outer dialogues with actual others, given that both kinds of dialogues are structured by the dialogical matrix as relations between subjects. Inner speech is conversation, a speech act; the one who talks to oneself is conversing with an other, and through others. The theory of the infant’s intersubjective capacity and the virtual other affords a new matrix for understanding socialization. a matrix that invites different notions of the domains of key concepts associated with socialization and meaning acquisition.

Identity, culture, and dialogue Social identity is a core concept of both sociology and psychology. In forming an identity, one grapples with the sense of belonging socially, of individual social expressions and individual coherence, as well as with role patterns and designated cultural positions. In modern society, identity is often understood as something toward which one aspires, as a psychic whole and stable self-understanding. Identity is also understood through the lens of class, gender, and ethnic roots. Concepts

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such as “habitus,” roles, and interpellations into discursive positions imply postulating a social identity that mirrors social structures. In modern life, we meet social identity as a strategic composition of symbols and consummation, which are influenced by social and cultural positions. Social identity is not, however, understood as a passive reflection of hegemonic structures A dialogical perspective anchors identity in subject and context, implying that the construction of identity is an act, as well as interaction. My striving to compose various aspects of myself as a whole or to send signals about my social position involves a series of acts. The acts are themselves embedded in existing and potential dialogues. My social constructions are rooted in the social context, but may also transcend it. To construe one’s social belongingness is also an act, even though it may be presented as a natural whole – for example, in terms of one’s “roots.” That the act is influenced by structural relations does not change its being an act or an utterance. From a psychological perspective, the modern identity task is to maintain the coherence of self, and to draw the boundaries between oneself and the processes in which one is embedded. It is considered problematic when identity is fragmented, without clear boundaries between self and the environment. In a dialogical perspective, this fragmented identity may be viewed as lacking an understanding of how to construct a modern self. The “dissolved self ” may be understood as lacking the capacity to handle the dialogic self in a reflective manner, in contexts in which the individual is anchored in many and interconnected dialogues. The “dissolved” self may refer to a clinical problem, but also to the existential challenges to the dialogical self in a modern environment. Social expressions/utterances are developed in a context and need to be understood as acts, not as expressions of stable inner characteristics, even if stable inner traits exist. As any utterance is an act, there is no point in distinguishing acts from meanings or attitudes. Replying to a question in a survey by stating that I intend to do so and so is an act, not a “reflection” of an inner (otherwise hidden) state. The fact that replies in a survey vary with the interviewers or contexts does not mean that the respondents are liars or unstable, but that communication is an act in a context. A child is not lying when, alone with an interviewer, he or she states that the school is interesting and important, and later, when joined by two schoolmates, says that school is boring. The child “meant” what was said on both occasions, but as actions, these statements are anchored socially. The first is a part of the child-adult dialogue; the second as part of child culture. The process of socialization is facilitated by the capacity of intersubjectivity and most likely by other structural properties that may be traced in proto-language and the mechanisms of language acquisition. The cultural world exists as an objective reality, which is gradually acquired by the active child. The internalization of culture is a process of active acquisition of meaning, the process is structured by the intersubjective matrix of the child and by the “social facts,” in a Durkheimian

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sense, of language and culture. Within this framework the dialogic child meets culture and language as something that the child gradually creates. Internalization begins by relating sign and content, and the cultural conventions between signifier and signified are gradually constructed by “doing,” by experience. The constitution of linguistic understanding does not occur by virtue of the language being internalized as a series of signs with appropriate formal content, but by virtue of the language being acquired through social processes in which the child itself is active. Even if this gradually makes the external structure internal, the individual and social variations reflect the social nature of meaning acquisition.

The cultural dialogues and social relations as patterns of movement In advocating “the intersubjective matrix,” Stern refers to “mirror neurons” as enabling perception of others’ acts as a sort of mirror to our own acts, “permitting us to directly participate in another’s actions without having to imitate them” (Stern 2004: 79). The dialogic matrix of intersubjectivity entails that cultural patterns cannot be envisaged as an external reality internalized in our heads. The recipient is an active participant in the process, not just by actively receiving, but by structuring the information afforded in a dialogic manner. Intersubjectivity does not only mean acknowledging the dialogical format of communication or of altercentric participation subserved by the mirror system, but also acknowledging that there are always dynamics, movements, owing to acting entities. It is possible, even though here posited just as a tentative assumption, that the intersubjective structure plays a role in imposing an action format on cultural patterns. This would suggest that culture and social relations are not conceived of as a network of norms and values by the child, but as patterns of (narrative) movements and actions. If this is tenable, then the child should primarily be expected to think in terms of sequences of actions, events and movements, and only gradually learn to think in terms of structures and static patterns. Forms of understanding during socialization do not move from object to subject, but reverse; not from static to dynamics, but from dynamic to static; from movements (actions and dialogues) to static patterns; from subjects to acknowledging objects. According to this perspective, we are as beings dynamic, not static, because our point of departure is the structural schema of intersubjectivity and dialogue.

Dialogue and epistemology The innate intersubjective matrix does not only change theoretical points of departure for sociological and psychological conceptions of socialization, it also alters

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how we conceptualize the acquisition of language and culture, the parent-child relation, and child-child relations. This invites viewing a number of phenomena in a different light and offers new perspectives on the child’s possible egoism. The fact that the child seeks to promote itself does not mean he or she lacks the capacity to recognize others. In a dialogical matrix, the child’s language acquisition emerges as a dialogical process in which the language is being moved from idiosyncratic and local connotations to general cultural and denotational categories, somewhat in line with Peirce’s pragmatic understanding of communication: language has strong idiosyncratic, local, and situation-anchored dimensions. Culture is acquired by the active subject who is concurrently constituted as a cultural individual in this process. The individual is formed owing to the existence of the subject, and not the other way around. The other is also as subject established by virtue of the infant’s dialogic matrix. Thereby the self is established as a subject, not as an acknowledgment, but in the mode of felt immediacy in the layer of primary intersubjectivity. Although this does not entail establishing a prosocial individual, the posited asocial individual can no longer be upheld. Although we cannot know the types of conversations the child will encounter throughout life, we can know what the child is capable of. The research on innate intersubjectivity provides a perspective on the mechanisms of phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. It is also easy to place the development of the intersubjective matrix in an evolutionary framework and to relate it to the perspectives of Dennet (2004), for example. The idea of the child as a blank slate, being moulded by culture, can be viewed on par not only with behaviourism, but with the idea of human beings as nothing more than cultural beings. But the Durkheimian idea of “social facts” can very well be preserved in a model of children born with innate structures and capacities that influence and structure their interaction with culture patterns, and even perhaps influencing cultural patterns as such. Culture as such must be understood as social facts, as objective social realities. The conceptualizations of Peirce or Saussure of language are no less fruitful if the child has dynamic innate capacities that structure how language and culture are acquired. However, the interaction between the child and objective cultural realities should be understood in a different manner than if the social facts alone ruled.

Intersubjectivity, the nurture assumption, and the company of peers As a general cultural assumption (despite the influence of early behaviourism), the idea that parents form, stimulate, and develop their children is fairly new. Research in Norway indicates that mothers who had their first child in the 1950s saw themselves to a much lesser degree as “moulding” their children than mothers who had

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children in the 1970s and later. The variations in culture, class, and regions also underscore how our assumptions of nurturance vary, and that the modern idea of “stimulation” is different from the old bourgeoisie model of upbringing or the aristocratic belief in sending children away for “training,” modelled after apprenticeships. I would argue that the modern assumptions that the nurturing acts of parents shape the personality and growth of the child are related to the ideological foundation of modern family, the demanding educational society, and the popular versions of educational theories that provide a stream of advice on how to effectively stimulate one’s children. This assumption about the centrality of nurturance must be separated from the general importance of parenting. There is no doubt that the position of parents has been strengthened as we shifted from an industrial society to an educationbased, postindustrial society. Parents are the basic provider of children’s total environment, they influence children’s Weltanschauung as well as their habits, and not in the least, parents’ actions shape or influence children’s environment, from schools and organizational participation to neighbourhoods and peers. Parents as providers of social and cultural capital, of emotional and economical support, entail a different model of the parent-child relation from that inherent in nurture assumptions. Nurturing, in its present dominating form, focuses on the infant or young child and converges with the idea of the infant child as an object being shaped into a subject by its parents. If the parents are responsible for such basic humanization of the child, the idea of parents moulding the child’s personality and development naturally follows. If the child is regarded as an acting subject, bringing the matrix of intersubjectivity into his or her dialogues with their environment, the socialization process takes the form of interaction, with the child as the active participant. The significant others who influence this acting subject (and how) will vary with contextual factors, and with age and life phases. The role of nurturing is implicitly based on the idea of primary socialization, an influence prior to peer influence, or secondary socialization. Primary socialization assumes a central role for early nurturance as shaping the child. Our modern understanding of genetics also supports this weakening role of parents as shaping their children (as does the prospect of siblings who differ significantly from one another). An active subject, with the capacity for active intersubjectivity, seeking the company of peers has a long history; play between children seems to be a basic part of socialization and cultural competence (Frönes 1995). This critical view of the nurture assumption is not a rejection of the importance of parents and parenting, but of the idea that children are shaped by the nurturing of parents.

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The subject and the other The intersubjective matrix constitutes not only the acting subject, but also “the other” as a subject. The problem of the social sciences in establishing the subject is that it may easily render the other invisible, as in the model of optimizing actor and the over-socialized man. In an intersubjectivity perspective, the other is necessarily at the centre of the matrix. The understanding of myself as a subject is based on the recognition of the other as a subject. This opens the discussion for a further elaboration of the position of the other in the understanding of intersubjectivity as developed through the processes of socialization. For Buber (1936) and Levinas (1996), the other is not just an acting subject; the other constitute myself as a subject. The other is a different subject, one who differs from me, while at the same time being like me, being a unique subject like myself. The image of the other develops through socialization, from the simple subject who is one like myself but still another, to the other as beings like me but at the same time different, and even a mystery, the known unknown. The idea of being close to another rests on the other being different, the romantic idea of becoming as one is based on being two. Theories of development acknowledge the same by emphasizing that social decentration entails acknowledging that the other is not identical to me. The more we know about others, the further, deeper, and more different the other becomes, while at the same time becoming closer. The intersubjective matrix implies placing the other at the centre. The other is not gradually recognized, it is always there at the centre of my own subjectivity and as the basic mechanism in self-objectivation. Elaboration of the other is the development of own self. The other as a mystery is a recognition of the complex and mysterious self. In this acknowledgment lies the understanding of the dialogical mind. The intersubjective matrix is a Hegelian subject with the other as the necessary route to the self. Theoretical elaboration and comprehensive empirical research support the dialogical child, affording a matrix for understanding human beings as biological and social creatures. This new paradigm for understanding the relation between culture and subject also offers new premises for socialization theory and for sociological understanding in general. The intersubjective matrix not only accounts for how the embodied individual is embedded in the social, but also how the subject plays a role in constituting the dialogues in which it is embedded.

Acknowledgment Some portions of this chapter are based on my essay (in Norwegian) on towards a dialogical understanding of self and socialization, in Dialog, selv og samfunn,

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I. Frönes and T. Schou Wetlesen (Eds.), Oslo: Abstrakt forlag, 2004: 250–268). I thank the editor of the present volume for inviting this inclusion in spite of my being prevented from presenting it at the Theory Forum Symposium on October 3–5 2004.

References Althusser, L. (1983). Ideologi og ideologiske statsapparater: forskningsnotater (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus: Notes toward an Investigation). Frandsen, F. (Ed.). Aalborg: Grus. Berger, P. L. et al. (1974). The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Random House. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bråten, S. (1988). “Dialogic mind: The infant and the adult in protoconversation.” In I. M. Carvallo (Ed.), Nature, Cognition, and System (pp. 187–205). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bråten, S. (1989). “G H Meads filosofi som grunnlag for dialogisk forståelse”. In H. Thuen & S. Vaage (Eds.), Oppdragelse til det moderne (pp. 95–118). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Bråten, S. (2002). “Altercentric perception by infants and adults in dialogue”. In M. Stamenov & V. Galese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (pp. 273–293). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bråten, S. (Ed.). (1998). Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buber, M. (1936). Ich und du. Berlin: Schocken Verlag. Dennet, D. C. (2004). Freedom Evolves. New York: Penguin. Eco, U. (1994). The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fromm, E. (1956). The Sane Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Frönes, I. (1995). Among Peers. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Frönes, I. (2004). “Sosialisering, subjekt og samfunn. Mot en dialogisk forståelse av selv og sosialisering.” In I. Frönes & F. Schou Wetlesen (Eds.), Dialog, selv og samfunn (pp. 250– 268). Oslo: Abstrakt Forlag. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. London: Polity Press. Hinshelwood, R. et al. (1997). Introducing Melanie Klein. Cambridge: Icon Books. Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. London: Routledge. Kagan, J. (2000). Three Seductive Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacan, J. (1975). Det ubevidste sprog: psykoanalytiske skrifter. København: Rhodos. Levinas, E. (1993). Den annens humanisme (Humanisme de l’autre homme). A. Aarnes (Ed.). Oslo: Aschehoug. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peirce, C. S. (1994). Semiotik og pragmatisme, A. M. Dinesen & F. Stjernfelt (Eds.). København: Gyldendal. Piaget, J. (1997). The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: W.W. Norton. Trevarthen, C., & Hubley, P. (1978). “Secondary intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding, and acts of meaning in the first year.” In J. Lock (Ed.), Action, Gesture, and Symbol (pp. 183–229). London: Academic Press. Veer, R. van der, & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell. Vygotskij, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language. New York: Wiley. Winnicott, D. W. (1986). Familien og den individuelle udvikling: det sande og det falske selv. Frederiksberg: Det lille forlag.

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The intersubjectivity of imagination The special case of imaginary companions Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis University of Crete

In the history of psychology, imagination has been considered mainly as a private psychological state, a compensatory way of fulfilling individual wishes, an escape from reality, “a thing in the mind”, irrational, unsharable, a-social, even part of an “autistic” way of thinking (Freud 1908, 1915–1916; Griffiths 1935; Piaget 1951). In psychoanalysis, for example, imagination is considered the primary mode of experience for the human being. The baby is captive of his unconscious wishes, governed by the pleasure principle, forced to hallucinate since this is the most direct way to feel satisfaction. Throughout the rest of the subject’s life, imagination retains as its basic function the satisfaction of personal desires, compensating for an unsatisfactory reality. Freud (1908) states clearly that only the unsatisfied person imagines. For Piaget (1951) imagination is equated with the subjective assimilation of reality to the ego, is purely egocentric and serves only the satisfaction of the individual’s ego. The equation of imagination with egocentric assimilation, “imprisons” the former in the subjectivity of the individual, rendering it fundamentally asocial and non-intersubjective. In recent developmental theories, like in the Theory of Mind field, imagination is depicted as a form of mental representations that do not have as a purpose to represent reality accurately (Woolley 1995). Being a special kind of representation, imagination is inner and private, different from real objects because representations cannot be perceived and without stability (Wellman & Estes 1986). The contents of imagination are “inside” the head, although sometimes they can be “projected” outside (Woolley 1997). These views are in accordance with, and in fact derive from, the general underlying conception of the subject as an isolated individual, who’s trying to cope with a “strange” world, which he must discover and where he must adapt himself. We can mark as one of the cornerstones of this view the philosophy of René Descartes, although we can trace important aspects of this perspective a long way back, even to the writings of St. Augustine. James Mark Baldwin (1913) in his book on The

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History of Psychology clearly states that “René Descartes stands at the portal of the temple of modern philosophy and psychology” (p. 109). As a point of departure we have the discrete, separate and autonomous subject. A lonely thinking ego (or even an autistic desiring unconscious), able to differentiate and distance itself from the physical (including its body) and social environment. Mind is considered discrete from the body. It rests “inside” the body and its contents are private, subjective and accessible only by it. The body and the rest of the world belong to the “exterior – outside”, are objectively perceived and in fact are nothing more than “objects”. The relationship of the subject with the world is not direct, but mediated by various psychological and especially cognitive processes, like representations, beliefs, “prebeliefs”, schemes, desires, or unconscious wishes. The other does not naturally exist for the self as a person simply by perceiving its special qualities, but must be discovered or constructed through action, or the ascription of a mind, or the transcending of the initial fusion of the baby with the mother. The relationship of the self with the world and the other persons is not something given that develops further, but something that must be accomplished through development.

Imagination revisited In order to take a different view on imagination, it is necessary to take a radically different view on human nature and development. The recent findings from the study of infant and child development have seriously challenged the older theories and have established an interactional and intersubjective conception of human development.1 We could sum up some of these recent developments in three general positions. The first, which we could call an ontological position, maintains that the human being is fundamentally a person, an intersubjective being. A person is the opposite of an object, it is a being with which someone can communicate and share attention, intentions and emotions. The communicational dimension of the person is its most basic and fundamental predicate. The second position, which we could name ontogenetic, claims that human development is an intersubjective process, and the quality of its outcomes depends directly on the quality of the intersubjective interactions and relations of the person. The personal development is a process that presupposes the attentiveness, cooperation, interaction and the mutual support of at least two persons. Normal development is impossible outside an emotionally supportive intersubjective organizational context, whose perturbation can cause severe and long-lasting malfunctions to the developing person. According to the third position, there are various kinds of intersubjective processes, which lead subsequently to various different kinds of experience for the

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person. We can discern at least two, the second-person and first-person intersubjectivity. By the second-person intersubjectivity we refer to the direct, non-mediated interaction between two persons that is characterized by sharing, mutuality, complementarity and coordination. This broad kind of category can be further divided into subcategories depending of which of the above dimensions prevails, or on focus of the interaction. Following Stern (1983) we can differentiate between intersubjectivity based on complementarity between the two partners, and intersubjectivity based on sharing and tuning. Another division could be between the intersubjective interactions where the focal point is between the two persons (like in primary intersubjectivity), and those where the two persons are jointly focussed on a third “object” (like in secondary intersubjectivity) (Bråten 1998; Hobson 2002; Trevarthen 1998). As first-person we define that kind of intersubjectivity where there is not a direct, un-mediated meeting between two persons. Communication or interaction is mediated by various forms of “(meta)representations” (Bråten 1998: 1–2). The other can be the “object” in the first-person’s consciousness, experience, reflection, simulation of mind, or imagination. Although, actually never really an “object”, but the unique kind of object that a person always is. In the context that is sketched by these propositions, imagination can no longer be dealt as an individual, private, locked in the head faculty. Instead we wish to promote the idea of the fundamentally dialogical and intersubjective nature and development of imagination. Before discussing the various aspects of this proposition, we need to define what imagination does. Through imagination the absent is made present. We conceive of imagination as mental imagery, the ability to produce, maintain and manipulate mental images (Thomas 1997, 1999a, 1999b). This ability is directly linked to perception, without which it would be hard to imagine how it could be possible for images to be formed at all. Gibson (1979) defined perception as the active picking up of meaning afforded in the environment. We emphasize precisely the active dimension of this process. It is in virtue of the activity of the whole person that meaning is perceived, through one’s corporeal action in the world. Our bodily postures, orientations and actions determine perception and shape the meaning that is laid in the environment. Perceiving and meaning through the whole body, implies that experience and various other processes narrowly considered as merely “cognitive”, involve the whole person. We consider imagination as a quasi-perceptional function. Its major difference from perception is this: while imagining the person does not actively explore the actual environment (Thomas 1999b). The subject produces certain predictions and expectations about how something might be, while refraining from searching the “real world” to perceive. The body partakes in this process in three ways. First, the bodily exploratory activity contributes decisively, through past experiences, in the formation of these predictions. Perceptual experiences provide imagination with raw data. Second, the perceptual-motor system participates fun-

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damentally in the generation of mental images (Hebb 1968; Laeng & Teodorescu 2002; Neisser 1976). It was found that when subjects engage in mental imagery of something that had actually been perceived in the past, they produce spontaneously eye movements that follow exactly the same scanpaths that where traced during the perception phase (Brandt & Stark 1997; Laeng & Teodorescu 2002). In another experiment in which the subjects where provided with verbal descriptions of physical scenes not experienced before, they also generated spontaneously eye movements that followed the direction and orientation of the described scene (Demarais & Cohen 1998). Third, the body through its specific constitution, organization, position, and orientation in the world determines the meaning of what is perceived, what the percepts mean to us, and the subjective nature of the experience. A widely used term to denote the organizational role of the body in perception is “body scheme”. The body scheme may be defined as a holistic somatic complex or frame that orients the person and determines the way in which experience is meaningful for the particular organism (Hermans 2003; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Neisser 2003). Imagination, as pointed out by Hermans (2003), is an experience that has an “image-schematic” form. We “move” and process meanings in imagination, much in the same way we move and process meanings in the real world. While talking about perception is usually done in the first person, a closer look at development alters fundamentally the scene. Infants are from the beginning introduced in a “second-person” world, an interpersonal and social world. Their perception is continually structured by their interactions with other persons. Not surprisingly, their perceptual system is well attuned to pick up the meanings that are transmitted by another person, like eloquently shown in the case of neonatal imitation (Kugiumutzakis 1998), and also attuned to co-perceive. Joint attention develops rapidly during the first year of life (Reddy 2003, 2005). Trevarthen (1998, 2001) and Trevarthen and Aitken (2001) have eloquently described the impressive development of the interpersonal interactions from primary through secondary intersubjectivity during this period. What is entailed by this developmental sequence is that perception is embedded in an intersubjective context, where meaning is co-perceived and co-constructed. In this developmental context imagination is coloured accordingly in two ways. First, regarding its contents, imagination is populated by the reliving of the most prominent and important facts of the infant’s experience. These are the interactions with the important others. Stern (1985) maintains that after approximately the second month, infants can memorize the structure of various forms of interactions with other persons. He names them Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized (RIGs), which incorporate and generate certain expectations of action, feeling and sensation, about how an interaction may proceed. In a nearly similar way, Bråten (2000) refers to E-motional Memory, the mnemonic retention

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of interpersonal interactions and the ability to re-enact in imagination past experiences of interactions from having felt both own and the partner’s movements and feelings. Stern (1985) and Bråten (2000) maintain also that the infant can “re-live” these memories, in the presence or the absence of a real other. Second, regarding form, we regard Stern’s evoked companion and Bråten’s e-motional memory to be perhaps the first forms of imagination. They serve not just as contents but also as forms of imagination, much in the same way that above was attributed to the “body schema”. Their abstract forms function as matrixes for the production, elaboration and experience of various new imaginary states. Also they function as meaning matrixes when the person relives in memory a real experience in order to understand it, or re-evaluate it, or re-define it. We also suggest that imagination from its start, perhaps, functions in a dialogical mode. To the question as to why that may be so, we offer these three tentative replies: First, because it is formed through intersubjective – dialogical experiences that are abstracted in dialogical understanding matrixes. Second, because each new imaginary formation or each new experience that is imaginary relieved, enters in a virtual dialogue with already existing meaning forms, through which it is defined or re-defined, contrasted and evaluated. This kind of dialogue can also be formed between already existing meaning forms. Third, because dialogicity might be inherent in the mind. Evidence comes from various lines of developmental investigation, which show that the person can hold in mind several different positions synchronically. A fine portrayal of this comes from the study of infant teasing, and the well-known paradigm of offer and withdrawal teasing (Reddy 1991). The infant holds in mind the expectations of another person about an action and at the same time the negation and violation of them. This can be shown to even younger infants. In the double television replay experiment (Murray & Trevarthen 1985, 1986), the baby’s distress and avoidance to the perturbation and inappropriateness of the interaction shows that he has certain expectations about how an interacting partner should respond, with mutuality, attunement and complementarity, which contrast with the actual misattuned actions of the re-played other. An implication of the above discussion is that imagination can be communicated and shared intersubjectively. More precisely, imagination can be shared in an intersubjective context. From the study of early imitation, protoconversations, joint attention, teasing, and language learning, we know that infants and their communicational partners can easily and directly understand the intentions, purposes, feelings and the referential point of each other. Should imagination be any different? From the study of children’s play we know that this is not different. From 1,5–2 years of age, children are effectively able to engage with age-mates in interactional and mutual pretend play (Howes 1980, 1985, 1987; Howes & Matheson 1992; Howes & Tonyan 1999; Howes et al. 1989). They are able to discern which actions fit inside the context of pretence, and from 3,5–4 years of age they start to

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communicate and negotiate verbally the content and the form of pretence (Doyle & Connolly 1989; Dunn & Dale 1984; Giffin 1984; Howe, Petrakos, & Rinaldi 1998; Howes & Tonyan 1999; Miller & Garvey 1984). The sharing of imagination depends and rests on various factors. We shall list four contributing factors. First, imagination is intentional, but intentionality is not a characteristic of consciousness or the mind. It is an attribute of the embodied subject. The intentionality of the infant involves his whole corporeal orientation and action towards an object in the environment. It carries then certain affordances that can be immediately perceived by a second person. Second, through the course of development, a shared corpus of meaning is created and consolidated in the context of intersubjective relations, in the form of scripts, representations, or working models (Bowlby 1969; Nelson 1996; Stern 1985). These co-created meanings are readily available and shared between those partners that formed them. Third, imagination is immersed in feelings, both in the sense that it triggers and is triggered by them, but also in the sense that its intended objects are always intended in a certain way, with a certain value, quality and meaning. This quality of imagination can be objectively perceived during its communication or enactment, through the emotional presentations and the vitality affects that provide important information about its subjective meaning and quality. Fourth, a first-person’s imagination can be understood by another person in an intersubjective context, if he is attuned to the first and tries to live the feelings, the thoughts and the actions that are evoked in him by the sharing of the personal experience of the first person (Bromberg 2001). We do not here refer to simulation, but to the co-creation of the first-person’s imagination by two persons. For example in Papastathopoulos’ (2004) research about the characteristics of children’s imaginary companions, while interviewing the children about the characteristics of their companions, some of them delayed to answer directly to some of the questions (e.g. the colour of the imaginary companion’s eyes). The interviewer felt that the children where at that moment thinking for the first time about the quality of those characteristics. So, in this case we had an instance of co-creation of the characteristics of the imaginary companion, by the child and the interviewer, which led to a better understanding of the phenomenon by both parties. We doubt whether lone simulation can recreate the quality of another’s subjective experience of complex imaginary phenomena. In summary so far, imagination, as we conceive it, entails these characteristics: i.

It is a faculty of the embodied person, directly related with perception, and has as its major function the meaningful understanding and re-understanding of experience.

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ii. Its basic contents and meaning forms are derived from the structure and organization of the person’s actions in the environment and the interactions with other persons. iii. The development of imagination takes place inside the context of intersubjective interactions. iv. Imagination and its contents can be communicated and shared in an intersubjective context.

The case and studies of imaginary companions The above hypotheses can be vigorously illustrated in the special case of children’s imaginary companions. This is a very common phenomenon of childhood. From children’s and their parents’ reports we know that the 41–67% of preschool and school aged children have at least one imaginary companion at some point in time (Gallino 1991; Pearson, Rouse, Doswell, Ainsworth, Dawson, Simms, Edwards, & Faulconbridge 2001; Singer & Singer 1981; Taylor & Carlson 1997). While there are various conceptions of this phenomenon, some common characteristics may be captured in the following definition (Papastathopoulos 2004): An imaginary companion is an imaginary person that is created or adopted by the child. It is an invisible person, except in the case where the child has personified a real object, which he nevertheless treats as having autonomous psychological existence. The imaginary companion has an unusual air of reality for the child, although he recognizes its imaginary nature. In order for an imaginary person to be identified as an imaginary companion, it should have a life span of several weeks and partake in the child’s everyday life. We hypothesize that the creation of an imaginary companion is an expected and direct outcome of the intersubjective nature of development and the dialogical structure of imagination. Its creation is guided by the same innate motives that guide and support the communication and interaction between persons. The imaginary companion is a person and has the functional equivalence in imagination of a real person. It has psychological and physical attributes, and is a being with which the child can form various interpersonal relations. The form and the quality of the child’s real interactions influence the characteristics of his interactions with the imaginary companion and vice versa (Papastathopoulos 2004). In order to evaluate these issues, we interviewed children with and without imaginary companions and studied their playful interactions.

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Method Subjects. A total of 16 preschool aged girls took part in the study. They were divided in two groups depending on whether they had or not imaginary companions. The first group consisted of 8 girls identified as having at least one imaginary companion in the present time of the study. The second group consisted of 8 girls identified as not having in the past and in the present an imaginary companion. The mean age of the two groups was 5.4 years and 5.3 years respectively. Procedure. The children of both groups where firstly administered an interview about their play and their social preferences. The interview of the first group contained some additional questions about the physical, psychological and relational characteristics of the imaginary companions. Afterwards the children were divided in 8 dyads, each of which consisted of 1 girl with imaginary companion and 1 girl without imaginary companion. Each dyad of girls were accompanied in a room where there were playthings laid on the floor. They were asked to play freely, and their play was videotaped for 15 minutes. Results Characteristics of the imaginary companions. All the girls had imaginary companions with human form. The majority of the girls (62,5%, N = 5) had 1 imaginary companion, and the rest 2 imaginary companions (37,5%, N = 3). From a total of 11 imaginary companions, the 7 (63,3%) had a name, while the rest 4 (36,4%) were anonymous. The majority of imaginary companions were females (81,8%), and only two were defined as males (18,2%). Most of them were older that the child (54,5%), and the rest were of the same (27,3%) or of a smaller age (18,2%). They had blue eyes (72,2%) and blonde hair (45,5%). Most of the imaginary companions were characterized by the girls as “good” (82%). One was characterized as “so and so” and another one as “bad”. When asked what they do with their imaginary companions, all of the girls spontaneously responded that they play. So, the sum of the imaginary companions functioned as playmates. The majority of the imaginary companions (82%) also functioned as conversational partners. Only few of the girls (37,5%) reported that their imaginary companions accompanied them to their everyday routines. All the girls, when asked whether their imaginary companion really existed, answered readily that they did not really exist. It is interesting that 2 girls spontaneously commented that they only “think of them” and another girl that her imaginary companion existed only “in fantasy”.

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Table 1. Descriptive statistics and paired-samples t values for girls speech scores during the dyadic play sessions Group of girls

With imag. companion Mean S.D.

Total amount of speech 110.3 Communicational speech 80.3 Verbal enactment of pretence 44 Socially directed verbal enactment of pretence 19.4 Negotiation of pretence 45.6

Without imag. comp. Mean S.D.

df t

32.5 32.7 31.7

90 59.6 31.5

28.5 25.8 35.4

7 7 7

1.941* 3.550** 1.608*

14.7 30.7

14 21.6

13.1 14.8

7 7

3.330*** 3.383***

* p > 0.05 ** p < 0.01 *** p < 0.02

Play and social preferences. Almost all of the girls that had imaginary companions (87,5%, N = 7) reported that they preferred to play pretend games. On the contrary, only half of the girls without imaginary companions (50%, N = 4) referred to pretend games as their favourite. All the girls from both groups, when asked whether they preferred more to play alone or to play jointly with other children, answered that they preferred to play with other children. Girl’s speech during the play sessions. During the dyad’s play, the girls of the two groups did not differ significantly on the total amount of speech (Table 1). However, the girls with imaginary companions directed their utterances significantly more often to their play partner, than the girls without imaginary companions (t = 3.550, df = 7, p < 0.01). That means that they used their speech more often to communicate. The two groups did not differ significantly on the verbal enactment of pretence (t = 1.608, df = 7, p > 0.05). When the direction of the verbal enactment was considered, a significant difference emerged. Girls with imaginary companions directed their verbal enactment of pretence significantly more to their play partner, than the girls without imaginary companions (t = 3.330, df = 7, p < 0.02). Their verbal pretend enactment was more cooperative and social. Negotiation of pretend play, which includes all the utterances that refer to the discussion and determination of the pretend scenario, the identity of the objects, the roles and the action plans, differentiated significantly the two group of girls. The girls with imaginary companion engaged twice as more, than the other girls, in negotiations of pretence (t = 3.383, df = 7, p < 0.02). One especially negotiation strategy is of great importance, ulterior conversation. Giffin (1984) defines this as the intentional proposal, by a player, of transformations in an already established and enacted pretend scenario, without interrupting the ongoing enactment. Girls with imaginary companion engaged significantly more in ulterior conversation, that the girls without imaginary companion (t = 2.477, df = 7, p < 0.05).

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Discussion The findings of this study confirmed the suggested hypotheses. Imaginary companions where described by the girls as persons. They had some recognizable physical characteristics (human form, sex, age, eye and hair colour), one psychological attribute (moral quality) and certain relational roles (the role of a playmate and a conversational partner). The moral quality of the imaginary companion is a very important attribute, since it has always an interpersonal reference. Being “good” is essential for close interpersonal relationships and especially those that are characterized by mutuality and complementarity. Those two features are essential and necessary in order to form interactions and relations based on conversation and playfulness. The most important feature of a person, according to Hobson (2002), is that a person is a being with which you can relate. The fact that all the imaginary companions functioned as playmates and interlocutors constitutes the most decisive evidence of their allowing to be characterized as persons. Girls of both groups preferred mostly to play with other children than alone. This might be taken as an indication that there is no difference between them regarding their motivation for interpersonal interaction and engagement. But the results from the analysis of the dyadic play sessions draw a different picture. The girls with imaginary companion used their language significantly more interpersonally, and especially during the enactment of pretence. This shows that they have stronger and more elaborate motives for communication and sharing with other children. They engaged in twice as much negotiations of pretence as did the second group’s girls. The negotiation of pretence aims at the organization and establishment of a joint and shared body of knowledge, meanings, rules and procedures for the collaborative maintenance and experience of an imaginary reality (Doyle & Connolly 1989; Giffin 1984; Howe et al. 1998). The use of certain negotiation strategies reveals the communicational expertness of the children with imaginary companion. As it was presented, they engaged in significantly more ulterior conversations. The use of such a strategy demands great caution and competency since the child, without interrupting the ongoing enactment of pretence, must introduce a new transformation or action plan, which was not established before. These results point to the existence of a dialogical circuit that is composed from two interrelated sub-circuits (Papastathopoulos 2004). The first sub-circuit is formed in real life by the interaction of the child with other persons. The second sub-circuit is formed in fantasy by the child and his imaginary companion. During the interactions with real others the child practices and exercises its communicational and sharing abilities and its understanding of mind. Those achievements, together with the structure of conduct of the interactions, form and organize generalized representations or internal working models that contain expectancies

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about the way that another person is expected to act in communication and also about the forms that its development might take. The expectancies of these internal working models are transferred and applied in the context of the relation between the child and the imaginary companion. Now, in this second circuit, the child can practice, simulate, evaluate and re-define a wide variety of themes that concern interpersonal relations. What the child achieves in the context of fantasy feeds back and modifies the internal working models, which guide in more advanced ways future interactions with real others. The working and the effects of this dialogical circuit can be more obviously traced in the previous reported finding, that girls with imaginary companions engaged in more interpersonally oriented verbal enactment of pretence. We discern here the strong effect of their relation with the imaginary companion. This context contains at least two very important elements, pretence and interaction. The children pretend that they interact (talk or play) with their imaginary companion, since as it was presented all of them recognized its unreality. So, the children in the context of imagination exercise and practice at the same time on interaction and pretence. What is achieved in imagination is subsequently reflected in interactional pretend play with real children.

A new prologue for imagination? We have tried to show that imagination is not a secluded “castle” in the head, that function apart from reality and especially intersubjective reality. It was proposed instead that imagination is dialogically and intersubjectively constituted and functioning. In order to portray this, we have chosen to refer especially on the phenomenon of the children’s imaginary companions, whose presence is a profound paradox for the older, individualistic theories of imagination (Papastathopoulos 2004). Starting from this special case of child fantasy, we can now point at how decisively our lives are immersed in fantasy, during our real lives. The imaginary companion phenomenon is just one case of the imaginary persons or creatures that populate our lives. From the mythological chimera or sphinx till Mickey Mouse and Santa-Claus and from the TV-personas till our dialogues with deceased loved persons, we enter into imaginary conversations, evaluations, disputes and so on, with non-existing beings for vast amounts of time in our daily lives. These imaginary relations and dialogues play an important role in the way we evaluate in reality, in the decisions we take and the actions we perform. If in the name of an objective science we deleted them from our research field, human reality would not just be impoverished, but it would end up to be just the “psychologist’s imagination”.

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A new prologue for imagination should start from pointing out that it springs from the same soil as with engagements with the real world: that is intersubjectivity. It shares its functions, contents and aims.

Note . For a review of the recent findings on infant development see: Akhtar and Tomasello (1998); Bråten (1998); Butterworth (1992, 1995); Harrist and Waugh (2002); Hobson (2002); Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, and Jasnow (2001); Kugiumutzakis (1998); Meltzoff and Moore (1998); Reddy (1999, 2003); Stern (1985); Trevarthen (1977, 1998, 2001); Trevarthen and Aitken (2001); Trevarthen and Hubley (1978); Trevarthen, Murray, and Hubley (1981); Tronick (1989).

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Papastathopoulos, E. (2004). Plasmata tou aera: i fantastiki sintrofi se koritsia prosxolikis ilikias. Department of Philosophy and Social Studies, University of Crete. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Pearson, D., Rouse, H., Doswell, S., Ainsworth, C., Dawson, O., Simms, K., Edwards, L., & Faulconbridge, J. (2001). “Prevalence of imaginary companions in a normal child population.” Child: Care, Health and Development, 27, 13–22. Piaget, J. (1951). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Reddy, V. (1999). “Prelinguistic communication.” In M. Barrett (Ed.), The Development of Language (pp. 25–50). Hove: Psychology Press. Reddy, V. (2003). “On being the object of attention: implications for self–other consciousness.” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 397–402. Reddy, V. (2005). “Before the “third element”: Understanding attention to the self.” In N. Elian, J. Roessler, & P. McCormack (Eds.), Joint Attention: Perspectives from Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Singer, J. L., & Singer, D. G. (1981). Television, Imagination, and Aggression: A Study of Preschoolers. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Stern, D. (1983). “The early development of schemas of self, other, and “self with other”.” In J. D. Lichtenberg & S. Kaplan (Eds.), Reflections on Self Psychology (pp. 49–84). Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. Taylor, M., & Carlson, S. M. (1997). “The relation between individual differences in fantasy and theory of mind.” Child Development, 68, 436–455. Thomas, N. J. T. (1997). “Imagery and the coherence of imagination: A critique of White.” The Journal of Philosophical Research, 22, 95–127. Thomas, N. J. T. (1999a). “Imagination.” In C. Eliasmith (Ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind [WWW document] URL; http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/philos/MindDict/imagination.htm Thomas, N. J. T. (1999b). “Are theories of imagery theories of imagination? An active perception approach to conscious mental content.” Cognitive Science, 23, 207–245. Trevarthen. C. (1977). “Descriptive analyses of infant communicative behavior.” In H. R. Schaffer (Ed.), Studies in Mother-infant Interaction (pp. 227–270). London: Academic Press. Trevarthen, C. (1998). “The concept and foundations of infant intersubjectivity.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 15–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (2001). “Intrinsic motives for companionship in understanding: Their origin, development, and significance for infant mental health”. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 95–131. Trevarthen, C., & Aitken, K. J. (2001). “Infant intersubjectivity: Research, theory, and clinical applications.” Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciples, 42, 3–48. Trevarthen, C., & Hubley, P. (1978). “Secondary intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year.” In A. Lock (Ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language (pp. 183–229). London: Academic Press. Trevarthen, C., Murray, L., & Hubley, P. (1981). “Psychology of infants.” In J. A. Davis & J. Dobbing (Eds.), Scientific Foundations of Pediatrics (pp. 211–274). London: William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd. Tronick, E. Z. (1989). “Emotions and emotional communication in infants.” American Psychologist, 44, 112–126.

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The intersubjectivity of imagination 

Wellman, H. M., & Estes, D. (1986). “Early understanding of mental entities: A reexamination of childhood realism.” Child Development, 57, 910–923. Woolley, J. D. (1995). “Young children’s understanding of fictional versus epistimic mental representation: Imagination and belief.” Child Development, 66, 1011–1021. Woolley, J. D. (1997). “Thinking about fantasy: Are children fundamentally different thinkers and believers from adults?” Child Development, 68, 991–1011.

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Applications and therapeutic implications

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chapter 

When empathic care is obstructed Excluding the child from the zone of intimacy Karsten Hundeide University of Oslo

Introduction In this chapter I will try to explicate the conditions that facilitate empathic care and identification with the child on the one hand and those that obstruct this care on the other. In the first part I present empathic care as a component embedded in the normal communication between caregiver and child. This implies that care is not seen as a one-sided contribution from the caregiver to the child, but as a dialogical product where both contribute. In the second part of the chapter, I introduce the concept of a “zone of intimacy” into which a child can be included and cared for through empathic identification and sensitive availability of the caregiver to the child’s needs. But a child can also be expelled from the zone of intimacy with subsequent blockage of empathic identification, affective withdrawal leading to neglect and possibly abuse. Through this theoretical metaphor, and offering examples, inter alia from Angola, I try to describe three ways into the zone of intimacy. Finally I relate this perspective on empathic care with the newly emerging field of “ethics of closeness” and Levinas’ ideas of the “appeal of the face” (Bauman 1996; Vetlesen 1999).

The questions Recent research within early communication has shown that human care is not a one-way process in which the care-giver provides and the child receives care, independently of the child’s initiative and responses. Rather it seems that sensitive care is a communicative or dialectic process in which the care-giver’s actions toward the child is dependent on the expressive appeal of the child’s utterances, and conversely, the child’s responses are dependent on the care-giver’s actions and on how they

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are received and apprehended (Bråten 1996, 1998; Papousek & Papousek 1991; Sameroff & Fiese 1990; Stern 1995; Trevarthen 1995). In this way the child (in this case) becomes a co-creator of the care it receives – or more correctly: the care that arises and is created between them. Thus, care cannot be reduced to static recipes for “what one should do when. . .”. Nor can care be attributed to some competence or ability for caring in one person or the other. Rather it is the outcome of a dialogical process that emerges between them (Hundeide 2002). In order for such a caring process to take place, empathic sensitivity, and ability to apprehend and recognize the quality and meaning of each other’s expressive initiatives and responses is necessary. What do the child’s initiatives and utterances express? What are the feelings and intentions behind a caring action?

The primary cycle of care According to one of the leading researchers in the field, Colwyn Trevarthen, this facility for interpreting the expression of others appears to be a fundamental ability existing in all of us. He writes: . . . human perceivers have a remarkable sensitivity to beings with animacy and intentionality. . .they can readily detect parameters of motivation in other subjects’ behaviour, such as “emotion” of an action, or its “effort” and “vitality” . . . But the ability to detect and observe qualitative differences in actions of others, and thereby to perceive their motives, is but a small part of the capacity for imitative identification, emotional empathy and reciprocal communication that all human possess. Most importantly, a communicating subject is trying to make an effective complementary reply, to enter into, and jointly regulate, a dyad of expressive “conversational” exchange with the Other . . . This is what Bråten (1988) means by the term “dialogic closure” . . . (Trevarthen 1995: 8)

Such an effective complementary reply in an exchange between a committed caregiver and an infant will normally lead to a mutual exchange of smiles and positive expressions. This “proto-conversation” is temporally precisely synchronized to a turn-taking schema, which the infant appears to be able to follow at the age of five weeks, and to which it responds with distress if disrupted (Trevarthen 1989). But this disposition may also be apparent when one of the partners responds by expressing human care, empathy and comforting in a situation where the other is experiencing pain and suffering. This does not only apply to adults; one sees the same response in infants of less than a year of age. Eisenberg (1992) mentions as an example that when the father expresses sadness, the thirteen month old infant responds by giving him her favourite doll. There are many such examples (Bråten 1998).

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This demonstrates that what I have called the primary cycle of care1 is a dialogic response of a fundamental and immediate character, which can be seen both in the committed care-giver’s spontaneous caring responses to the infant’s utterances and expressive appeals and in the infant’s reactions to this response. This means that there already exists a potential that can be activated and triggered so that already existing communicative patterns (as a disposition) rather than learning a set of new caring actions and communicative skills. This further implies that intervention becomes a question of facilitating and sensitizing something that is natural and that emerges spontaneously. Something the infant invites under normal circumstances through its expressive initiatives (Hundeide 2000, 2001). As an example of this, I had the opportunity some time ago to observe a young sensitive mother’s relationship with her first born over a period of time. I was struck by her absolute accessibility at all times, and her participation in everything the child did. When the child was eating, she participated by opening her own mouth when the child did. When I played with the child and made it laugh, the mother participated all along, laughing with the child. When the child tried to attain one goal or other, such as putting something into a box, the mother was attentive and participating, and she made small movements as if to help the child to carry out the activity. She was sensitively accessible throughout, participating in everything the child did. Or to express it in other words; she is empathically identified with the child. The care-giver empathises with the child and participates in both its assumed experiences and in its activities as an alternative, supporting self. This is described in more detail in Bråten’s concept of “altercentric participation” (see Bråten 1998, 2003; Hoffman 2000; Stern 2004). In the following sections of this paper, I will return to how this primary cycle of care can be reactivated in cases when it is obstructed and demobilised.

When empathic care is obstructed But not all interaction between care-giver and child has this immediate, empathic and participatory quality. There are accounts of children being abused where this empathic caring mechanism, that I have called empathic identification with the child, does not seem to function or has become obstructed (or blocked). For example; when children are placed in traditional institutions (Ryan & Tomas 1976), when there is extreme poverty and the struggle for survival, when there is brutalisation and demoralization due to wartime violence, when there is high stress and family-conflict involving alcohol and drug abuse, or when the child triggers negative images in the caregiver; images that may be associated with the caregiver’s own problematic childhood (Fraiberg, Adelson, & Shapiro 1975; Pelzer 1995). In the following section we will take a closer look at some examples from my work

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with children in extreme situations, also from my social work in Angola and relate them to conditions that seem to block empathic identification with the child.

When children are negatively defined and stigmatised In my experience there are two conditions that are particularly conducive to neglect and failure of care, i.e. negative, stigmatizing definitions of the child and distancing in the relationship between care-giver and child. These often occur together as part of a general pattern of rejection of the child and withdrawal of empathic identification and care (Scheper-Hughes 1992). Negative definitions in the relationship between parents and children often develop in situations where there is a high level of family stress and where children become a burden, both economically and emotionally. This is visible both in environments with extreme poverty in developing countries, but also in wealthy Western societies, where children may be experienced as a hindrance to the free career development of the parents. Under such circumstances, negative, stigmatizing and objectifying definitions of children, with subsequent emotional withdrawal and distancing in relation to the children, may easily develop. The anthropologist Scheper-Hughes (1992) gives a compelling example of this from her studies in the poorest quarters of Recife in Brazil. In the district where she was working, infant mortality was exceptionally high, close to fifty percent, she discovered that poor mothers under such high survival pressure and high infant mortality sometimes withdrew emotionally from these infants as if to protect themselves from the ensuing emotional shocks and mourning when they understood that their chances of survival were minimal. A weak and physically vulnerable child, was labelled and defined by their mother as “a child who wants to die” and a child that looked “ghost-like”, they were also described as “small angels”. Such children had little chance of survival because of the maternal emotional withdrawal and the ensuing neglect. The negative definition of the child as “ghost-like” started a self-fulfilling process of emotional and physical neglect that usually ended in death. In some cases, it was said, the infants were helped by their mothers to die – “that was what they wanted”... When the researcher tried to help some of these children through special assistance, she was warned that this would be wasted efforts, because sooner or later these children would die, that was their destiny and that was what they wanted (Scheper-Hughes 1992). When infant mortality is so high that the mother unconsciously tries to protect herself by withdrawing her emotional attachment to the child it is like an unconscious calculus of risk and emotional investment, and if the conclusion is withdrawal, the whole caring mechanism is at risk and the chances that the negative assessment of the infant will be self-fulfilling, is considerably increased. Under

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such conditions, a more pragmatic economical survival approach becomes more feasible. As Scheper-Hughes expressed it: Part of learning how to mother in the slum includes learning how to “let go” of a child that “wants” to die.

In this way a self-fulfilling process was initiated on the basis of the mothers’ negative diagnosis or apprehension of the child. According to the anthropologist, “there was no expression of great joy nor of sorrow”; at the child’s funeral, “the infant was seldom even the focus of the conversation at all ...” (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 418). It is nonetheless misguiding to interpret this as a general deficiency of empathy and caring ability in these impoverished mothers, because it was at the same time evident that the same mothers were sensitive and caring towards the other siblings that showed signs of vitality and robustness.2 Such a selective emotional withdrawal can therefore be understood as a strategic reaction of self- protection with the purpose of avoiding repeated experiences of loss and depression following the death of weak and physically vulnerable children to whom they were attached. Such reactions may be interpreted as adaptive strategies that emerge under difficult life circumstances where survival, both physical and psychological, has become a challenge (see also LeVine et al. 1988). In connection with social work directed towards vulnerable children in extreme situations I have witnessed similar examples of the stigmatisation of children in relation to local superstition of possession and bewitchment. In the rural districts of Angola there is a prevailing belief that if a child is divergent for one reason or another – it may be anything from physical defects and impairment, to psychological handicaps following traumatic experiences of war – this deviation is explained as result of bewitchment of the child and possession by demons. An evil spirit is thought to have entered the child and it is this spirit that creates aberrations in appearance or behaviour (Hundeide & Egebjerg 2003). As a consequence of this diagnosis/definition (that was very often performed by the local witch doctor) these children are rejected by their families, both physically and psychologically. In the worst cases they are expelled from their homes and left to beg in the streets for survival.3 The most extreme example I have witnessed in this context is a group of impoverished orphans in North-Angola. They had been “diagnosed” (or defined) as being possessed by demons after consultation with the local witch doctor. These children were blamed for most of the local accidents and misfortunes, from deaths of people to crop failure and drought. They became public scapegoats, thus providing an explanation for the adversity experienced by the local society. As a consequence they were usually expelled from their homes, ending up in treatment centres owned by the same witch doctor that had diagnosed them. Here they were subject to different forms of torture or exorcisms in order to “drive out Satan”. For

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example, they had chilli-pepper applied to their eyes, which then became swollen and red, so that they acquired the look of monsters. They were also subjected to painful cleansing rituals in which they were beaten and tormented. This went on for several months. When we were given the opportunity to visit this “institution” following one such treatment, the children were already totally subdued, subjugated and traumatised. Even after the treatment was over, the stigmas persisted which again led to the unwillingness on the part of their parents to take the children back. Therefore most of them ended up as workers on the farm of the witch doctor who had originally “diagnosed” them. An interesting point in this context is that the children were themselves convinced of their own possession, and they told the most incredible stories about what they could do at night, all corresponding to the local beliefs about possession. In other words, the children dramatised the expectations, the “diagnosis” and the conceptions they were attributed. It became a part of their understanding of themselves and their behaviour.4 More generally, one can say that we approach other people according to our definitions of them. We continuously interpret and attribute characteristics to our fellow human beings, and behave towards them accordingly – thus initiating a process that can easily become a self-fulfilling process.5

Objectification and abuse Extreme physical abuse and torture usually involve objectifying and demonising definitions of the victim. “Traitor” is one such definition that appears to legitimize abuse and torture. Working with child and teenage soldiers in Angola, we learned about extreme abuse in this category.6 These youngsters had been kidnapped as children and re-socialised as guerrilla soldiers in the UNITA. The soldiers were trained according to the principle of “the son of a snake is also a snake”, and this implied that entire family and all relatives were killed if one of the family members were accused of treason. They were also trained in different torture techniques to be used on alleged traitors. In an area on the border of Namibia a group of teenage soldiers participated in the execution of a group of people accused of treason. This was perpetrated by having the victims themselves collect wood for a pyre on which they were subsequently burned alive. These teenage soldiers were highly regarded among the officers because they were “totally loyal, they carried out orders and killed without hesitation”. An interview with a young female soldier from the war in Sierra Leone gives a certain impression of what they had been through:

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– Have you ever killed rebels in this war? – Yes, many times. When the soldiers came back to camp with the rebels, I was often ordered to “wash” them. – What does that mean? – Kill them. – Did you shoot them with a machine gun? – No, bullets are expensive. I killed them one by one (with a knife). – Did you feel that you did something wrong? – I was defending my country. – Did you ever feel pity for the rebels you killed? – In the beginning when I saw their dead bodies I sometimes felt sorry for them, but we had to kill them, otherwise they would have killed us if they had the chance. These rebels killed and cut open the stomachs of pregnant women. They raped all women they could get their hands on (Peters & Richards 1998: 87–89).

These are of course extreme cases, but they contain some of the legitimising components one finds with lesser abuse as well. – – – –

An objectification, and often a demonising definition of the victim who is seen as morally inferior, non-human, traitor and therefore deserves to be abused.7 That they were following orders – and if they did not comply, they would be killed themselves.8 That this was in fact a noble and necessary action performed in the service of their country. These legitimising arguments seem to absolve the perpetrators from a feeling of responsibility, guilt and awareness for their inhuman actions.

For the child soldiers, these ideological legitimations became an important part of their indoctrination and preparation for their role as “under-aged soldier”9 (Bracken & Petty 1998). “We killed traitors because we were fighting for our country” . . .10 Many of these youngsters sustained serious psychological problems when they were subsequently to be integrated into civil society after having lived for years in brutalizing war conditions with totally different values (Hundeide 2003b).

The zone of intimacy It is worth noting that in conditions involving dehumanisation and objectification, an invisible line appears to be drawn between “them” and “us”. “We” who are on the inside of this line may experience mutual love, empathy and human care and friendship from the others on the inside, while those on the outside are at best treated with indifference, and at worst abused as objects deprived not only of their

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rights, but also of their subjectivity – to be understood and viewed as “persons” and fellow human beings with the same ability to feel and wish, and with the same need for inclusion, love and self-respect as ourselves. Those who are on the inside of this zone are the people we love and who are close to us – they are a part of our family. With these people we co-experience their state and their needs through empathic identification, and we act accordingly. We co-experience their feelings, wishes and intentions for good or bad. In relation to them, it is easy to be caring because it is a natural extension of the relationship we already have with them. The impetus for caring itself is already in existence Those who are outside of this zone on the other hand, we do not apprehend in the same sensitive and empathic way. These are people we have an external, at worst an objectifying “I-it relation” to, characterized by indifference or rejection. In this situation it is not easy to influence and promote good caring because the relationship does not invite this as a natural extension of the relationship. They are surely human beings, although they are strangers, and as participants within a shared community we understand them according to conventional codes and rights that apply among human beings. However, this tends to be an outwardly conventional relation (secondary care), different from the spontaneous co-experiencing we have when someone in our family is exposed to a tragedy or a great joy. In that case we participate and our experience is inward as if it involves ourselves directly and personally. Tragedies happening to “strangers” outside of our zones of intimacy affect us to a much lesser extent and less spontaneously. Although we may upon reflection respond in a humanitarian way, still it does not have the quality of direct unmediated emotional participation that characterizes our reactions to those who are on the inside. Of course there are gradations both inside and outside the zone of intimacy, from those whom we love and are part of our family, close friends and persons we like and are friendly with, to those on the outside the zone who are just like strangers, to whom we respond indifferently or show an externalised sympathy, to those whom we dislike or despise (“enemies”), and towards whom we respond at best with indifference and neglect; at worst by objectifying stigmatizations that may legitimize abuse and violence. This metaphor of a zone of intimacy can depicted as a physical barrier indicating those who are on the inside and who are on the outside, as shown in Figure 1. In this way we may locate spatially our relationship to people – from “persons” with whom we have a close personal relation with empathic identifications within the zone of intimacy, to “strangers”, those on the outside with whom we do not spontaneously empathize. As indicated in the model, there are cultural conceptions and folk theories that direct both our normative conceptions of a “normal child” (Goodnow 1990), our prescriptions of good care (LeVine, Miller, & West 1988) and even of abuse

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and maltreatment (Rohner 1980). These conceptions become embedded in our taken for granted cultural and institutional practices, which again influence the way individual care-givers relate and interact with their children. On the positive side, this model shows that seeing the child as a person is the first step towards humanisation and inclusion.11 This means that we see the child as a fellow human being with the same needs for security, love, approval, self-respect and human rights as we have ourselves. When this conception of the child is in place, the crucial mechanism, that I have called empathic identification with the child , may be released. As shown in the model this again implies emotional and attentional availability to the child and sensitivity to its psychological and human needs. In this state of increased sensitivity the care-giver is capable of recognising and reading the child’s expression and utterances and refer them to the child’s mental state, its emotionality and intentionality. This is what Fogany et al. (1991) calls “mentalising” – the ability to read the other person’s mind – an essential precondition for sensitive care, and another manifestation of the care-givers empathic identification with the child.12 Commitment to care follows as a natural consequence of this increased sensitivity and engagement, which again makes intervention in the form of facilitation and reactivation of good caring practices easy (Hundeide 2001). By including the child into the caregiver’s zone of intimacy, it is possible to elicit her empathic identification with the child, which in turn provides a deeper and more sustainable basis for care. When this mechanism functions, the caregiver is always “with the child”, and it is therefore easy to influence the relationship between them in a positive way, whether it concerns the child’s physical or its psycho-social health, On the negative side, when a child is negatively defined and stigmatized in some way, i.e. as possessed, or as a child with bad or evil character, a monster, there is natural withdrawal and distancing from the child. The empathic mechanism of spontaneous identification and participation in the child’s feeling and experience is blocked and obstructed. The child is no longer seen as a person and as a cohuman being – he is outside of the zone of intimacy, at best as a stranger and worst as a despised and demonized enemy. This objectification is usually combined, not only with expulsion from the psychological zone of intimacy, but also with physical segregation and distancing (“Apartheid”) which again prevents direct eye-to-eye and face-to-face contact (see later). A typical example of this objectification is children in bad institutions and orphanages. As Ryan and Tomas (1976) conclude in their analysis of depriving institutions for mentally handicapped persons: 1. The patients are categorised either as normal or abnormal, and there is no option for the abnormal to share any of the psychological characteristics of the normal.

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 Karsten Hundeide CULTURAL MODELS OF CONCEPTION OF CHILD GOOD CARE

ABUSE/NEGLECT Caregiver’s definition of the child OUTSIDE THE ZONE

INSIDE THE ZONE

Stigma – negative Seeing the child as a “person” conception of with tender qualities and human needs (p) Inclusion P the child Empathic blockage/ Expulsion P and withdrawal (p) Empathic identification with in the caregiver the child needs – psychological and physical/nutritional Objectification Commitment to care: Indifference/neglect Emotional and attentional availability for the child Abuse/rejection: Violence, torture

Appropriate care based on empathic sensitivity with the child

Availability of food, medicine. Physical health

Three ways into the zone

1. Face-to-face communication and intimate dialogue

2. Bodily contact and embracing

3. Imitation sensitive touch, and direct participation in the child’s activity

Figure 1. A model of human care in the zone of intimacy, with indicated ways into the zone and modes of being excluded or kept outside the zone

2. There is no possibility for the abnormal to be anything other than what is designated by their social roles and negative definitions, in this case that they are mentally retarded – and nothing else. 3. There is an unwillingness to accept their subjectivity as persons – that they have their own subjective consciousness, feelings and thoughts and inner experiences of themselves and others. In the worst cases these inmates of such institutions live in a dehumanised world in which they are being seen and treated as objects; sometimes referred to as numbers with uniforms to emphasise that they are not unique persons, but outsiders, more like objects. This is dehumanization and de-individualization that invites empathic withdrawal, objectification and abuse. Certainly not all institutions are like this.

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Ways in and out of the zone of intimacy: Expulsion and inclusion As indicated in Figure 1, the zone of intimacy is both flexible and permeable. It is flexible in the sense that an episode, such as a moving film or story, can temporarily open up and expand our zone of intimacy so that we may include and identify empathically with a suffering child who is normally outside of our intimate network: “it could have been my own child”. But it could just as well have been an account of an enemy that makes us withdraw all empathic commitment so that the person (enemy) remains on the outside of the zone of intimacy – remote as an object. In the model this definition (apprehension) of the other as a non-person is indicated with a (p), while the included person is indicated with a capital P. The zone of intimacy is permeable in both directions in the sense that it is possible for a person on the inside to be expelled from the zone, i.e. P → (p). He then becomes a stranger or an object with which one no longer feels empathy and sympathy, but rather distance and remoteness. In the same way, a person on the outside can be included in the zone, “be brought in from the cold” and take part in the human fellowship on the inside, in which one feels closeness and care for one another (p) → P.13 In order to arrive at this state of emotional sensitivity to the Other, it is necessary to be in close contact. This can occur by way of what I have metaphorically called the three ways into the zone of intimacy. These ways are: – – –

face-to-face communication and intimate dialogue bodily contact and touching imitation and direct participation in the activities of the other

I will deal with each of these ways drawing upon some case studies from our work in Angola.

Inclusion into the zone through face-to-face and gaze contact (p) → P Face-to-face contact is one of the ways into the zone of intimacy and empathic identification with the child. Face-to-face contact will also provide eye contact and the reciprocal exchange of facial expressions and speech. A strong and direct emotional experience can create sensitivity and openness to the child’s attitude, or the “victim’s” “appeal of the face” is brought to bear, as Levinas and the ethics of closeness has described it (Vetlesen 1998). There is a body of literature on the importance of the face and gaze in the establishment of emotional contact that I am unable to discuss here (Ekman & Friesen 1975; Vanderberg 1999; Oppenheim et al. 2003).

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The impact of face-to-face contact and gaze contact became clear to me through an experience recounted to me by a close friend. It was about his relationship with his son who had Down’s syndrome: When after scanning, the doctors told him that they would have a child with Down syndrome, he became very agitated and depressed, despite his daily contact with handicapped children at work. In the beginning after his son was born, he had great problems in looking at him, touching and holding him. Despite his explicit ideology about the acceptance of deviations there was something in him that was unable to accept that this was his own son. This continued for some time. He was unable to relate to the child, and he avoided and ignored him. But one day his wife asked him to hold the child – who was then an infant – in such a way as to gain direct eye contact with it. He then experienced that the child looked him in the eye, smiled at him and reached out for him – and this was what it took to break the ice. It gave him an emotional shock. For the first time he could see his son as a smiling, but vulnerable and helpless person who turned to him. This was a breakthrough in his relationship with his son. Experiences such as these, where there has been emotional rejection of a child, are not unusual. It is as if the profound feeling of emotional contact and acceptance of the child breaks through when it is experienced as a helpless being, combined with a feeling of “my child needs me”. This appears to be a fundamental aspect of all empathic care and a precondition for what I have called empathic identification with the child.14 This example also demonstrates the strong effect which direct face-to-face encounter and gaze contact can have on the relationship between the care-giver and the child. Since this is a two-way dialogical process and not confined to care-giverto-child but also from child-to-care-giver, it is apparent that expressive children can have a humanising effect on adults: through their emotional expressive signals, usually experienced as expressions of innocence, vulnerability and helplessness, they invite care and empathy in most people – even people who rarely express such feelings themselves. However, not all infants or children have this immediate emotional appeal. Some are unattractive, even ugly to look at. Others are passive and not very expressive, they give weak or ambiguous emotional signals. In such cases it may be important to help the care-giver to establish contact with the child by identifying the signals that are there, gradually supporting a positive re-definition of the child as a person needing care (see the ICDP programme, Hundeide 2000). Let us compare two of the examples we have mentioned and relate them to the zone of intimacy. In the example of the “children who wishes to die” mentioned earlier, we see a mother who withdraws emotionally from the child because it was defined as an “angel who wished to die”. A withdrawal of emotional identification occurs as a consequence of the negative definition, and the child is expelled from

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the zone of intimacy, (P → (p)). In the example with the father who could not accept his child, but who experienced an emotional breakthrough in contact, we see the opposite. Through gaze and the experience of the infant’s expressive appeal, the father gained a spontaneous emotional contact with the child, which in turn initiated empathic identification with the child – “my child”. From being ignored and overlooked, the child was included in the zone of intimacy and care, ((p) → P). From being a non-person, the child has become a person for whom the father feels protective, i.e. there has been a movement from (p) to P. Furthermore, these two examples illustrate two important ways into the zone of intimacy, i.e. the importance of positive definitions of the child, and the importance of expressive exchange through face-to-face contact and gaze contact. Body contact is also an important way into the zone of intimacy as we shall see in the next section.

Inclusion in the zone of intimacy through sensitive touch and bodily contact In the ICDP’s work with orphans and neglected children in different parts of the world, we have observed the importance of bodily contact and affectionate touching when treating children who have been subject to affective deprivation and traumatisation. I will discuss two examples from Angola. We observed a blind girl in an institution for children with multiple handicaps. When she arrived at the institution she was so weak and undernourished that she could hardly walk. After a period of time with supplementary feeding and care her condition improved, and this was when we discovered that she was almost blind. This made communication with her very difficult (the signals for mutuality were ambiguous), and when we met her, she appeared to ignore human contact while the physical care was seen to. Through sensitive physical communication it was possible to achieve contact with her again. We have video recordings of the emerging interaction between the girl and one of our female “facilitators”, who first approaches the girl by taking her hand, holding it and gently caressing the hand with sensitive touch. We can see how this leads to a change in the girl’s expression: she leans back, relaxes, smiles contentedly and appears to enjoy this intimate contact. The facilitator gradually expands the physical contact by first touching the girl’s lips and then her cheeks with affectionate stroking. Finally, she puts her arms around the girl and holds her closely. The girl responds by putting her hands around the supervisor’s neck and clinging to her as if a crucial need in her is satisfied. While the supervisor holds her like this, she speaks into the girl’s ear, repeating her name and guiding her hands towards her eyes, nose, mouth and ears while repeating the girl’s name and the names of the body parts she is touching. In this way they come to understand one another and by speaking about the same things, a space for inter-subjective sharing was created between them. All the

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time the facilitator holds the girl tightly to herself, and there is a contented smile on the girl’s lips. The ice has been broken and an intimate contact is in the process of developing between them. Through sensitive physical contact, touching and intimate dialogue it was possible to bring the girl into the zone of intimacy – or more aptly; they included each other mutually in their own zones of intimacy. Sensitive, affectionate touching that leads to close embracing is the prototype of closeness and mutual love, whether in relation to an infant or a partner in an adult love relationship. In a situation of sorrow, loss, neglect and despair, such contact can often release repressed feelings and tears, which may relieve pressure and provide a considerable sense of comfort and security. Nonetheless, this is a powerful form of intervention and contact, and it must be applied with sensitivity and respect for the other person’s limits – more as a spontaneous response to the other’s expression and appeal. Because the danger of infringement is of course great in such situations and in relation to persons with strong dependency needs. Therefore, this method must be used with prudence and follow-up in order to prevent new disappointments and new betrayals.

Inclusion in the zone of intimacy through imitation and sympathetic participation in the child’s initiatives and activities Another way into the zone is by first establishing contact by imitating the child’s gestures and initiatives, and then gradually developing this into communication and participation in the child’s activities. This is a way of responding by following the child’s initiative. As long as a child produces expressive or goal oriented initiatives and actions, it is always possible to start a simple communicative cycle by imitating and complementing the child’s actions, following the child’s initiative and thus initiate a cycle of turn-taking. The most well known example in this regard comes from Hunt’s intervention study in Iran. In addition to instructing the care-givers to express an affectionate attitude towards the children, he particularly asked them to imitate the children’s gestures and expressions so that a simple communicative cycle could begin. It was this simple, pragmatic instruction that turned out to have a very strong positive effect on the orphans subsequent development when they were compared with a control group only receiving so-called responsive toys, in line with Piaget’s theory on the important role of self initiated actions (Hunt 1982). In our work in Angola, the ICDP-team has occasionally employed the same technique, particularly in cases where there have been contact difficulties. In one case, one of our facilitators was contacted by a father who was an alcoholic and unable to take care of his two and a half year old daughter after his wife died. At

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that time the girl functioned apparently normally for age and she was able to say a few words. Due to her father’s condition she was placed in a very poor foster home with a foster mother who was only interested in the financial benefits of keeping the child, thus subjecting her to extreme neglect. The child was placed in a small room where she spent the next two years without any form of human contact. There was a little window high up on one wall, but no toilet. The room was never cleaned, food was thrown in once a day, and the girl lived in her own dirt for two years. When this state of affairs was discovered, one of our facilitators intervened and got the child out of the prison. At this time, the child could no longer walk properly, but crawled about on the floor making sounds like an animal. She had rat bites all over her body. It was impossible to establish eye-contact with her or gain contact through face-to-face expressive exchange. She did not respond to normal communicative expressive signals, and her face was closed and devoid of expression. She avoided eye contact and she constantly moved restlessly around in the room. The only thing that caught her attention was when she was given food, at which she produced a specific sound – something like “tchee-tchee”. While this went on it was possible to focus her attention on the food for a short time. When one of our facilitators started working with this girl she was more than four years old. The facilitators was deeply committed to help this girl and in line with the ICDP approach she started by looking for expressive signals, initiatives and actions that she could relate to and imitate in order to start a communicative cycle (Hundeide 1991). In the beginning, these signals were the same sounds that she made in connection with feeding. After a period of time, she was able to distinguish more signals from the child, and began to use them systematically in relation to food, washing, visits to the toilet and play. Little by little, a rudimentary communicative system based on imitative signs and sounds began to develop between them that seemed to work well in their practical daily lives. The girl also began to show signs of emotional attachment to the supervisor, showing joy when she visited her, and distress when she left. Gradually, her facial expression also changed, becoming more lively and expressive and it as also possible to obtain eye contact with her. Slowly she began to reciprocate the facilitator’s expressive initiatives with similar expressive utterances, such as smiles and bodily contact, for example tickling. In time she was also able to focus her attention on one activity over a somewhat longer period of time. When I saw her at a later point in time it was possible to establish eye contact and exchange mutual expressive utterances; smiles and sounds, in the same way as one would communicate with an infant. She could walk, albeit a little unsteadily, and she showed a particular trust in her brother, and liked to sit on his lap. Evidently, there was a normalisation and humanisation process under way. This process started through sensitive communicative contact with another per-

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son, a facilitator, who managed to establish contact and communication with her through imitation of her accessible gestures and expressive utterances. This is where the development begins. At this level, one must begin where the child is, with the utterances and expressive initiative that are accessible.

The ethics of closeness and the primary cycle of care In this account I have placed the main emphasis on what I have called the primary care cycle. This implies an assumption that caring has its roots in a pre-verbal and pre-theoretical disposition that is apparent in the infant immediately after birth. In more general terms, one can say with Trevarthen that there appears to be a “dynamic “together-with-the-other-consciousness” that comes first and that is sustained throughout our lives in our deepest moral core”. He further elaborates this in the following quote: The human consciousness seems to emerge from a completely non-rational, nonverbal, concept-less and totally non-theoretical potential for participation and communication with other persons that one can see first in infants. (Trevarthen 1995: 8)

This is a radical claim that goes against the traditional view of how the human consciousness (the mind) is formed as a result of linguistic socialisation. According to the new perspective, it is rather a primary inter-subjectivity, formed before language, that constitutes the basis for how further socialisation evolves (Bråten 1998; Stern 1985; Trevarthen 1989). Quite surprisingly, this radical viewpoint appears to accord with French philosopher Levinas and his idea about the “first philosophy” in which ethical responsibility for the other through the direct “appeal of the face” itself comprises the basis for our subjectivity. In Levinas’ words: When the other looks at me, I am responsible for him without expecting reciprocity on his part ... responsibility for the other is the crucial, primary and fundamental structure in our subjectivity.

Quoting Levinas, Bauman further concludes with the claim: Morality is not a product of society, it rather it is the moral relation that is primary, something that society manipulates, edits and confuses ... (Bauman 1996: 182–183)

In a review of the relationship between the new communicative developmental psychology and the ethics of closeness, Vanderberg (1999) points out that the new findings in early communication appear to support the basic perspective of

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the ethics of closeness, He mentions the following convergences between the two positions: – – – – –

The view on the primary moral relation as “the first philosophy”. The significance of the appeal of the face and expressive closeness as fundamental to the development of responsibility for fellow human beings. The dangers of remote relationships which deprive human beings of the direct experience of the other’s face and thus the feeling of direct responsibility. The dangers inherent in the abstracted and “totalizing gaze” of the bureaucrat – the glance from a distant and abstract position. The dangers of negative definitions that can legitimise dehumanisation and infringement, freeing the perpetrator from the feeling of responsibility for fellow human beings.

In line with this viewpoint, the care of others is not only something we do for others, but something we do in order to recreate our own human subjectivity – our deepest moral core.

Acknowledgement I am indebted to Pedro and Irina Mendes for case stories and discussions about the content of this paper.

Notes . Not all caring has its basis in the primary care cycle, however. There are forms of caring adapted to older children and adults that naturally require a more reflective approach, mirroring society’s varying conventions and values. This secondary caring does not have the same immediate and spontaneous qualities as the primary caring cycle, rather it represents the more reflected humanitarian values and principles of human rights that are a part of our culture (Berger & Luckman 1967; Bråten 2003; Skoe 1998). . Instead of interpreting such behaviour as indications of “deficient caring competence in the mother”, the focus is in this paper changed from the mother’s capacities to the way she defines her children – and this is to a large extent not only a personal competence, but a situational, interactive and cultural affordance. . In social sense these children serve as scapegoats being held responsible for any negative occurrence within the family or in the local community, thus functioning as scapegoats for uncontrollable misfortunes in the community – in a similar way as the female witches of the Middle Ages who were burnt on pyres. . This appears like a hidden contract between themselves and the healer about who they are, what their symptoms and powers are, and how they can be healed (Hundeide 2003b, c).

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 Karsten Hundeide . But the definitions that we employ in this process of reciprocal definitions are also part of a cultural repertoire of personality typifications which we appropriate as we are socialized into a community, and this may also include recipes for healing which may not always coincide with Western conceptions of therapy, as the examples above indicate. . “We” implies collaborators inside ICDP, particularly Pedro and Irina Mendes, Milu and Santana. . It is important to note that this type of legitimising and stigmatisation also occurs in violations of human rights and UN conventions in the pursuit of what are called “terrorists” like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib Prison. One can also find comparable justifications in violence prone racist gangs, such as new Nazis (Bjørgo 1997; Hundeide 2003a, b). . These experiences were a part of the teenage soldiers’ training: in some cases they were instructed to kill prisoners – in some cases members of their own families – while the others were watching. If they were unable to comply with the orders or showed signs of weakness in crying or clutching, they were themselves shot in front of the other recruits. This is the terrorism that led to blind obedience to “the sergeant”, who often exploited them with extreme cruelty (Bracken & Petty 1998; Hundeide 2003b). . “Under-aged soldiers” is now the politically correct term as child soldiers is starting to have a stigmatising effect due to the violence associated with this term. . When some of these child soldiers were interviewed individually about their future life aspirations, some of them said they would become teachers, and when we asked why, many of them replied “In order to help my country!”. This seems to indicate that collective national identifications were dominant even in their personal motivation and self-construction. . The concept of “person” as opposed to a non-person, a thing, has been used in social science to indicate the crucial importance of labelling, stigmatisation and negative definitions when violence, terror, torture, massacres and crimes against humanity are committed (see contributions by Buber, by Bauman, by Bråten, by Christie, and by Smedslund). The concept of “person” is not necessarily limited to human beings; a loved animal, a pet, a dog or a whale, can become the object for person-attributions, which implies that they are perceived as having similar sensitivity to pain. suffering and humiliation and also similar needs for being secure, included, loved and respected – as we ourselves have. . . They are, in other words, co-human beings. This makes empathic identification possible. . In a similar vein, Daniel Stern talks about the “the intersubjective matrix” which implies that our mental life, our personal feelings and thoughts are “cocreated through dialogues with other minds” (Stern 2003: 77). . According to Bauman (1996), this was one of the things the Nazis tried to prevent. Face-toface contact with “the Jew next door” could be the basis of inclusion into the zone with sympathy and empathic identification. . In his recent book The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life Daniel Stern (2004, cf. also this volume (2)) points out the significance of short moments of intense contact “. . . in which both partners create and undergo a joint experience. . . This resonant experience enlarges the intersubjective field between them and opens up new possibilities for exploration. . .” This is exactly what happened in the example described above about the father and his Down Syndrome child. The intense moment of eye-to-eye contact became a turning point in their relationship.

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References Bauman, Z. (1996). Modernity and the Holocaust. London: Polity Press. Bjørgo, T. (1997). Racist and Right-Wing Violence in Scandinavia: Patterns, Perpetrators and Responses. Oslo: Tano Aschehoug. Bracken, P., & Petty, C. (1998). Rethinking the Trauma of War. London: Free Ass. Books, Ltd. Bråten, S. (1988). “Dialogic mind: The infant and the adult in protoconversation.” In M. Carvallo (Ed.), Nature, Cognition and System (Vol. I) (pp. 187–205). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bråten, S. (1996). “When toddlers provide care: Infants’ companion space.” Childhood, 3 (4), 449–465. Bråten, S. (Ed.). (1998). Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bråten, S. (2000). Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn: Essays on Dialogue in Infant & Adult. Bergen: Sigma Forlag. Bråten, S. (2003). “Participant perception of others’ acts: Virtual otherness in infants and adults.” Cultural and Psychology, 9 (3), 261–276. Dunn, J. (1993). Young Children’s Relationships. Beyond Attachment. London: Sage Publications. Eisenberg, N. (1992). The Caring Child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. (1975). Unmasking the Face. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Field, T. (1990). Infancy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fonagy, P., Steele, H., Moran, G., & Higgit, A. (1991). “The capacity for understanding mental states: The reflective self in parent and child and its significance for security of attachment.” Infant Mental Health Journal, 13, 200–217. Fraiberg, S. H., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). “Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problem of impaired infant-mother relationships.” Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14, 387–422. Hoffman, M. (2000). Empathy and Moral Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, J. (1975). What do We do on Monday? Pelican Paperback. Hundeide, K. (1991). Helping Disadvantaged Children. Psycho-social Intervention in a Third World Context. London: Jessica Kingsley. Hundeide, K. (2000). Ledet Samspill fra Spedbarn til Skolealder. (Guided interaction from infancy to school age). Asker: Vett og Viten. Hundeide, K. (2001). “Reactivation of cultural mediational practices.” Psychology and Developing Societies, 13, 1. Hundeide, K. (2002). “ The Mind between us.” Nordisk Psykologi, 54 (1), 69–90. Hundeide, K. (2003b). “Becoming a committed insider.” Cultural Psychology, 9 (2), 107–127. Hundeide, K. (2003c). Barns livsverden: Kulturelle rammer for barns utvikling. (Cultural frames for the child’s development.) Oslo: Cappelen Forlag. Hundeide, K., & Egebjerg, I. (2003). “ ICDP project in Angola.” Unpublished report from the ICDP Foundation, Oslo. Hunt, McVicker (1982). “ Towards solutions of early education.” In Nir-Jav, Spodek, & Steg (Eds.), Early Childhood Education. New York: Plenum Press. Levinas, E. (1982). Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. LeVine, R., Miller, P., & Maxwell West, M. (1988). Parental Behavior in Diverse Societies. London: Jossey-Bass, Inc. Publishers.

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Lindner, E. G. (2000). The Psychology of Humiliation. Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Psychology, University of Oslo. Murray, L., & Trevarthen, C. (1985). “Emotional regulation of interaction between two-montholds and their mothers.” In T. A. Field & N. A. Fox (Eds.), Social Perception in Infants (pp. 137–187). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Oppenheim, D., Koren-Karie, N., & Sagi, A. (2003). “Mother’s empathic understanding of their preschoolers’ internal experience: Relations with early attachment.” From internet: Oppenheim’s homepage. Papousek, H., & Papousek, M. (1991). “Innate and cultural guidance of infants’ integrative competencies: China, United States and Germany.” In M. Bornstein (Ed.), Cultural Approaches to Parenting. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Ass. Pelzer, D. (1995). A Child Called “It”. London: Orion Paperback. Peters, K., & Richards, P. (1998). “Fighting with open eyes: Youth combatants talking about war in Sierra Leone.” In P. Bracken & C. Petty (Eds.), Rethinking the Trauma of War. London: Free Ass. Books, Ltd. Rohner, R. (1980). Handbook for the Study of Parental Acceptance and Rejection. Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut Press. Ryan, J., & Tomas, P. (1976). The Politics of Mental Handicap. London: Vintage Press. Sameroff, A. J., & Fiese, B. H. (1990). “Transactional regulation and early intervention.” In S. Meisels & J. Shonkoff (Eds.), Handbook of Early Childhood Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skoe, E. (1998). “The ethics of care.” In E. Skoe & A. von der Lippe (Eds.), Personality Development in Adolescence. London: Routledge. Sroufe, L. A. (1988). “Relationship and Relationships Disturbances.” In A. Sameroff (Ed.), Relationship Disturbance in Early Childhood. New York: Basic Books. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death Without Weeping. University of California Press. Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. (Paperback edition with new introduction: New York: Basic Book 2000/London: Karnac 2003.) Stern, D. N. (1995). The Motherhood Constellation. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton. Trevarthen, C. (1989). “Infants trying to talk: How a child invites communication from the human world.” In R. Søderberg (Ed.), Children’s Creative Communication. Lund: Lund University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1995). “The child’s need to learn a culture.” Children and Society, 9 (1), 5–19. Vanderberg, B. (1999). “Levinas and the ethical context of human development.” Human Development, 43, 31–44. Vetlesen, A. J. (1999). Nærhetsetikk. (Ethics of closeness). Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal. Whiting, B., & Edwards, C. (1988). Children of Different Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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chapter 

Family disseminate archives Intergenerational transmission and psychotherapy in light of Bråten’s and Stern’s theories Andrea Cabassi Child Psychiatric Service, Parma

Introduction Perturbing cycles of circular re-enactments in parent-child relationship, described in terms of family disseminate archives, concerning the family, its history, its destiny, and its memory across generations, constitute a challenge for psychotherapeutic attempts to break such cycles. Such archives will be defined here in terms of these six elements: (i) home atmosphere, (ii) infant-parents relationships, (iii) objects, (iv) family narratives, (v) name, and (vi) documents. These elements invite descriptions in Stern’s terms of amodal perception, affect attunement, and protonarrative envelope, and in Bråten’s terms of felt immediacy, e-motional memory, and altercentric participation, which have afforded cues for counselling and psychotherapy in two cases of perturbed infant-parent relationship.

On destiny Rainer Maria Rilke (1929), in his paper “Briefe an einen jungen Dichter”, writes to a young Kappus who wants to become poet and advises him of the way to pursue such a path. Commenting on destiny, Rilke claims that destiny is inside and not on our outside. If we look in the deepest parts of ourselves we shall find that we are authors of our destiny. Common sense entertains a different view of the relationship between man and destiny. In common sense destiny is something on the outside. It is inescapable and connected with the position and the movement of stars and planets; astrology is the dark side of destiny.

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These reflections about the “inside” or “outside” with regard to destiny are very important for the development of our topic, especially when we speak about destinies repeating themselves in families. In such cases it seems that the life destiny of one member repeats itself without variation in another member of the following generation and it seems impossible to make a break in this repetition. We can see this very well in multiproblems families. The “common sense” way of thinking about this tends to be totally deterministic: it sees only the outside and thinks this repetition is like a curse on the family, perhaps a deserving curse, a curse against which it is not possible to do anything, a curse that the family only has to suffer. According to common sense nothing can break this. This curse seems to develop itself in a homogeneous and empty time as it is described by Walter Benjamin (1974) in his thesis about history: a quantitative time in which everything comes back without change and differences, a time in which destiny seems to come from outside, from a cursed position of stars and planets that persecute families. It seems like an eternal present repeating itself, continuously. In our time, many families show the same pathology across three generations, at least. When we work with this kind of families we can ask for ourselves what destiny entails and whether it is an inside or outside matter. Which are the mechanisms presiding, often invisibly, over repetition? And we can make the invisible visible? If we reflect on this and try to answer such questions, inevitably, concepts about destiny cross concepts of transgenerational and intergenerational transmission. Destinies repeating themselves in multiproblems families can be accounted for in terms of Bråten’s and Stern’s theories. They have the great merit to give cues of lecture and indications for interruption of repetition in psychotherapy or in counselling when there is a perturbing infant-parents relationship. Before turning to this let me present a concept that I have recently elaborated with my colleague and family therapist, Maria Teresa Zini (2004): that of ‘family disseminate archives’.

Family disseminate archives From the first days of life the infant enters into a relationship with the home, with its typical atmosphere. Home, as Winnicott (1986) asserts, is where we start from. Maria Teresa Zini and I define family disseminate archives in terms of this home environment. The word archive derives from the ancient Greek term arché. Arché has a double meaning: the first is that of beginning, the second is that of command. For ancient Greeks, archive is the place where things begin but also the place where authority exerts its power. Archeion was the residence where the supreme magis-

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trates, the arcontes, lived. They oversaw and interpreted documents. They had the power to put them in order and to be their hermeneuts. Home is an archive and arcontes are its inhabitants. In this archive we can find family documents, papers, objects like ornaments, linen chests, family album of photos, and the characteristic atmosphere of the home. The term disseminate means that the archive can be disseminated everywhere: any room, any corner, any object, all the furniture, the home smell too, can be places containing documents or a family memory. The disseminate archives are of family because they concern family, its history, its destiny, its memory across generations. Family disseminate archives are composed of these six elements, then: (i) home atmosphere, (ii) infant-parents relationships, (iii) objects, (iv) family narratives, (v) name, and (vi) documents. The first element may seem to be virtual but it is not. I refer to home atmosphere. Home atmosphere is home smell, the smell of each room, the light or the darkness in the corners of each room, the colours, the dust, the half-light plays, the atmosphere created by parents like serenity, calmness or tension. Infant perceives everything by virtue of amodal perception and the mode of felt immediacy. But about this topic I will speak later on. The second element is infant-parents relationship. It is not possible to divorce the first element from the second one because the most important scene where infant-parents relationship is played out is the home and this relationship is strictly connected with atmosphere and vice versa. The third element is made up by objects; at home every room is full of all kinds of objects: ornaments, pictures, photos hanging on the wall, linen chests, cupboards, antiques tables, toys. . . and each of them can transmit a family story from one generation to another. Many of these objects can have an affective value for parents when, above all, they are objects belonging to their own parents or ancestors. Ancestors, often, have handed down some objects, now in the home. Poets well know that furniture has a story and conveys a family story. For example, in his poetry Rimbaud addresses the buffet who knows the family stories: “– O buffet du vieux temps, tu sais bien des histoires,/ Et tu voudrais conter tes contes, et tu bruis/ Quand s’ouvrent lentement tes grands portes noires” Rimbaud (2002: 74). The fourth element is constituted by family narratives. In the first phase of life the infant hears sounds and speech without understanding the meaning of words. But the baby can perceive tunes, voices, rhythms, serenity or tension. When beginning to understand words and with the appearance of speech, the infant gets the first sense of family narratives, and which may prevail throughout the lifetime. The fifth element is, in part, linked with parents and ancestors, across age, and begins before the birth: the name. In our culture name can be the name of an ancestor or the name of a grandparent. The name reflects and hides parents’

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expectations and their desires. A relative can be important because he or she has had a great affective value, or because he or she has made something of importance for the family, and the narrative of this deed has been handed down from one generation to another. The child may feel to be under obligation to repeat the same deed, or may come to feel this task to be too heavy to escape. It is not always like this, but it may become a burden when the expectations are shared by each family member and when these expectations and desires are very powerful. In the case in which the name of the child is the same as that of a dead brother, this archive element is like it is written on the body of the child. Often this means that the parents have not been able to do the work of mourning. The sixth element, finally, are made up by documents: all kind of documents, wills, papers containing fragments of family story, often family secrets. These documents can be contained in linen chests, drawers, chest of drawers, and cupboards. When the child becomes older, if he or she has felt an atmosphere of secret, sensed that there is something hidden in the parents’ narratives, the child may turn into a detective in search of secrets to disclose.

Family disseminate archives in light of poetry and Bråten’s and Stern’s theories In this paragraph I will consider, above all, the elements of family disseminate archives linked with the pre-verbal world of the infant. Let me first consider Stern’s (1985) cue concept of amodal perception. Infants’ perceptive channels, in the first month of life, do not have a particular specialization. This entails a great richness because the infant can translate stimuli from one sense to another, across sense modalities. The infant can, as it were, see taste, hear colours, translate atmosphere around him. He can feel the parents’ tension, the parents’ serenity, and translate them into movements and actions. In this way it is possible to consider amodal perception as a forerunner of metaphor, a protometaphor, and to see the infant as a poet. Besides, poets well know amodal perception. Baudelaire writes in “Correspondences” about the long echoes of the smell and colours that have been sensed and linked: “Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent/ Dans une ténebreuse et profonde unitè,/ Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, les parfums, les couleurs et le sons se répondent” (Baudelaire 1961: 11). This unity, where each thing answers to another, where everything corresponds with everything and can be translated from one sense to the other, is the unity of amodal perception that permits one to translate colours into sounds, scent into sounds and colours etc. Rimbaud (2002: 114) says in “Voyelles”: “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu . . .” In this poem there is correspondence between each vowel and each colour: A for black, B for white, I for red etc. This is another manner of reactivating

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supramodal perception. The poet is like an infant and the infant is like a poet (while children with autism and psychotic children when older find it very difficult to use metaphor). Marcel Proust (1989) uses and talks about the sense of smell in his “Recherche”. The reactivation of sense of smell and the taste of the famous “madeleine” brings him to remember and reconnect his life story. We, apparently, have lost this link between sense of smell and some fragments of our life. But this connection lies in the deepest part of our memory, of ourselves and – on particular occasions – re-emerges because amodal perception continues to work also in the quiet. And in these moments we find again the time that we believed to have forgotten. Amodal perception and the mode of felt immediacy permit an entry into this first element of family disseminate archives. Bråten defines felt immediacy as the mode of directly perceiving own or other’s body movements in a presentational immediacy, as in proprioception and alteroception, differing from perception in representational mediacy by symbolic and conceptual distinctions. (Bråten 2000: 299–300)

The mode of felt immediacy permits one not only to perceive own or other’s movements in a presentational immediacy, but also to enter in a world of smell, colours, sounds because it is a-representational, a-symbolic, and infant, in this phase, feels without representations, without making use of symbolization, the changes of atmosphere, of smells, of light, any little change of movement at home. We have distinguished infant-parents relationship as another important element of family disseminate archives. It cannot be divorced from atmosphere because it determines it and vice versa. Here, I shall refer to Stern’s pertinent distinctions of affect attunement (1985) and protonarrative envelopes (1995b), and then take into consideration Bråten’s (1998, 2000) simulation model and cue concepts of altercentric participation and e-motional memory. By virtue of amodal perception and the mode of felt immediacy, the relationship between mother and infant is like a dance, where they follow the “music”, the tune. Infant can answer to a movement of mother with a babble or vice versa. When there is music in these sounds and movements, when tunes are synchronised, we have affect attunement. When there are problems the tune, the “right music”, is broken. Andrea Zanzotto, one of the most important Italian and European poets, describes the similarity relation of poet and infant in one of his essays (2001), and in his poetry he has anticipated Lacan’s (2002) theories. In his poetry Zanzotto works from (pre)speech, using babble, interjection, onomatopeia, and the mode of nursery rhyme. He defines this as “motherhood speech”. Babble, right tunes, onomatopeia, and interjection make up the mode of communication between mother and infant, the way of communicating in the world, a mode which, when we are

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adult, we do not use but which lies in our memory. This motherhood speech is a speech in which what is understood is the signifier and not the meaning. Signifier is tune; it is the music that the infant, in the preverbal world, can understand by virtue of amodal perception and the mode of felt immediacy. In affect attunement, there is an exchange among signifiers. We may regard all the pre-verbal communication between infant and parent, all the music and the dance of affect attunement, to be under the sign of signifier. Besides, the growing of intensity of tune, the maximum of attunement, and then its descent, is the “music” that accompanies the infant-parent relationship. This “music” is the first plot that the infant learns to know. It is the forerunner of a narrative world in which we will be plunged for all our lifetime. This first plot is what Stern has termed protonarrative envelopes, and that which Andrea Zanzotto has well understood when he considers the motherhood speech, the protodialogue between mother and infant as an exchange of signifiers. Such affect attunement in parent-infant interplay entails other-centred participation and leaves or evokes in the participants e-motional memory of a wordless kind, inviting re-enactment. These are the conceptual terms by which Bråten distinguish such phenomena, which I think are fundamental: He has introduced the term “altercentric” to characterize “other-centered perception and mirroring of movements which he has identified in human infants in face-to-face situations, for example when they reciprocate the spoon-feeding to which they have been subjected, reflecting the opposite of egocentric perception of caretaker’s feeding” (Bråten 2000b: 297). Here are his definitions: Altercentric participation means an “ego’s virtual participation in Alter’s act as if ego were a co-author of the act or being hand guided from Alter’s stance. This is sometimes unwittingly manifested overtly, for example, when watching a high jumper, or when opening one’s own mouth when putting a morsel into another’s mouth, and differs from perspective-taking mediated by conceptual representation of other” (Bråten 2000b: 297–298). E-motional memory is a “composite term, combining the folk sense of being “moved by” and the root sense “out of motion”, for the procedural memory of having co-enacted – virtually or actually – the goal-directed movements of others, evoking in the learner shared vitality affect contours and inviting circular re-enactment in similar situations” (Bråten 2000b: 299). Other-centred participation and e-motional memory play a very important role with regard to the second element; infant-parent relationship. Infants, aged 10–11 months, can see the mother’s movements and virtually co-enact them from the mother stance. This may come about by virtue of mirror neurons support. Rizzolatti, Gallese and other researchers (2001) of the Human Physiology Institute of Parma have discovered this particular kind of cells in monkeys. These neurons fire

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at the sight of another individual performing an act. If a macaque monkey sees an experimenter or another monkey grasping a morsel the mirror neurons fire. The same neurons fire when the monkey does the grasping. It appears that the monkey simulates another’s movements that have a goal. Probably infant simulation of mother movements is subserved by mirror neurons. Infants, after some days delay, can actually re-enact mother’s movements by virtue of e-motional memory. This simulation model is very important because it can explain the covert mechanisms of intergenerational transmission, those mechanisms that an observer may regard as a destiny. As for the third element, objects are important because they can have a long, long story through generations. The infant relations to objects, may be briefly described in Bråten’s terms in this way: Movements around objects can be seen by the infant and he can, virtually, move himself while he looks at the parents with the objects at home and move himself actually, from e-motional memory, with the same object later in life. Such objects can also be what Winnicott terms transitional objects. When infant is alone these objects may fill his virtual companion space, as it is filled by his mother and father when they return home. With the fourth element, family narratives, we must consider speech appearing about 2 years of age. In this period infant becomes able not only to hear tunes, sound, (the signifier, as Zanzotto terms it), but also manages to understand fragments of family stories. He learns to hear family narratives. Stories transform themselves from protonarrative envelopes to almost complete plots. Altercentric participation, of course, does not disappear but works again and allows the child to perceive silences, embarrassments, and reticence in family narratives and seeking to understand their meaning. Name is the fifth element. In the case, for example, in which infant has the same name as his dead brother, it is possible that the infant who tries to reach out to the parents, stretch out to arms into emptiness because the parents would virtually have in their arms the dead son. In Bråten’s terms, the infant cannot meet the actual other because the actual other is, only and always, engaged in a virtual other not living (the dead son). The child tries to enter into a relationship with the parents as the child’s actual others, but they make the child into another person who is not actually present. In Stern’s term, their evoked companion, memories of their dead son, conflicts with their live child, who fails to become their actual companion. And when the child grows older, documents as the sixth element come into play; the child may become a detective, seeking to disclose hidden secrets.

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Perturbing infant-parents relationship: Theoretically informed counselling and psychotherapy Altercentric participation can create virtuous and vicious circles (Bråten 2000a). Vicious circles are, strictly, linked with intergenerational transmission. The infant, through other-centred participation, co-enacts, virtually, movements with his parent (mother or father or other caretaker). Through e-motional memory, he re-enacts, actually, this movement in another moment. If he has enjoyed caregiving and sweet movements, he will easily in the future act out such movements with other children or other person as he grows older. But if he has suffered abuse, or ill-treatment by his parents, it is possible he could, in a future phase of his life, re-enact the same attitudes towards other persons. He could become abusive or ill-treat others, repeating the same family story. As Stern points out in many of his papers and books (1985, 1995a, b) intergenerational transmission does not happen in “the ether”; it happens through acts and an act is an answer to another act. Nothing magical and no mystery. But we must ask why it is that in one family one act brings about repetition of pathology and in another family this does not happen. Or why in the same family a son repeats the “deed” of a parent or ancestor while another pursues a very different way. When faced with perturbing intergenerational transmission we must always take into consideration these three variables because they can bring about different outcomes: First, infant temperament which is the constitutional factor. Every infant has a distinct temperament and modes of reacting to situations will vary accordingly. The same situation can bring about very different behaviours. Second, the time that the infant spends with the most pathological members of family and what importance they have for him. Is he prisoner of this relationship? Can he not escape from it? Third, is there another available member of the family that can take care of the infant if, for example, the mother has heavy psychiatric problems or ill-treats his son? May the father or another caretaker of the family offer a good alternative to the mother? If no such caretaker is available, the infant may come to be brought to repeat dysfunctional patterns.

Two cases of psychotherapy and counselling I shall now turn to some examples in which I have tried to use Bråten’s theories to interrupt a repetition seeming like a destiny. We may well regard destiny as neither inside nor outside. It is on the border because a relationship is entailed, act answering to the acts as Stern says, entailing virtual and actual movements, leaving or evoking e-motional memory.

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First example. Livio, his father and his peers. Counselling. Counselling with parents can sometimes be a mode where the aim is to interrupt an ongoing cycle or chain. In such cases counselling entails affording new insights or information to the couple and in their relationship with the infant. Two parents come to me for a counselling. They have a son, Livio, 2 years of age. They worry because Livio ill-treats, pushes and bites peers. Peers cry and he does not understand why. Livio believes he is only playing with them. But peers are afraid when they see Livio coming in the park and they want to escape. Livio, often, then is left and remains alone. The father remembers when he was a child that he played rough or violent games of movements with his own father. Probably, through e-motional memory he has repeated the same movements with his son. He, again, remembers that when his son was very young he played only movements games with him. It is likely that Livio has co-enacted virtually these movements (when he was aged 1011 months) and that he now re-enacts similar rough movements with his peers, thinking that this is only a play. This is a vicious circle where there is a repetition of behaviours along generations. Counselling consists in trying to offer an insight to the parents, in particular the father in this case. The counsel is to make Livio engage in plays without violent or rough movements, to leave him to play gradually alone, to play with him with very different kind of movements permitting the toddler to co-enact such movements and actually re-enact them, also with his peers. Six months after I saw the parents, the situation is, truly, better. This has been possible because the parents acquired a novel pertinent insight, and because of the toddler’s good temperament, and emerging personality structure. In this case the variables that did the good work were not only infant temperament, but also the ability of the parents, in particular the father, to modify and to extend the range of their behaviours with the son. In this case the chain of repetition in intergenerational transmission has been interrupted and this interruption leaves space for new behaviours. In other terms, it is as if Livio has learned new music, new tunes and new signifiers together with his parents. Second example. Ivo, mother and grandmother. Psychotherapy. This is a most complicated situation in which work has been made in reconstructing the past and trying to change the meaning of some of Ivo’s behaviours, a child 5 years old. I have seen him twice a week for a long period, in sessions of psychotherapy. In this case heavy vicious circles are evident. Ivo’s mother is a woman with many psychiatric problems. In her first wedding she married an alcoholic, and now she is married to a meek husband who suffers from his wife’s behaviour, but does nothing to try to modify it. Her mother in turn has had a similar story. In her first

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marriage she married an alcoholic who then died in a car accident with car. She then remarried, and she ill-treated her daughter. The relationship between the mother and Ivo is very difficult, repeating the same kind of relationship that pertained between Ivo’s mother and her mother. It is likely that from e-motional memory, she remembers her own mother movements and, like what happened to her, she has begun to ill-treat Ivo in the first month of infancy. The Ivo’s family disseminate archives are those of a family in which atmospheres were full of tension, where darkness is incumbent in the rooms, where the father is afraid of his wife. Even if Ivo does not understand every meaning of events and things surrounding him, he understand signifiers, broken tunes, the non-synchronized music. Through the mode of felt immediacy, Ivo perceives everything about this atmosphere, feeling the tensions. But also, through altercentric participation, he lives the mother’s movements from the mother’s stance. Movements of ill-treatment in his mother provokes movements in Ivo who coenacts, virtually, mother’s movements. In a following phase of his life he re-enacts these movements with peers and adults, as well; he is violent, he says bad words to peers, to teachers, to everybody. It seems that he repeats his mother’s deeds from e-motional memory: a vicious circle very hard to break because in this multiproblems family there is no corrective experience for Ivo. The father is not an alternative model, and he does not manage to interrupt the pathological relationship between the mother and Ivo. The father suffers from the violent temper of his wife and for him it is impossible to help his son, who cannot defend himself. We have, here, an example of intergenerational transmission, passing from grandmother to mother, and from mother to infant. A destiny seems to be persecuting this family, but we have seen destiny repeating itself as acts provoking other acts feed acts from one generation to the next. In this family there are no variables helping the infant. One needs to say again here that destiny is neither outside nor inside. Destiny is on the border; it is the relationship between the infant and parents, and the relationship between parents with their own parents, maintained by the acts, by movements across generations. This family lives in an empty homogeneus time, as Walter Benjamin (1974) says, where things repeat themselves. It is a quantitative time, not qualitative. Here Ivo cannot activate defensive mechanisms before altercentric participation begins to work (and, probably, the same thing happened to his mother with her mother). If altercentric participation begins to work, as Bråten (2000a) specifies when writing about vicious circles, it is most likely that Ivo can repeat the mother’s movements from the mother stance, re-enacting the same behaviours. In fact, this is what has happened because of Ivo’s sensitive temperament, and because his father was not an alternative model, and because the relationship Ivo had with his mother was continuous and prolonged in time. All these things combined to prevent the creation of defence mechanisms interrupting altercentric participation.

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Psychotherapy is useful when trying to interrupt such a vicious circle in search for a new meaning of Ivo’s movements and of Ivo’s bad words. Thanks to words and movements said and acted in therapy by Ivo, this reconstruction is made. Reconstruction made with him can have the power to interrupt a vicious circle. The psychotherapist can contribute to interrupt the chain of destiny introducing new information and new meanings; he can give the patient the possibility to re-write his past. In this way he works to substitute an empty linear homogeneus time with a non-linear full time, a qualitative time. He can, and sometimes he manages, to do it. And this is one of the most important meaning of psychotherapy. Let me finish by a quote about this meaning pertaining to the past, present, and future: ... the protonarrative envelops of traumatic “pasts”, locked in e-motional memory, hidden and yet retained as they have been by a bodily e-motional memory outside awareness and verbal narratives, denied any consciously declared narrative label, need somehow to be assigned an existential and phenomenological meaning in order to be opened in the intersubjective present. Brought out in the open to be meaningfully contained in the intersubjective present shared with dialogical companions as an actualized past, it may open for an emergent future that invites this past to be acknowledged and then re-written in view of the emergent future written in the present in co-authorship with the other – actual and virtual. (Bråten 2000a: 258)

References Baudelaire, C. (1961). Ouvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard. Benjamin, W. (1974). “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” In Gessamelte Schriften (1974–1989). Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. Bråten, S. (Ed.). (1998). Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bråten, S. (2000). Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn. Essays on Dialogue in Infant & Adult. Bergen: Sigma Forlag. Bråten, S. (2000a). “From intersubjective communion in infancy. Virtuous and vicious circles of re-enactment.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn. Esssays on Dialogue in Infant & Adult (pp. 244–268). Bergen: Sigma Forlag. Bråten, S. (2000b). “Glossary.” In S. Bråten (Ed.), Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn. Esssays on Dialogue in Infant & Adult (pp. 297–301). Bergen: Sigma Forlag. Cabassi, A., & Zini, M. T. (2004). L’assistente sociale e lo psicologo. Un modello di lavoro integrato. Roma: Carocci. Proust, M. (1989). A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard. Rilke, R. M. (1929). Briefe an einen jungen Dichter. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag. Rimbaud, A. (2002). Poésies. Une saison en enfer. Illuminations. Paris: Gallimard.

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Rizzolatti, G. et al. (2001). “From mirror neurons to imitation. Facts and speculations.” In W. Prinz & A. Meltzoff (Eds.), The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Book Stern, D. N. (1995a). The Motherhood Constellation. New York: Basic Book. Stern, D. N. (1995b). “Self/other differentiation in the domain of intimate socio-affective interaction: Some considerations.” In P. Rochat (Ed.), The Self in Infancy: Theory and Research (pp. 419–430). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Winnicott, D. (1986). Home is Where We Start From. Harmondsworth: Penguin Book. Zanzotto, A. (2001). “Infanzie, poesie, scuolette.” In Scritti sulla letteratura. Milano: Mondatori. Zanzotto, A. (2002). Poesie (1938–1986). Milano: Mondatori.

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chapter 

Reaching moments of shared experiences through musical improvisation An aesthetic view on interplay between a musician and severely disabled or congenital deafblind children Birgit Kirkebaek VIKOM Centre, Copenhagen

Introduction In case of unsuccessful establishment of contact in the meeting with people with functional impairment, we often have recourse to an external organization of the interaction. This may result in isolated training based on behavioural therapeutic approaches1 or it may result in day programmers, structured to a degree, which decreases considerably2 the influence of the child, the young person or the adult. This chapter focuses on the pedagogical significance for special education of the new infant paradigm and of a more biological minded orientation. It is based on an ongoing project called “Establishment of shared experience through improvisation; an aesthetic perspective between a musician and severely disabled and/or congenital deafblind children”. It will be emphasized that the findings, by Colwyn Trevarthen and other researchers, of a connection – a link – between music and communication may help many children with severe disabilities, children whom we today are treating with behaviour-oriented training strategies. This is because an aesthetic approach necessitates that all expressions have to be seen and taken seriously. The turning point of the project is an approach to the personal meeting, which emanates from musical improvisation.3 The project originated from an experience, which showed that Cathrine Lervig, musician, is able to establish contact and communication with young persons and adults with congenital deafblindness faster and on a higher qualified level than the pedagogues of the persons in question. Through this project we wish to examine how musical interaction between

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Cathrine Lervig and six children with severe functional impairments develop and which significance this may have for the special pedagogy.

What is the project about? The project is about what is ahead and under the words and the language in the human interaction. It is about the congenital musical, which includes the social and the emotional in the relation. It is about that which is one cut deeper than alteration of turns. It is about rediscovering the basic musical and takes a starting point in the congenital rhythmic pulse, which all humans are endowed with and the physical experiences, which all interaction arises from. All children with or without disability have a vital and basic experience with the body, the sounds, the sent, the movement, the touch and the symbiosis with the motherly organism.

Which basic musical elements form the congenital musical? The musical elements that we respond to and which are ahead of the word and also behind the word are: speech, variation of voice, rhythm, dynamic (whispering, yelling), pause, vocal pitch, articulation, temper, science of gestures, facial expressions, repetitions and imitation. However, it is also about theme and falling in and the archetypical sounds, which exist from the beginning: sighs, grasp, complaint, breathing etc.

Basic hypotheses, material and methods of the project The basic hypotheses of the project are as follow: – – –

Music and communication are two sides of the same coin. Increased awareness on how the elements of music may enrich the communication. The relation is balanced on mutual sincerity through musical improvisation.

Follow-on hypotheses which are important for the issue, namely Establishment of shared experience through musical improvisation have been advanced on the basis Cathrine Lervig’s music theoretical insight and supported by a number of theories (Trevarthen 2000; Björkvold 1992; Bråten 1998, 2000; Lorentzen 2001, 2003; Sollied & Kirkebæk 2001; Stern 2004, and others): –

Instead of looking at the child and the situation from outside, as a third part, and in advance consider how we wish the child to react, we must be in the sit-

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–

uation, share it with the child and hereby make it important through inclusion of the rhythm of the body, the sound of the voice, the dance of movements. We must not only accept, but also entirely appreciate sounds, movements and rituals, different from normally seen and heard, and use them as a starting point in the communication.

In the video material scrutinized so far the reason mentioned above and followon hypotheses lead to following preliminary postulates interesting for the (special) pedagogy: – –

–

–

That external structure such as schemes programs and symbols do not necessarily lead to inner structure and shared meaning. That the individually used communication “tool”, the tool an adult is using to create meaning, must be developed to a high level such as Cathrine Lervig’s use of her voice. That musical elements such as tempo, pitch, variation of voice, dynamic, pause, vocal pitch, articulation, drama, gestures, repetition and imitation must be included in the teamwork. That it is important to understand that we do not only imitate the expressions of each other, we complete them too, extend them – and return to the known.

Cathrine Lervig seeks through wordless singing and musical improvisation to establish a shared dialogic room of sounds, rhythm and movements based on the expressions of each individual child. This is a kind of singing, inspired by Saamish jojk and African Ngoma. Ngoma is a total-concept of perception, involving the expansion of the moment in rhythm, movement, singing etc (Bjørkvold 1992). The purpose of the project is to find new special pedagogical understanding of the basic factors involved, when trying to establish contact, co-action and communication with disabled children. These children are in a vulnerable situation because of the uncertainty, which their functional impairments cause, people around them, and because of their difficulties in interacting in an understandable way. Cathrine Lervig, musician, and Birgit Kirkebæk, researcher and Doctor of pedagogic, are responsible of the project. The project material is partly based on a pre-study of video analysis of Cathrine’s interaction with seven young persons and adults, who are congenital deafblind; partly on video recordings of Cathrine’s interaction with three children with multiple disabilities from Rosenvængets School and three pupils from Geelsgaard School’s department for deafblind children. These six pupils each had ten one-to-one lessons of about half an hour with Cathrine. There is app. 30 hours of video recordings to be used in the analysis. Besides this we have app. 10 hours of recordings of the concerts Cathrine gave for all pupils and staff when she visited the two schools.

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An important methodical turning point is that we continuously compare Cathrine Lervig’s “inside out” perspective with Birgit Kirkebæk’s “outside in” perspective. There is an essential difference between being in the situation and looking at it from the outside; there is also a big difference between experiencing the session, and watching the cuts: As “video watchers” we do not experience what is going on out outside the screen in the same way as the participants in the session.

The importance of seeking to create meaning without guaranteeing that it will lead to a shared meaning One of the elements that parents noticed watching the video recordings of Cathrine Lervig’s co-action with their children is that no sounds and no movements are wrong. In Cathrine’s improvisation she seeks to start from the child’s movement or sound and integrates this to give it space and meaning in the interaction. Cathrine Lervig starts creating meaning in her musical improvisation without knowing whether it will lead to a shared meaning. She seeks to create a language here and now in the situation. She is going “from outside and in”, where we as professional social pedagogues traditionally move the other way. We start with the meaning instead of taking our starting point in creating the meaning.

The psychobiological founded source of musicality of the human being Colwyn Trevarthen describes the psychobiological grounded source of musicality of the human, as an immanent part of the unique way the human being is moving. Gestures and rhythmic narrative expressions communicating intentions are being controlled by dynamic emotional processes in the brain, which forms the basis of the human intersubjectivity and its musicality.4 Face and hand have similar dynamic dimensions as vocal expressions. The musicality of the movement is an essential inherited capacity in our brains, bodies and mind that is constructed to develop, imagine, feel emotionally, remember and recognize impulses and narratives. Trevarthen writes that we all have a spontaneous emotionally loaded need for sharing impulses of movements and perceptual imaginations with others. A person creates a meaning in everything that he/she does with deliberate interest and innovative purpose. Trevarthen refers to case studies carried out by Mary Catherine Bateson which show that musical improvisation, musical experiences and participation in musical interaction have essential importance for both premature children as well for people with advancing disorders or autism or learning disabilities and for people of all ages. He points out that before you can start training speech and social skills, it is necessary to activate the natural common

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spontaneous motives for common activities and emotional commitment; this is where musical approach plays a decisive role. This is the exact situation that Cathrine Lervig is able to illustrate as a musician in the project in question: – – – –

She seeks to hit the rhythm through musical improvisation and tempo, which her co-singer is able to maintain as a continuous whole. She synchronizes her movements with the movements of her partner and is timing them. Together with the child she creates a shared (aesthetical) expression through her intersubjective timing of tempo, rhythm and sound. A shared, meaningful story is created, focusing on varied emotional qualities, allowing all expressions, which each is considered a valuable contribution to the shared story.

Interaction and shared experience In a previous research project on interaction and shared experience between parents and severely disabled young children and infants in Denmark (Sollied & Kirkebæk 2001), a video analysis isolated a number of variables focusing on the child’s emotional expressions, dyadic expressions, triadic playing, turn taking, shared experience, exploration and themes (stories). These focus points are together with improvisation theoretical ideas used in the analysis of the video recordings mentioned earlier. March Wittmann’s and Ernst Pöppel’s research on time and timing, rhythm and tempo is significant for the project, proving that there is a general temporal principle in the interpersonal communication, which is biologically founded.5 The communication between mother and child is according to Stephen Malloch characterized by three musical components: rhythmic pulse, quality of voice and story. Pulse is the fixed line of expressive events in time e.g. that the mother gives time to the child to answer. Quality is the melody and sound contours of vocalization, which is equivalent to tempo of the physical gestures. The story is the combination of pulse and quality, which allows mother and child to share spirits, experience and emotions.6 The ability to enter a shared frame of timing is according to Benjamin Schögler the essence itself of our communication nature (cf. also Schögler and Trevarthen, this volume). The mother and child improvise in the interaction. They share a traditional children’s song by creating, sharing and remembering a rhythmic narrative.7 It seems that in her work with the children involved, Cathrine works in a similar way with the rhythmic narratives arising in the interaction.

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The esthetical perspective The concept of aesthetics was invented in the mid-18th Century. At that time it was used in general about sensory perception and took part in the discussion of the relationship between sensory and logical realization. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) considered aesthetics a philosophical discipline. The idea, that it is the relation between the piece of artwork and the participant that pronounces the aesthetic verdict, came from him. This must be seen in contrast to the belief that there is an objective way to acknowledge the quality of a work of art. In the 19th and 20th century aesthetics were interpreted more narrowly, and from a more philosophical point of view. Now the focus was directly aimed at the object of art, rather than being at the relationship between the viewer and the work. In German philosophy, art played a particular role. Art was said to be in a privileged relation with truth, as something able to uncover falseness and superficiality – an example of someone with this perception is Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). In the 20th century interest has again gathered around a wider understanding of aesthetics and the relation between work of art and the recipient of it. One is talking about the aesthetic product and its influence on the subject, and the subject’s perception and use of the art, seen in relation to the culture to which the individual belongs. Aesthetic means to feel or to sense. In the 17th Century philosophers talked about “the recognition of a new area of experience which does not wind up with rationally controllable knowledge, but concerns our sensibility towards the individual appearance of situation”.8 The French philosopher Michel Foucault describes the existence of aesthetics as “the individual’s form conscious formalization of his life”, but also emphasizes that the Antique ideal of aesthetics of life has been replaced by an individualized art of self-creation which separates the ideal from the social.9 The German philosopher Heidegger speaks aesthetically about the work of art as “the initiation of the truth”. Immediately these quotations tell something about the hypotheses formulated now, as expressed by these questions: – –

– –

Which kind of esthetical consciousness is developed in people who – due to their impairments – grow up under other conditions than “normally”? What happens when the esthetical dimension is separated from the social? – When the surroundings do not see the esthetical dimension in expressions different from normally seen? Can we as professionals change and extend our understanding of the esthetical in spite of the theoretical and practical knowledge already acquired? Which kind of “setting” of life do we meet in congenital deafblind children and children with multiple disabilities that we interact with?

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–

Heidegger is calling the work of art for “the initiation of the truth”. What type of art are we creating when the meeting with the disabled children becomes a success?

The Norwegian psychologist Per Lorentzen (2003) helps us to understand these issues in his new book, which deals with “Interaction and communication with adults with learning disabilities”.

Using something else than training as a starting point or laissez faire Per Lorentzen tells in his book about “different” persons he has met; there is the man who can spin his belt around his arm in a very sophisticated way; the woman whose door to the world is a fascination of balloons; people with autism who flourish when a music therapist use their natural rhythms as starting point. He is engaged in explaining what happens when we turn our acquired professional conduct upside down and do something different from what we are originally trained to do. When we take our starting point in things that are already important to the person with whom we are, regardless that it may be spinning a belt around the arm or blowing up balloons instead of starting with a decision of the goal and the kind of normal behaviour that we would like to reach through training and acquirement of skills. From an esthetical perspective you may say that it is a matter of perfection of the expression that the other person shows you by seeing it, accepting it as important as well as sharing and develop the fascination of fellowship. As humans we have an emotional and experience distance to others, but usually we can break this barrier by sharing emotions and experiences. This may be difficult to people with functional impairment to do the same; to experience emotional reactions as a part of a shared social activity where we partly relieve each other emotionally and partly share experiences. In case there is no active fellowship, if there is focus on emotions as splinted actions, emotions will remain un-communicated with the result of large existential loneliness and frustration. In his new book Lorentzen (2003) will introduce a new perspective on learning disability. This means that he will replace the individualistic view on functional impairment with a relational view. This means that an essential understanding of intellectual impairment cannot be accepted as the explanation of human behaviour, but continently the behaviour is perceived with a reasoned, dyadic and dialogic perspective. He asks what does it take to redefine deviant behaviour to social acceptable behaviour and how do we include it in community? This is the very question that we also focus on in the project “Establishment of shared experience through improvisation”.

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Lasse, an example Cathrine Lervig describes her lessons with an eight-year-old boy named Lasse, who is blind and severely hearing impaired as follows: First she is uncertain of the quality of the video tape, which she finds “shaken” and unclear. Gradually she experiences the video in a very different way: “the video record of the lesson is very special, I will describe it as a piece of art. It is not a film with Lasse and Cathrine. It is the atmosphere between us. Sometimes we disappear from the screen. But arms, legs, shoulders and shirts acting in the empty room make it a room with magic and atmosphere: the atmosphere between us, the room where things are happening”. The communication between Lasse and Cathrine Lervig is concentrated and through her analysis she finds points as follow:

Lasse’s interaction / challenges through the process with: From Lasse and I using our voices in the first lessons: we take turn, we must keep an invisible flow while the other is on; Till we use the dance more and more in the latest lessons: our expressions are parallel and we remain in this condition all the time = flow. Lasse is dancing: he is sitting on his bottom as a tipped V. He keeps the basic rhythm in body and melody sounds in arms and with hands (sometimes arms and hands have each their sounds). But the co-ordination is clearly a whole. Just like us dancing: our feet hit the floor in a basic rhythm, head, arms and hands etc. have other patterns within the frame of the basic rhythm. Cathrine Lervig stresses the following facts in the experienced interaction: – – – – – –

– –

Concentration. Lasse listens and acts. Lasse is being listened and responded to. Lasse expresses his emotions, exchanges emotions and shares emotions with another person. There is a constant flow: maintain close contact with the other, he is dancing, I am singing. Dynamic: Experience and accompanying each other through the emotional process: experiencing to go with another on a trip to several emotional outbursts in “the secure room” of the music. Allowing the other to take the lead: to see life from the angle of another human being; trust another person and follow her in her emotional expressions. Take the lead himself; be a part of the decisions made; lead the other through events which are meaningful from his point of view; having influence on the course of the emotional events, meaning what we are going through, which way we are going.

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–

– –

Suggest something new, take initiatives, go all out: in the safe room of music, Lasse may go all out with something; maybe it is understood, held and followed up, maybe not. Maybe it is the starting point of something unexpected. Choose and challenge: Lasse chooses what he wants to respond to, related to what I offer him. Pauses: Have breaks: Lasse needs breaks: I wake him by touching him with my hands. He receives these moves.

Lasse’s dance. Cathrine Lervig describes Lasse’s dance as his very own expression. He has never seen anyone dancing, as he is completely blind. Lasse cannot walk or crawl. But he can sit down and dance. In his dance he is using many sides of himself. – –

He experiences that his initiatives are responded to meaning that another person holds him and they create something together. Cathrine Lervig writes, that “in the dance Lasse has found his own expression, an expression able to match my expression and challenge with the same strength. He wouldn’t be able to use his voice in the same way, since he has a weaker voice than mine.”

The example illustrates many of the points of this article. Concerning special pedagogical efforts the new infant paradigm of teaching children with functional impairments, means a revolution in regard to taking the starting point in the relation and the early contact patterns. However, the question is, have we spend enough time and energy on understanding the musical qualities from which the mother-child contact arises? If it is a question about creating meaning and through improvisation open up for each other’s perception of the world, this is not only a new infant paradigm coming up but also an aesthetical paradigm characterized by the fact, that the expressions of the Other are taken so seriously that improvisation and musical elements are given space not only in the establishment of contact but also as important parts of further development of contact and communication.

Acknowledgment The project is a co-operation between two research centers: Videnscenter for Børn og Unge med Multihandicap (VIKOM – Research Centre for Young People and Children with Multiple Disability) and Videnscenter for døvblindfødte (VCDBF – Resource Center on Congenital Deafblindness).

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 Birgit Kirkebaek

Notes . See an example of this in the article: Elin Andreasen, Bjarne Øyen: “Etablering av funksjonelle ferdigheter hos barn med multifunksjonshemning” (Establishment of functionary skill by child with multiple disabilities). Spesialpedagogikk 8 – 2003:& 28–33 (Norsk Tidsskrift). . Read the critics of the circumstance in: Carol Potter, Chris Whittaker: Enabling Communication in Children with Autism. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. London and Philadelphia 2001. . Since the eighties there is an increased focus on creative and artistic entrance angles on the area of learning disability, which will give room for personal development through artistic expression. Examples to be mentioned are the theatre group of day training school of Limfjordsskolen, Karavana, The Art School in Copenhagen, The Art Museum Gaia in Randers and many others. . Colwyn Trevarthen (Department of Psychology, The University of Edinburgh): “Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000. . Marc Wittmann and Ernst Pöppel (Institute of Medical Psychology, Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München, Germany): “Temporal mechanisms of the brain as fundamentals of communication – with special reference to music perception and performance.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000. . Stephen N. Malloch (Macarthur Auditory Research Centre Sydney, University of Western Sydney Macarthur, Australia): “Mothers and infants and communicative musicality.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000. . Benjaman Schögler (Department of Psychology, The university of Edinburgh): “Studying temporal co-ordination in jazz duets.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000. . Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, Vol. 20: 502 – with reference to Kant og Baumgarten. . cf. the chapter “Livet som kunstværk” (Life as art) i Dag Heede: Det tomme menneske (The empty human being). Introduction to Michel Foucault. Museum Tusculanums Forlag, Københavns Universitet 1992: 148.

References Bjørkvold, J.-R. (1992). Det musiske menneske (The Muse Within). København: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Bråten, S. (1998). Kommunikasjon og samspil – fra fødsel til alderdom (Communication and Interplay – from Birth to Old Age). Oslo: Tano Aschehoug. Bråten, S. (2000). Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn. Essays on Dialogue in Infant & Adult. Bergen: Sigma Forlag. Heede, D. (1992). Det tomme menneske. Introduktion til Michel Foucault (The empty human being. Introduction to Michel Foucault). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag.

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Kyndrup, M. et al. (2003). Kulturens Fremtid. Æstetik uden grænser (The future of the culture. Aestethic without borders). Statens Humanistisk Forskningsråd 2003. Lorentzen, P. (2001). Uvanlige barns språk (Exceptional childrens’ language). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Lorentzen, P. (2003). Fra tilskuer til deltaker. Samhandling og kommunikasjon med voksne utviklingshemmede (From onlooker to participation. Intercourse and communication with adult persons with intellectual disability). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Malloch, S. N. (2000). “Mothers and infants and communicative musicality.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000. Schögler, B. (2000). “Studying temporal co-ordination in jazz duets.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000. Sollied, S., & Kirkebæk, B. (2001). Samspil og samoplevelse (Interplay and intersubjective experience). Copenhagen: VIKOM 2001. Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton. Trevarthen, C. (2000). “Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: Evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000. Wittmann, M., & Pöppel, E. (2000). “Temporal mechanisms of the brain as fundamentals of communication – with special reference to music perception and performance.” Musicæ Scientiæ. Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication. The Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000.

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chapter 

To sing and dance together From infants to jazz Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen University of Edinburgh

Communicative musicality is part of us, the way we converse by moving Of all the ways we human beings share company, and communicate being alive, active and aware in our intricately mobile bodies, singing and dancing, the breath and activity of music, are the most elemental and persuasive. With them we celebrate friendship and tell the story of our experiences, hopes and beliefs. There are messages in the polyrhythmic way our two-legged bodies move with pulse and accents that can be varied to express the subtleties of will and consciousness to others, and music seems to be a special manifestation of human skill. We are different from other animals in this, but the foundations for all human cleverness in moving were laid down in the moving of creatures that evolved long ago. We need to trace the development and cultivation of human moving by comparison of its principles with those that guide all animal actions. A beginning can be made by describing how infants, very lively but naive human beings, move in musical ways. As soon as they can stand, toddlers dance to the rhythm of music. Newborns alert to the pulse of a parent’s affectively intoned voice and can respond in synchrony (Malloch 1999). Babies only a few months old alert and turn to the sound of a song or instrumental music, and then share the tempo and melody, vocalizing in harmony, especially on final phrases, swaying the body and beating out an ‘intrinsic motive pulse’ with arms and legs (Trevarthen 1999; Mazokopaki & Trevarthen 2007). Sharing body games with song is a favourite pastime of happy parents with 4- to 6-month-olds all over the world (e.g. Takada 2005). Now it has been shown that a premature baby, two months short of a full term gestation, has, not only a coherent body sense, but a precise sense of the rhythm of ‘talk’ and can exchange little calls with a parent in sensitive improvisation of syllables in a shared or ‘co-constructed’ phrase of thinking (Figure 1). This previ-

Figure 1. Innate ‘speech’ rhythms: A newborn infant, now 2 months premature, in an ICU in Holland, communicates with her father who is ‘kangarooing’ her under his shirt. When she makes clear calls with her immature vocal system, her father imitates the sounds closely. Both pitch their sounds a little above Middle C (C4), around E. After the first exchange of one sound each, they generate a 4-second ‘phrase’ of short (c. 0.3 sec.) sounds alternating at a ‘syllable’ frequency, with intervals between 650 and 850 millseconds, i.e. around andante. (See spectrograph on the lower right). Then a series of single utterances are made. When the father does not respond, the infant makes 3 sounds at phrase length intervals (4 sec.), the first weak and the others louder, before he replies. The infant has an intrinsic time sense for syllables and phrases. (From a video by Saskia van Rees (van Rees & De Leeuw 1993). Spectrograph by Stephen Malloch.)

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To sing and dance together 

ously unknown time sense and musical talent of a maximally naive human being (wrongly conceived by medical and psychological science as at a stage without conscious awareness or intersubjective sympathy) give us a new understanding of the roots of human consciousness (Trevarthen & Reddy 2006). This understanding recognizes that clever minds live in moving bodies, that emotions are essentially part of the appreciation of what movements can do, and that thoughts originate as projects for moving with conscious acceptance of what occurs in perception of an outside world (Varela et al. 1991; Gallese & Lakoff 2005). It also gives us a new psychobiology of culture, how we move together to create meaning, not by imitating movements or joint attention to objects, but by sympathy for the motives and emotions of one another’s actions, by negotiation of roles in intelligent and inventive acting (Donald 2001; Trevarthen 2004a, b). In the second year, when language is still rudimentary, a ‘children’s musical culture’ (Björkvold 1992) flourishes among peers, made by the toddlers as they invent themes of play. They import or imitate a few ‘standard forms’ of music from the adult word, but mostly they are inventing and sharing a wide range of vocal and gestural performance, with a natural and free musicality of breath, voice and the whole body moving. Knowing that the mind is ‘embodied’ (Varela et al. 1991), designed to work in well-timed collaboration with the weight and mobility of all the limbs together, helps understanding of the wonderful sympathy all animal brains have for movements of other animals – how we, and animals too, are naturally intersubjective, making social collaboration by sensing in movements both intentions that formulate them, and the emotions that modulate and evaluate them. In the human case there is a new ability to make up rituals and language, for inventing stories and techniques for acting to change the world – an ability to make culture by ‘miming’ fantastical projects in the art of communicating (Donald 2001). Even a baby has special biological functions, anatomical features and physiological motivating processes of body and brain, which make cooperative communication and cultural learning a specially human need (Trevarthen 2001a, b, 2004).

Innate rhythms and expressions of relating The discovery of infant intersubjectivity, or the ability of young infants to enter into the dynamic experience of a mother’s moving by sharing a dialogue of vocal, facial and gestural expressions, came from close observation of how matching rhythms of movement were shared (Trevarthen 1998). Descriptive micro-analyses of film, and oculograms of eye movements, showed how rhythmic were all the infant’s movements of looking and reaching out with arms and hands and legs and feet to nearby objects (Trevarthen 1974, 1984). From birth, infants’ move rhyth-

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mically with integrated purpose – and the fundamental pulse and accelerations of the movements appeared to match those of spontaneous and intuitive adult expressions (Trevarthen 1986). In other words, infants and adults are matching or sympathetic rhythmic performers. A mother talking with her infant presents a dance of head turns, facial movements and hand gestures, and a singing voice. Infant and mother both exhibit the polymodal coherence of action in one mind time, as described by the phenomenologists (Michotte 1962; Merleau-Ponty 1982). Only later do they learn to attend with critical focus of attention to ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’ or ‘touching’ with one modality at a time, using specially limited forms of exploratory moving to ‘fine tune’ skilful actions, and to learn new ones. From the beginning, the fundamental rhythms of infant and adult match. By this equality of time sense they can dialogue efficiently, anticipate one another’s expressions, alternate and synchronize utterances or gestures precisely, and ‘attune’ to one another’s emotions (Stern et al. 1985; Beebe et al. 1985). The tensions and grace of each gesture can be appreciated between them in ‘felt immediacy’ (Bråten 1988), because their minds are imagining moving in time and space by matching or ‘corresponding’ processes. Thus it was demonstrated by a handful of independent studies around 1970 that the development of human communication of purposes, interests, and feelings, and ultimately the celebration of myths, narratives of purpose and strategies of ideas as well as the use of language, is founded on and intimate sympathy for patterns of expressive moving (Bateson1971, 1975; Stern 1971, 1974; Trevarthen 1974, 1979). All parts of the body obeyed the same sources of muscular activation, what the Russian physiologist Bernstein (1967) had called the ‘Sollwert’ or command to move, moving to the beat of one ‘ecphorator’ or ‘conductor’. The acoustic analyses of vocal exchanges in protoconversation and mothers’ songs by Malloch (Malloch et al. 1997; Malloch 1999) have confirmed these expressive parameters, enriching our appreciation of how the changing pulse and expressive modulations of a mother’s voice match the rhythm and accelerations of her infant’s arm movements, and revealing the precision of timing for the narratives of their vocal interactions and imitations (Figure 2). While recognizing the conservation of rhythms in human motor activity through all stages of development