Timothy P. Racine

The role of shared practice in joint attention

The infants participation in sequences of joint activity that require visual attention is usually seen as an outcome of and evidence for the existence of particular infant psychological competencies. In a review of the relevant literature, we suggest that what is presupposed in most theories of joint attention is the role that shared social practices play in understanding the mind. It is, in fact, with recourse to such practices that researchers theorize about the infants understanding of mind in the first instance. We argue: (1) the mind is not an entity that is separable from human activity; (2) knowledge of shared practices is what the developing agent requires to come to an understanding of their own mind and that of others; and (3) rather than searching for the best indicator of a true competence lying behind and necessary for joint attention, we should consider the various forms of interaction involving shared attention as constitutive of varying degrees of understanding. We consider the relevance of these arguments for contemporary social developmental theory.

Relations between Mother-child Talk and 3- to 5 Year-Old Children's Understanding of Belief: Beyond Mental State Terms to Talk about the Mind

In relating parent-child conversation to childrens social cognitive development, we examined how mother-child dyads talked about the psychological world. Seventy mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children made up a story about a series of pictures depicting a sequence of events involving a false belief. Mother-child talk was coded for the use of mental state terms as well as talk about important aspects of the depicted events. The children were given 2 false belief tasks. When age was controlled, mental state term use was associated with childrens false-belief understanding. However, when mental state terms and talk about the aspects of the false-belief component of the story were both taken into account, only talk about the false-belief section of the story accounted for significant additional variance in childrens false-belief understanding. We suggest that these results encourage a broader view of talk about the psychological world beyond an exclusive focus on the use of mental state terms.

Shared practices, understanding, language and joint attention

In responding to the commentaries from Hobson (2007), Moore (2007) and Rakoczy (2007), we first discuss the commonalities our approach has with other theories and then elaborate on the nature of shared practices and their relationship with language and understanding. We then address views of representation, arguing against an empiricist approach and for a constructivist, action-based account of knowledge and development. Finally, we briefly discuss implications following from our approach regarding how existing research would be reinterpreted and directions for new research.

Parent–child talk and children's understanding of beliefs and emotions

We examined the development of childrens understanding of beliefs and emotions in relation to parental talk about the psychological world. We considered the relations between parent–child talk about the emotions of characters depicted in a picture book, false belief understanding and emotion understanding. Seventy-eight primarily Caucasian and middle-class parents and their 3- to 5-year-old children participated (half boys and half girls). The emotions talked about were relatively simple, but the complexity of the situation varied in terms of whether or not an understanding of beliefs was required to understand the emotion. Talk about the belief-dependent aspects of the emotions of picture book characters predicted childrens false belief understanding, whereas talk about non-belief-dependent aspects of these emotions predicted childrens emotion understanding. We argue that these data suggest that the development of childrens understanding of beliefs and emotions is intertwined with learning to talk about the psychological world.

Cross-sectional and longitudinal relations between mother-child talk about conflict and children's social understanding

We examined the relations between the ways 48 mothers and their 3- to 5-year-olds talked about a conflict depicted in a picture book and their childrens current and subsequent level of social understanding. We distinguished explanatory talk, which directed attention to the actions that generated the conflict, from non-explanatory talk, which discussed the conflict in terms of, for example, making up or saying sorry. Controlling for child age and overall talk by mother, explanatory talk was positively associated with contemporaneous social understanding. Social understanding at time one was also positively associated with social understanding 30 months later. These data suggest that dialogue about conflict may be helpful for 3- to 5-year old childrens understanding of the mental world, to the extent that it facilitates their understanding of particular social situations.

How Useful Are the Concepts “Innate” and “Adaptation” for Explaining Human Development

Adaptationist thinking has played an important role in the life sciences, especially since the neo-Darwinian modern synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics that occurred in the 1930s. Adaptationist approaches focus on what a phenotype ‘‘is for’’ by reasoning about what particular adaptive problem it might have solved in an ancestral environment. This in turn leads to hypotheses regarding the manner in which the phenotype in question may have enhanced reproductive success. In the past 20 years or so, largely through the work of evolutionary psychologists, adaptationist explanation has become more common in psychology. During this same period of time, core knowledge explanations of human development have also increased in popularity. Such researchers conceive of the core capacities for which they marshal empirical evidence as the products of natural selection and, therefore, adaptations. In this article, I briefly describe these two approaches to human development and place their adaptationist programs in a historical context. I then describe recent developments that complicate adaptationist and innatist claims and briefly discuss the possibility of an alternative evolutionary meta-theory. In a general sense, evolutionary psychology can be understood as the study of the effect of evolutionary change on psychological development. It is sometimes capitalized as Evolutionary Psychology to single out the so-called Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology associated primarily with the theorizing of Tooby and Cosmides, but also Pinker, Buss and a few others [e.g., Buss, 1995; Pinker, 2003; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992]. Although my goal in this necessarily brief article is to discuss adaptationism more generally, I focus on evolutionary psychology because it lays out the basic assumptions that are in play when psychologists claim that a given phenotype is the result of an adaptation and is, accordingly, in some sense innate. In broad strokes, evolutionary psychology explains currently adaptive behavior – and sometimes maladaptive behavior through relying on mismatch arguments between our ancestral and modern environment – in terms of specific cognitive adaptations that are the product of the differential reproductive successes of our hominid ancestors. It is explicitly adaptationist because it explains human development by attempting to

The Evolution of Joint Attention: A Review and Critique

Joint attention can be defined as the ability to intentionally coordinate an attentional focus on some object or state of affairs with another. This capacity is believed by most theorists to be logically, developmentally, and evolutionarily prior to language and further forms of social cognition tied up with human social communication. However, although there has been a good deal of empirical and theoretical work on joint attention, there has been less attention paid to the evolution of joint attention in its own right. There has also been sustained debate concerning whether other primates can be said to engage in joint attention, which in turn conditions the evolutionary theories that are offered. In this chapter, we define and describe joint attention, discuss the skills it involves, and the extent to which we share these with other animals. Next, we review work that has been done on the evolution of joint attention and related capacities and classify it as a function of its mode of explanation. We then discuss the aforementioned forms of evolutionary explanation in the light of recent evolutionary theories and findings that question adaptationist thinking, and consider the potential relevance of non-adaptationist thinking for theoretical work on the evolution of joint attention.

A systems view on revenge and forgiveness systems

Applying a non-developmental evolutionary metatheory to understanding the evolution of psychological capacities leads to the creation of models that mischaracterize developmental processes, misattribute genes as the source of developmental information, and ignore the myriad developmental and contextual factors involved in human decision-making. Using an evolutionary systems perspective, we argue that revenge and forgiveness cannot be understood apart from the development of foundational human psychological capacities and the contexts under which they develop.

Conceptual Analysis and Rational Imitation

Paulus’ paper [this issue] is a timely summary and critique of the rational imitation explanation of infant imitative abilities at the end of the first year of life. This paper harkens back to a classic article by Haith [1998] concerning the ostensible perils of what researchers more generally call rich interpretations of infant behavior, which run the risk of ‘[o]ver-interpretation of findings as evidence for high-level cognitive operations (e.g., representation, reasoning, belief, expectations, surprise) in the absence of adequate definitions or anchoring observations or procedures’ [Haith, 1998, p. 168]. Rich interpretations are typically juxtaposed in turn with lean interpretations that seek to explain the identical behavior with causal mechanisms that require less sophistication and psychological complexity on the part of the infant. Theories are then constructed from such interpretations; perhaps the theory constrains the form of interpretation as well. Viewed in this light, Gergely and Csibra’s [2003; Csibra & Gergely, 2007] rational imitation theory can be classified as a rich interpretation of 12-month-old infants’ imitative abilities, whereas Paulus’ and similar accounts can be categorized as a lean interpretation. As a summary and critique of Gergely and Csibra’s rich view and related ones that Paulus touches on, and a defense, mainly by implication, of his preferred lean view, Paulus’ article nicely illustrates the debate on these issues and facilitates the comparison of different perspectives. Moreover, what is quite novel in this article is that in the evaluation and criticisms of rich interpretations of imitation, Paulus employs some methods of conceptual analysis, inspired by the work of the analytic philosophers Robert Brandom [1994] and Peter Hacker [2007; Bennett & Hacker, 2003].

Yes, There Is Little Hope in Theory of Mind Research

Montgomery’s article (this issue) contains a well-constructed and thought-provoking blend of conceptual analysis, metatheoretical contrast and critique, and empirical data illustrating a social constructivist perspective on the development of the use of the verb hope. There has been little discussion of the concept of hope in the empirical and theoretical literature, and I have learned a great deal from this paper. I hope, so to speak, that developmentalists will take up Montgomery’s well-considered suggestions for future research on this neglected topic. As one who has employed conceptual analysis in my own work [for a how-to guide, see Racine, 2015] and has investigated relations between children’s use of mental state language and social cognitive development [e.g., Tafreshi & Racine, 2016], including the application of the social constructivist perspective that Montgomery illustrates [e.g., Racine, Carpendale, & Turnbull, 2006, 2007], I will first use this commentary to put Montgomery’s work in context and explain its significance and implications. I then discuss the social constructivist metatheory from a more critical perspective by making some remarks about Montgomery’s use of Wittgenstein that he employs to justify social constructivism and critique theory-theory. I conclude with some reflections on the role of metatheoretical work in social cognitive developmental research.