Re: [xmca] Origin of infant communication

[Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>]

I have just been reading and catching up on these discussions about innate-or-not or perhaps innate-what regarding communication, engagement, imitation, reciprocity, responsiveness, "passivity", inter-subjectivity, readiness-for-ToM, etc.

I am not someone who has worked much in the neonatal literature, but I have thought for quite a long time about possible wrong turns in thinking about biology vs culture, brain and meaning, development and evolution, and had the benefit of years' worth of intensive conversations with a leading developmental and evolutionary theoretical biologist and an entree into some of the insider conversations in his networks.

I don't envy neonatal researchers their inherent data-interpretation dilemmas! :-)

As one or two people have already noted, it's really hard to know to what extent we impose our adult-culture views on the meaning, and even the function, of what neonates and perhaps more generally in-fants (pre-verbal) children do. I for one happen to think that theory-of-mind is just one of these cultural narratives, though I know that is not a popular view at present. More serious, and basic, is the question of just what it means when "imitation" happens. Is it "communicative"? is it automatic? is it "mirroring"? does it imply a kind of awareness of the other that we have as adults when we do it? is it a sort of functional proto-engagement? does it function to provoke more infant-directed action/attention by the adult? is it a precursor of later inter-subjectivity or just a transient early mode of behavior? and so on.

Among the other dilemmas that invest these issues is the possibility that neonates have response patterns which are specific to their newborn conditions (i.e. pro-survival), but which later fade away or are superseded by "higher" (more cortically complex) control, and whether "superseded" means still there but more complexly coordinated with possible changes of function, or just transient and replaced by other behaviors/responses that look superficially similar but don't share any mediating neural mechanisms with the neonate behaviors.

Of course there are also some strange logical loops in all this, as I think was suggested by someone here, such as that how adults interpret the infant behavior to some extent will play a role in the developmental progression (e.g in recruiting a behavior to a function, say mirroring to communication) even if the adult interpretation and response sequence is scientifically incorrect. Like chicken and egg, but worse!

Likewise for cross-species comparisons, both species-centric interpretations and evolutionary convergences/divergences. It is often noted that in many ways infant nonhuman primates are more like human primates (and so vice versa) and then divergences increase with developmental time. But what does this mean? No nonhuman primate today lies along the human evolutionary lineage, they are all on different branches. At a guess, in infancy or at birth all (including humans) are least differentiated from their nearest common ancestor at birth. Backtracking ontogeny and phylogeny at the same time is a very tricky exercise. We don't know for example if we all share the same proto-communicative behavior set and to what extent we develop communication (or meaning-making) by the same or different pathways. For example, just because humans have manual sign languages that are isomorphic (mostly) to our verbal languages doesn't mean that other primates build their signing capacity on the same underlying neuro-behavioral repertoires. Indeed probably not, as they don't have the same kinds of speech-center development, much less the whole wider brain-body habits and pathways for speech, whether speech develops in an individual human or not (as with deaf signers, etc.).

Finally, there is the very tricky issue of just what can be "innate". The old idea of innate was something genetically determined and active at birth, all referenced solely to the individual organism in isolation from any material-social environment. Nothing about that concept makes sense anymore, I think, not for any species. Nothing is genetically determined apart from whole-organism-in-environment-interactive dynamics from fertilization (at least) onwards. That something is active at birth is a matter of timing, partly accident (birth happens while lots of other developmental strands are on-going and to which birth as such may not be directly relevant), and partly functional: useful in going out of the womb, useful in being out in the world, useful in being in-mother's-arms, etc. Particular, individual "behaviors" are adult interpretations and carving out of distinct-to-adults "bits" from what is likely a more holistic, integrated "animacy" of the infant, the bits being the visible tips-of-the-iceberg for which a sounder interpretation of function would need to look at the whole berg. Meanwhile developmental strands are on-going on many timescales and many levels of biological organization, within and across the fictitious self-nonself boundary, and necessarily overlapping the moment of birth, and the initial weeks, and any longer timescale we care to identify.

What matters, I think, is not what the infant appears "able to do" at any given time, but rather the over-time developmental cumulations or sequences (chreods, in an older terminology, but minus the implication of full species-specific determinism, only envelopes of possibilities are set): what builds on what, and how? Just because A appears at a time prior to B, and has some resemblance to features of B does not mean that B builds on A. Development, like evolution, is branching. Some branches appear, develop, and then lose relevance (organismic and/or ecological) when they are not further intricated into larger, further-going systems and complexes. The actual precursors of a later functionally well-defined, culturally identified, behavior pattern, are, I think, more likely to either be very vague functionally, less differentiated and specifiable (and so less noticeable, visible to the adult-cultured eye) or quite functionally different and later re-purposed, re-contextualized -- rather than easily identified by their surface similarities to the later constructs. That view is based simply on the ways in which development and evolution tend to play their game with one another.

My admiration goes to those with the courage to pick their way through these thickets!

JAY.




Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke 

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093







On Apr 30, 2010, at 11:25 AM, Rod Parker-Rees wrote:

> Thanks Eric.
> 
> It is interesting that the ToM approach to explaining how we know about the hidden workings of other minds, described by Vasu Reddy as a third person approach, can itself be seen as being towards the systemising end of the spectrum proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen between the 'hyper-male', hyper systemising pole of extreme autism and the 'hyper-female', hyper empathising extreme seen in people with Williams syndrome - especially when compared with the more empathising model described by Reddy as a second-person approach.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Rod
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org [ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org]
> Sent: 30 April 2010 18:50
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Origin of infant communication
> 
> Hey Rod:
> 
> Your post got me thinking about the "theory of mind" regarding autism and
> the belief that people who are autistic lack the understanding that others
> have beliefs, attitudes and in behavior separate from the autistic person.
> The landmark study has the autistic in the room with someone else with a
> ball and a cap.  The autistic person is asked to leave the room and when
> they return the ball is gone.  The autistic person is asked where the ball
> has gone and without fail they do not know where it is.  Then when the hat
> is lifted and the ball is revealed the autistic person cannot even answer
> how the ball got under the hat.  They lack the ability to place abilities
> onto the other person apart from themselves.  That said here is a link to
> a perspective written by a person with autism regarding the "theory of
> mind":
> 
> http://iautistic.com/autism-myths-theory-of-mind.php
> 
> eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> 04/30/2010 12:14 PM
> Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
> 
> 
>        To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>        cc:
>        Subject:        RE: [xmca] Origin of infant communication
> 
> 
> Another (older) book which makes a similar case for a direct 'getting' of
> intersubjectivity, unmediated by what might be described as more cognitive
> processes, is Peter Hobson's 'The Cradle of Thought'. Hobson uses
> comparisons between chimpanzees, normally developing children and children
> with autism to argue that one of the major differences in the social
> experiences of autistic children is that although they may be able to work
> out what other people's expressions, intonation, gestures etc. reveal
> about their inner processes, they have to work this out, whereas normally
> developing (or 'neurotypical') children have a much more immediate
> knowledge - akin to empathy and mirror neuron responses. Interestingly,
> one of Hobson's experiments involved asking children to 'read' STILL
> photographs of faces showing emotional expressions (sometimes upside down,
> sometimes showing only eyes) even though, I would argue, the ability to
> read photographs and the ability to read moving faces would seem to be
> very different kinds of skills.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Rod
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf
> Of Larry Purss [lpurss@shaw.ca]
> Sent: 30 April 2010 14:32
> To: Activity eXtended Mind, Culture,
> Subject: [xmca] Origin of infant communication
> 
> Avis and Mike and Martin [and others on the infant theme]
> 
> What are the origins of infant engagement? I  want to give some ideas from
> Vasudevi Reddy. She writes
> "A second-person approach [being addressed by a YOU] seems not only
> explain infant behavior better than either a first person {I position} or
> a third person "spectator" approach. It also changes the lens through
> which we PERCEIVE the problem of other minds that is expressed in much of
> the developmental literature. [that is, as a spectatorial process of
> observation of mere behavior across a gap]  The important difference
> between a 2nd person approach and a 1st person approach is that the
> emphasis here is NOT on recognition of the SIMILARITY to self of other
> peoples acts, but, crucially, of the EXPERIENCE of a RECIPROCAL RESPONSE
> to the others acts. The gap between minds becomes hard to find in this
> re-embodiment and this re-embedding.
> Infants are capable of entering into dialogue [recognition and response]
> with other people remarkably early in life. {I would add this dialogical
> process EXPERIENCED recognition and response continues to INFORM
> communication throughout the lifespan}.
> 
> Reddy points out many philosophers take this 2nd person perspective [or
> lens]: W. James called it "being noticed", Bahktin, the recognition of an
> "answering consciousness", Hegel, the awareness of recognition, and Buber,
> the experience of the I-thou relation.
> 
> This 2nd person concept refers to more than just "interpersonal
> attraction", more than just a recognition of a SIMILARITY of another
> person to the self, and more than just an INFERENCE from observation of
> movements.
> THE YOU is radically implicated in a 2nd person stance.
> 
> Larry
> 
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