A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists.

The study of the emergence of pretend play in developmental psychology has generally been restricted to analyses of children’s play with toys and everyday objects. The widely accepted criteria for establishing pretence are the child’s manipulation of object identities, attributes or existence. In this paper we argue that there is another arena for pretending—playful pretend teasing—which arises earlier than pretend play with objects and is therefore potentially relevant for understanding the more general emergence of pretence. We present examples of playful pretend teasing in infancy before and around the end of the first year, involving pretend communicative gestures, mis-labelling and almost non-compliance with prohibitions. We argue that the roots of pretence not only lie earlier in human infancy than generally acknowledged, but also are rooted in playful emotional exchanges in which people recognise and respond to violations of communicative gestures and agreements.

We welcome Belli's (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2022, 36, 477) comments on our double misinformation research and the opportunity to discuss the involved processes. We agree that our studies do not rule out (some of) the interference mechanisms specified by Belli (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2022, 36, 477)-because they were never designed for this purpose. Instead, the logic of our studies is at a molar level, potentially involving different molecular-level interference or non-interference mechanisms. We concede that specific interference mechanisms may operate in specific circumstances but maintain that our new research approach-adding further contradictory misinformation on top of existing misinformation to reduce the misinformation effect-does pose a challenge for interference accounts in general.

This chapter argues that the emotions are a constitutive part of the development of social understanding and therefore that it is deeply problematic to conceptualize emotion as psychologically separate from the emergence of our understanding of persons as subjects. In other words, the authors argue that emotion should not be seen as an “independent variable” in the development of social understanding. Emotions conceived more broadly as vitality affects are inevitable qualities of all actions and are categorically different from what are typically called “mental states.” Further, others’ emotions are rarely experienced in a spectatorial manner; they are more typically experienced in participation and involvement. The tendency to conceive of emotions as independent variables in the development of social understanding is an unfortunate instantiation of the traditional division in psychology between cognition, conation, and affection. The thrust of this chapter is a challenge to this traditional division in the development of social understanding.

General Audience Summary This research extends existing research on the impact of post-event misinformation on eyewitness memory. After witnessing an event, eyewitnesses may be exposed to misinformation (e.g., from other witnesses, the media, and possibly even the police), which has the potential to distort how the witnesses remember the event at a later point in time (e.g., when making a statement). This is long known (e.g., through Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues' groundbreaking work) and has been investigated and confirmed in hundreds of studies. Our new contribution to this field is to draw attention to a possible real-life situation that (to our knowledge) has never been investigated in eyewitness misinformation research: What happens if witnesses are exposed to multiple pieces of misinformation that contradict each other (in addition to contradicting a detail of the original event)? For example, a Volvo that was involved in a witnessed car accident might be described by a co-witness as a Peugeot and by still another co-witness as a Toyota. There is potential for this to happen: Often, there are multiple witnesses to crimes/accidents, and extending beyond the eyewitness case there is certainly a lot of partly contradictory misinformation on social media, etc. We reasoned that becoming aware of inherent contradictions between pieces of misinformation may reduce the credibility of the misinformation and thus limit its impact on memory. This is partly what we found in three studies-but we also found an opposite process: When misinformation is more subtle and less likely to be noticed in the first place, then being exposed to multiple pieces of misinformation increases the chances that at least one of them will be noticed and subsequently incorporated in the witness's memory. Our study highlights the complex effects of multiple misinformation and suggests that further exploration of this intriguing phenomenon is worthwhile. Eyewitnesses may be exposed to multiple, mutually contradictory pieces of misinformation. In the simplest case of double misinformation, an original detail is targeted by misinformation A and then by misinformation B, which contradicts A. In such situations, two separate mechanisms may produce opposite effects on eyewitness remembering: (1) multiple chances to be misled enhance the misinformation effect and (2) noticing contradictions between multiple pieces of misinformation undermines credibility and decreases the effect (all relative to the effect of a single piece of misinformation). Across three experiments, we found support for both of these effects and confirmed an important moderating factor in an item analysis: The first mechanism dominates at low levels of misinformation (encoding and subsequent) availability, and the second at high levels (as this facilitates noticing contradictions). This means that, ironically, more misinformation can be less effective (in terms of distorting eyewitness memory or factual knowledge) if it contradicts itself.

Abstract In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.

Taking a psychological and philosophical outlook, we approach making as an embodied and embedded skill via the skilled artisan’s experience of having a corporeal, nonlinguistic dialogue with the material while working with it. We investigate the dynamic relation between maker and material through the lens of pottery as illustrated by wheel throwing, claiming that the experience of dialogue signals an emotional involvement with clay. The examination of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of habit, the skilled intentionality framework, and material engagement theory shows that while these theories explain complementary aspects of skillful engagement with the material world, they do not consider the dialogic dimension. By way of explanation, we submit that the artisan’s emotional engagement with the material world is based in openness and recognition and involves dialogue with the material. Drawing on the intimate relationship between movement and emotion, it promotes an open-ended manner of working and permits experiencing with the material, acting into its inherent possibilities. In conclusion, we suggest that dialogue, whether verbal or nonverbal, constitutes a primary means for making sense of the world at large, animate and inanimate.

Questioning traditions and conventions was part of the postmodern order of the 1980s and 1990s. Some social scientists were questioning whether universal laws characterize human functioning and dev...

Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking or smiling. The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants’ reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other, and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants’ understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s participatory sense-making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants’ reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophistication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.

Emotions remain something of a mystery for most of us even when we accept their centrality to development in general and to infancy in particular. I make 2 arguments in this paper. One: that the most crucial thing about emotions is that they allow mutuality of engagement with other emotional beings-not only evoking responses, but also provoking further emotions in others. Mutual engagements-sometimes called moments of meeting or encounters with other minds-can be transformational. They allow us to be "seen," to be "known" by others, and in achieving that, they allow us to be persons. Some key phenomena of emotional encounters in infancy are discussed to illustrate this point. Evidence of such meetings is abundant in our lives and needs a committed focus for study within developmental psychology. Two: that we need to open out the idea of emotions (as well as probe at a microlevel) and the terms affect or affectivity might help encompass a greater breadth. Daniel Stern's "vitality affects" and Ben Anderson's "affective atmospheres" both cross disciplinary boundaries in contemplating emotional phenomena. It seems crucial for developmental psychology to incorporate such different aspects-neurological, kinematic, situational and sociopolitical-into discussions of emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Advice about the age for introducing complementary food to infants varies across European countries. Little is known about the actual practice of complementary feeding (CF) in the face of different advice from health professionals within Europe, nor about the impact of different ages of onset of CF on infant food acceptance. This longitudinal study aimed to explore CF in two European communities, British and Italian and to investigate whether infant age of CF influenced infant food acceptance. Forty-six mothers were interviewed before the onset of CF (Visit 1), one week after CF (Visit 2), and at 7 months of infant age (Visit 3), and infant mealtimes were video-recorded at Visits 2 and 3. CF occurred in both groups at a similar range of ages. CF age did not affect infant food acceptance at either Visit. Advice on CF should be based on cultural and individual differences.

Drawing on research from conversation analysis and developmental psychology, we point to the existence of "supporters" of morally responsible agency in everyday interaction: causes of our behavior that we are often unaware of, but that would make good-enough reasons for our actions, were we made aware of them.

Children's relations to objects are often seen as operating in a physical, asocial realm distinct from the sociocultural realm of other people. The most influential theories of autism exemplify this assumption, emphasizing problems in relating to other people alongside relatively intact dealings with objects. This article challenges the notion of a rigid social-material divide. It examines evidence of widespread disruption in the object use of children with autism, alongside developmental ecological and sociocultural research highlighting the mutuality of our relations to people and things, to argue that difficulties in relating to other people should themselves lead us to expect corresponding problems in object use.In support of this argument findings are presented from an empirical study comparing the triadic (parent-object-infant) play of children with autism (ages 1-6) and their parents to that of developmentally matched typical and Down syndrome dyads. Children's response to parental invitations and the proportion of time each child spent engaged with objects and/or their parents were compared. In contrast to the children in the comparison groups, those with autism were more likely to show no interest in parental invitations to act on an object in a particular way due to being preoccupied with their own use of an object and less likely to comply with such invitations. They also spent less time jointly engaged with their parent and an object and more time unengaged or focused exclusively on their own use of an object. These findings are discussed in the context of Gibson's (1979) concept of affordances to further our understanding of the social mediation of object use in children with and without autism and the role unusual child-object relations in autism might play in disrupting ongoing interaction.

The transition from milk to complementary food is a crucial but difficult process, requiring considerable adult sensitivity. We know little about the relationship between maternal feeding behaviors and infant willingness to eat at the onset of complementary feeding (CF), and we know even less about how these patterns might vary across cultures. Thirty‐seven dyads (15 from the UK and 22 from Italy) took part in a longitudinal study, during which mealtimes were video‐recorded 1 week after the onset of CF (Time 1) and at 7 months of infant age (Time 2). The first five minutes of mealtimes were coded for maternal feeding behaviors, for infant willingness to eat, and for synchrony in feeding. Maternal vocal communications (MVCs) and attention‐directing acts (ADAs) during the whole mealtime were also coded. Infant willingness to eat was significantly related to synchrony and co‐eating, suggesting the importance of sensitivity and empathy during feeding as in other parent–infant interactions. The frequency of maternal ADAs varied between nationalities and, contrary to current advice, did not relate negatively to infant willingness to eat. These patterns and variations suggest the need to consider CF as a contextually variable and sensitive foundation for feeding relationships.

The question of the relation between the collective and the individual has had a long but patchy history within both philosophy and psychology. In this chapter we consider some arguments that could be adopted for the primacy of the we, and examine their conceptual and empirical implications. We argue that the we needs to be seen as a developing and dynamic identity, not as something that exists fully fledged from the start. The concept of we thus needs more nuanced and differentiated treatment than currently exists, distinguishing it from the idea of a ‘common ground’ and discerning multiple senses of ‘we-ness’. At an empirical level, beginning from the shared history of human evolution and prenatal existence, a simple sense of pre-reflective we-ness, we argue, emerges from second-person I-you engagement in earliest infancy. Developmentally, experientially and conceptually, engagement remains fundamental to the we throughout its many forms, characterized by reciprocal interaction and conditioned by the normative aspects of mutual addressing.