Summary |
Joint attention involves two (or more) subjects attending to
an event or object together, where the attention of each participant is to some degree dependent on the attention of the other. It is sometimes said that joint
attention is ‘wholly overt’ or ‘out in the open’ between the participants,
where this means that they are both fully aware that they are together
attending to the event or object (although so-called 'lean' accounts of joint attention, deny that this is a necessary condition for joint attention). A canonical example of joint attention would
be where two people are sitting opposite each other, discussing and observing
an object that lies between them. The phenomena can be contrasted with shared attention where two people are
each attending to an object, but are doing so separately, such that the attention
of each person is of no relevance to the other, and does not figure in their
experience. Philosophical discussions of joint attention have tended to
focus on two questions: firstly, how the apparent epistemic and phenomenological
openness of joint attention can be explained without recourse to a complex
series of overlapping and embedded mental states. Secondly, how joint attention
can be understood as providing a normative and evidential basis for
communication and joint action. Within cognitive science, joint attention has been discussed with relation to the nature of autism, the Theory of Mind debate, the development of communicative intentions and the development of word-learning in infants. |