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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, linguis-
tics, brain science and philosophy. The orientation of the Series is toward
developing new interdisciplinary and integrative approaches for the investiga-
tion, description and theory of consciousness, as well as the practical conse-
quences 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
 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
8

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 2006047978
isbn 978 90 272 5204 3 (Hb; alk. paper)

© 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
JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/03/2007; 16:00 F: AICR68CO.tex / p.1 (49-116)

Table of contents

Contributors ix
Introduction 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 21
Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen
chapter 2
Applying developmental and neuroscience findings on other-centred
participation to the process of change in psychotherapy 35
Daniel N. Stern
chapter 3
The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 49
Frans B. M. de Waal

Part II. Mirror neurons and origins of neurosocial support

of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity and altercentricity

chapter 4
Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity 73
Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese
chapter 5
Human mirroring systems: On assessing mind by reading brain
and body during social interaction 89
Riitta Hari
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 Table of contents

chapter 6
Cues on the origin of language: From electrophysiological data
on mirror neurons and motor representations 101
Luciano Fadiga and Laila Craighero
chapter 7
Altercentric infants and adults: On the origins and manifestations
of participant perception of others’ acts and utterances 111
Stein Bråten
chapter 8
From speech to gene: The KE family and the FOXP2 137
Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and Frédérique Liégeois

Part III. From preverbal to verbal intersubjectivity in child development

chapter 9
Intersubjectivity before language: Three windows on preverbal sharing 149
Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks
chapter 10
Early speech perception: Developing a culturally specific way
of listening through social interaction 175
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 201
Ivar Frönes
chapter 12
The intersubjectivity of imagination: The special case of imaginary
companions 219
Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

Part IV. Applications and therapeutic implications

chapter 13
When empathic care is obstructed: Excluding the child from the zone
of intimacy 237
Karsten Hundeide
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Table of contents 

chapter 14
Family disseminate archives: Intergenerational transmission
and psychotherapy in light of Bråten’s and Stern’s theories 257
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 269
Birgit Kirkebaek
chapter 16
To sing and dance together: From infants to jazz 281
Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen
chapter 17
On circular re-enactment of care and abuse, and on other-centred
moments in psychotherapy: Closing comments 303
Stein Bråten

Author index 315

Subject index 321
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Contributors

Stein Bråten sezione di Fisiologia Umana

Dept. of Sociology and Human Geography Via Fossato di Mortara 17/19, 44100 Ferrara
University of Oslo Italy
P.O. Box 1096 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway [email protected]
[email protected]
Pier Francesco Ferrari
Rechele Brooks Dept. of Neuroscience/Dept. of
Dept. of Psychology/Institute for learning Evolutionary and Functional Biology
and brain sciences Università di Parma
CHDD-Building, Room 373 Via Volturno 39, I-43100 Parma, Italy
University of Washington [email protected]
Box 357920, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
Ivar Frönes
[email protected]
Dept. of Sociology and Human Geography
Andrea Cabassi University of Oslo
Mental Health Department P.O. Box 1096 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway
Child Psychiatric Service [email protected]
U.O. Neuropsichiatria Inf. e Psicologia Vittorio Gallese
Clinica del’età evolutiva, – A/Usl de Parma Dipartimento di Neuroscienze – Sezione di
Via Verona 36 A, 43100 Parma, Italy Fisiologia, Università di Parma
[email protected] Via Volturno 39, I-43100 Parma, Italy
Barbara T. Conboy [email protected]
Dept. of Speech and Hearing Sciences Riitta Hari
Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning Brain Research Unit
Mailstop 357920, University of Washington Low Temperature Laboratory, and
Seattle, WA 98195, USA Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre
[email protected] Helsinki University of Technology
FIN-02015 HUT, Espoo, Finland
Laila Craighero
[email protected]
Università di Ferrara
Dipartimento S.B.T.A. Karsten Hundeide
sezione di Fisiologia Umana Dept. of Psychology
Via Fossato di Mortara 17/19, 44100 Ferrara University of Oslo
Italy P.O. Box 1094 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway
[email protected] [email protected]

Luciano Fadiga Birgit Kirkebaek

Università di Ferrara VIKOM Centre
Dipartimento S.B.T.A. Kongevejen 256 B 2830 Virum
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 Contributors

Copenhagen, Denmark Benjaman Schögler

[email protected] Perception in Action Laboratories PESLS
Dept. of Psychology
Giannis Kugiumutzakis University of Edinburgh
Laboratory of Psychology St. Leonard’s Land, Holyrrod Rd
Dept. of Philosophy and Social Studies Edinburgh EH8 EAQ, Scotland, UK
University of Crete, Rethymno, Gallos [email protected]
74100, Crete, Greece
[email protected] Daniel N. Stern
Faculty of Psychology
Patricia K. Kuhl
University of Geneva
Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning
Cornell University Medical School
Mailstop 357920
14 Ch. De Clairejoie, CH-1225
University of Washington
Chène-Bourg, Geneva, Switzerland
Seattle, WA 98195, USA
[email protected]
[email protected]

Frédérique Liégeois Colwyn Trevarthen

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Department of Psychology
Unit, Institute of Child Health University of Edinburgh
UCL, 30 Guilford Street 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ
London WC1N 1EH, UK Scotland, UK
[email protected] [email protected]

Andrew N. Meltzoff Faraneh Vargha-Khadem

Institute for learning and brain sciences Developmental Cognitive
CHDD Building, Room 373 Neuroscience Unit
University of Washington Institute of Child Health, UCL and Great
Box 357920, Seattle, WA 98195, USA Ormond Street Hospital for Children
[email protected] 30 Guilford Street, London WC 1N1EH, UK
[email protected]
Stathis Papastathopoulos
Laboratory of Psychology Frans B. M. de Waal
Dept. of Philosophy and Living Links Center, Yerkes Primate Center
Social Studies University of Crete Psychology Department
Rethymno, Gallos 74100 Emory University, 954 N. Gatewood Road
Crete, Greece Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
[email protected] [email protected]
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Introduction

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 inter-
subjectivity 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, inter-
vention, 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 Intersubjec-
tive 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 chal-
lenged 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 implica-
tions, functional interpretations and learning contexts applications were exam-
ined, including models of perception and learning by imitation.
Third, earlier in the same year that the Theory Forum symposium underly-
ing the present volume took place, Daniel Stern (2004) published his book on The
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 Introduction

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 developmen-
tal 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 sub-
jects and disembodied and self-centred minds without windows to each other
except as mediated by constructed or symbolic representations. Modes of partic-
ipant perception have been identified entailing co-movements with others in felt
immediacy, supplementing perception of others in re-presentational mediacy. Sec-
ond, 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) empha-
sized 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 cere-
bral system is prepared for direct perception of the variety of sounds, gestures, and
movements that humans afford, he defined ‘alteroception’, in analogue to propri-
oception, as direct perception of the other’s motivated act (Trevarthen 1986). By
now, in line with his definitions, replacing the previous attribution of egocentric-
ity 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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Introduction 

evidence for the presence of mirror neurons and adaptive oscillators along with
the deepening literature on early imitation suggest that probably from the begin-
ning 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 theo-
retical views of the infant as a-social and ego-centric with a new understanding
of infant capacities for interpersonal communion and altercentricity. In their pro-
logue, 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 con-

versation 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 companion-
ship sometimes inviting object-oriented imitative learning by other-centred participa-
tion . . .
(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 intersubjec-
tivity 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 neurosci-
entific findings that suggest mechanisms for intersubjective phenomena, and to
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 Introduction

developmental accounts of such capacities subsumed in terms of the intersubjec-

tive 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 other-
centred 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 qual-
itative 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 ex-
pressions 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 recog-
nized as the source of felt emotions (Cognitive Empathy). This permits responses
to be geared more specifically to the other’s situation, thus increasing the effec-
tiveness 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 affin-
ity 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 immedi-
ate 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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Introduction 

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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 Introduction

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 participa-
tion, 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 neu-
rons, 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 be-
havioural studies on synchrony and imitation in human and nonhuman primates,
and addresses questions concerning primary and secondary intersubjectivity re-
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Introduction 

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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 Introduction

beyond their capacities; there are limitations even in bodily capacities for recipro-
cal 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 partic-
ipate 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 expo-
sure 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 reso-
nance 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 uni-
lateral 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 adap-
tation 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 mir-
roring 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 Chap-
ter 7 (this volume) in terms of other-centred participation). While pointing out
that true imitation is likely to require action understanding and to entail learn-
ing 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 mag-
netoencephalographic (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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Introduction 

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 elec-
trophysiological investigations of motor cortex excitability show that in humans
the observation of motor actions activates the motor circuits involved in the gen-
eration of the seen movements. Among active areas, the presence of Broca’s region
suggests a possible evolutionary pathway linking hand action related mirror sys-
tem 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 partici-
pation 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 spoon-
feeding, 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 develop-
ment of language, requiring decentration in ontogeny as the child matures, Bråten
advances the hypothesis that the mirror neuron system has been decentred in ho-
minin phylogeny to allow for infant listening and learning by (m)other-centred
participation to cope and take care. In ontogeny, this altercentric capacity for pre-
verbal learning by virtual other participation announces verbal conversation to
come with its reciprocal, participant, and simulational characteristics.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 16:52 F: AICR68IN.tex / p.10 (542-573)

 Introduction

As for the phylogenetic support of speech articulation, pertinent findings on

the inherited speech disorders in the KE family are presented by Faraneh Vargha-
Khadem 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 sub-
cortical 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 gen-
eration, 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 sci-
ence, Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks (this volume (9)) examine phenomena
illuminating the nature of preverbal intersubjectivity, entailing these three win-
dows on preverbal sharing: (a) action imitation, (b) joint visual attention, and
(c) sensitivity to intentions related to action or attempted action. The latter in-
volves 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, demon-
strating (with a triumphant smile) to have “read the experimenter’s intention”.
They also report from experiments with 12-month-olds who had experienced be-
ing 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 ex-
perience 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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Introduction 

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 distinc-
tions 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 re-
markable 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 speak-
ers 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 encultur-
ation 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, be-
fore 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 distinc-
tion 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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 Introduction

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 vol-
ume (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 vol-
ume (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 primar-
ily 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 commu-
nicate, than the 8 girls without imaginary companions, and also engaged signifi-
cantly 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 characteris-
tics 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 partic-
ipating 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 mu-
tual other-centred participation in which both partners create and undergo a joint
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 16:52 F: AICR68IN.tex / p.13 (678-732)

Introduction 

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. Draw-
ing 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 in-
timacy” 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 sub-
sequent blockage of empathic identification in the caretaker, affective withdrawal
leading to neglect and possibly abuse. Finally, Hundeide summarizes the condi-
tions 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 mem-
ory 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 protonar-
rative 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 co-
movements 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 mu-
sician and the blind and severely hearing impaired boy, Lasse, her contribution
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 16:52 F: AICR68IN.tex / p.14 (732-773)

 Introduction

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 chil-
dren, 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 behaviour-
oriented 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 em-
phasis 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 mu-
sicality – 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 musical-
ity in early protoconversation. They further report the results of musical acoustic
analysis of vocal records, interpreting the findings in terms of communicative mu-
sicality 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 pat-
terns 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 psy-
chotherapy, 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 other-
centred participation. Then, the question is raised about why abused children may
become abusive towards peers and, later, towards younger victims. Finally, cer-
tain 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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Introduction 

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 ex-
tensive, 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 Coun-
cil, 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.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 16:52 F: AICR68IN.tex / p.16 (816-928)

 Introduction

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 

Introducing the matrix and multiple layers

of intersubjectivity and empathy
JB[v.20020404] Prn:25/01/2007; 12:46 F: AICR6801.tex / p.1 (49-115)

chapter 

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 philoso-
phers 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 per-
ception of interests and feelings in an other person and responsive attunement
permitting delicate, emotionally regulated engagements. Like the processes of al-
tercentric 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 assump-
tions 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 dis-
tinguish different layers of intersubjective attunement in human development be-
fore 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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 Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen

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 communi-
cation 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 follow-
ing summarises the key steps that prepare the way for and support the elaboration
of higher-order competences in communication and thinking, including conver-
sational 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 ha-
bitual ‘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 atten-
tion within trusting relations of companionship. The infant displays to others
of knowledge and skill learned by sharing intentions and interests are ani-
mated 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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Prologue 

recorded by Bråten 1996), and sometimes help-oriented co-movements real-

izing 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 ver-
bal or narrative self and other in first-order modes of symbolic communica-
tion, 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 de-
velopment 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 con-
sciousness, 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 feed-
ing 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 devel-
ops an organization of its own – an organization moreover that is also reflected in
the self-other organization of the developing mind. The shifting between dialog-
ical competence and consciousness manifests itself in intersubjective attunement
at various levels – from confluence of affect at the primary level to advanced self-
other 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 sec-
ondary steps or layers, which continue to be operational and supportive through-
out 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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 Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen

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 conver-
sation 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 follow-
up 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 protoconver-
sation and interpersonal communion, in which participants attend and attune
to one another’s emotive expressions and gesture- and sound- producing move-
ments, 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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Prologue 

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 move-
ments 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 pref-
erence for musical features of the voice. Even a premature newborn baby may
actively contribute to the precise rhythmic exchange of vocal songs with a song-
like 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 par-
ticipated 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 re-
cipients 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 par-
take 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 behav-
ioral re-enactment design. Watching the model failing to pull the dumbbell apart,
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 Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen

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 partici-
pated 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 realiz-
ing 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 exhib-
ited 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 pre-
cursory 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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Prologue 

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 hu-
man 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 hu-
man 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 mid-
dle 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 dif-
ferent ways, brought our attention to the ‘musicality’ of expressions in communi-
cation 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 cen-
tral 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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 Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen

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 move-
ments 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 protocon-
versation 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 neuro-
physiological 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 sem-
blant, 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 sys-
tem 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 im-
plying a close link between the production and perception of speech. This is partly
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Prologue 

consistent with what is portrayed in Bråten’s (1974) simulation of mind conversa-

tion 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 begin-
ning of intentional communication in human phylogeny, the first primitive dia-
logue, 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 enact-
ment 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 progres-
sive 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, orig-
inally 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 sub-
jects 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 sys-
tem also become active in tasks involving mental hand rotation. It pertains to the
kind of participant mirroring which may be attributed to intimate dialogue part-
ners who mirror one another’s postures and gestures and sometimes complete one
another’s utterances. And it pertains to preverbal learning by altercentric partic-
ipation 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 to-
wards a narrative (mythic) culture. An evolved capacity for participant perception
in face-to-face learning and warning situations, we submit, may have been precur-
sory and supportive of such conversational speech adaptation in human evolution.
To infants endowed with the capacity for virtual (other) participation in gestic-
ulating 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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 Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen

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 speech-
mediated teaching and learning may in certain respect parallel the ontogenetic
steps (I, II, III) delimitated above – from intersubjective participation in an imme-
diate sense to higher order modes of intersubjective understanding mediated by
thought, language and symbolic communication. This blurs the distinction, how-
ever, between a speech community evolving as a co-created novelty and as environ-
mentally given in ontogeny to those born into the speech community, nurturing
the impressive speech learning capacity of the very young. While societal evolu-
tion 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 percep-
tion, and subserved by a phylogenetically afforded and adapted resonant mirror
system.

Notes

. While having previously taken exception to Trevarthen’s (1979) attribution of primary in-
tersubjectivity 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 oscil-
lators, 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 reg-
ulations that according to Selby and Bradley may establish immediate preferences and aversions
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Prologue 

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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Prologue 

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Stamenov & V. Gallese (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language
(pp. 37–59). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton.
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Trevarthen, C. (1980). “The Foundations of Intersubjectivity.” In D. Olson (Ed.), The Social
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 Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen

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chapter 

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, iden-
tification, imitation, internalization, “reading” other’s intentions, psychological
intimacy, etc. – intersubjectivity, in general. In this volume, we will learn of re-
cent 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, internal-
ization, “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 moral-
ity; 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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 Daniel N. Stern

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 re-
cently, 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 per-
haps 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 po-
sition; 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 initi-
ated), 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 ba-

sic notions arrived at by phenomenologists. One crucial finding is the discovery
of “mirror neurons”. These provide possible neurobiological mechanisms for un-
derstanding 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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Applying developmental and neuroscience findings 

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 imi-
tate 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 inten-
tions 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 partici-
pation 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 goal-
directed 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 under-
standing 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 incom-
ing 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 el-
egant models, tau theory, to describe how this kind of dyadic coordination and
synchrony could occur (Lee 1998).
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 Daniel N. Stern

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 intersubjec-
tivity can be seen in infants beginning right after birth. This argues for the funda-
mental 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 in-
tersubjectivity (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 re-
sponded 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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Applying developmental and neuroscience findings 

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 rep-
resentations 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 sim-
ply 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 se-
lective 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 start-
ing, 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 ac-
cess to another’s temporal experience. Watson and colleagues (1995) and Gergely
and Watson (1999) have found a most fascinating way the infant becomes sen-
sitive 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 con-
tingent. 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 in-
teracting 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 es-
pecially 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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 Daniel N. Stern

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 intersub-
jectivity. 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 or-
der 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 ele-
ment 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 psy-
choanalysis 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 hu-
man 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. Melt-
zoff and colleagues have described several situations in which pre-verbal infants
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Applying developmental and neuroscience findings 

grasp the intention of someone acting, even when they have never seen the in-
tention 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 in-
tended, 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 watch-
ing 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 com-
mon 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 inter-
subjectivity 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 res-
onance or simulation that permits some kind of direct feeling access to the others’
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 Daniel N. Stern

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 re-
cursive 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 in-
fant 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 ex-
pands 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 em-
barrassment, 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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Applying developmental and neuroscience findings 

is that they do not appear to be immersed in an intersubjective matrix. There ap-

pears 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 be-
ing 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 infras-
tructure 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 per-
tinent, 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 “mo-
ment 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 par-
ticipation in which both partners create and undergo a joint experience. The
experience is of short duration: seconds, subjectively a present moment. This reso-
nant 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; subjec-
tively, 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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 Daniel N. Stern

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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chapter 

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, mod-
ified, 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 re-
turned to the water. Occasionally, a structure loses all function and becomes super-
fluous, 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, es-
pecially 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 dis-
continuities 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 cogni-
tion, 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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 Frans B. M. de Waal

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 def-
initely 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 fil-
ter 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 conti-
nuity 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 in-
teractions 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 ca-
pable of. During the 180 million years of mammalian evolution, females who
responded to their offspring’s needs out-reproduced those who were cold and dis-
tant. Having descended from a long line of mothers who nursed, fed, cleaned, car-
ried, 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 obser-
vational 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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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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; Rimm-
Kaufman & 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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 Frans B. M. de Waal

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. Responsive-
ness 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 communica-
tion 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 re-
lated 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 indi-
viduals 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, vocaliza-
tions, 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 ap-
preciation 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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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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 be-
lieved 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 empathy-
inducing 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 capac-
ities. Tool-use and numerical competence, for instance, are seen as hallmarks of
intelligence, whereas appropriately dealing with others is not. It is obvious, how-
ever, 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 sympa-
thy, 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 mam-
mals, 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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 Frans B. M. de Waal

social animals. Thus, behavioural and physiological data suggest emotional conta-
gion 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 vari-
ety 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, ani-
mals 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 start-
ing 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 con-
duct 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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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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 “chang-
ing 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) experi-
ments 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 releas-
ing 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 ac-
cepted 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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 Frans B. M. de Waal

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 water-
filed 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 stud-
ies 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 in-
cident. 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 ob-
servations, 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 aggres-
sors, and more at recipients of intense than of mild aggression. Comparing third-
party contact rates with baseline levels, we found support for both predictions
(Figure 2).
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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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. De-
spite 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 defi-
nitely 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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 Frans B. M. de Waal

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 cor-
relation between the emergence of MSR in children and their helping tendencies
(Bischof-Köhler 1988; Zahn-Waxler et al. 1992), and phylogenetically, by the pres-
ence 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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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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. Con-
tra 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 socio-
affective 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 capac-
ity 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 feel-
ings 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 any-
thing 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 in-
nere 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 reac-
tions 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 emo-
tion perception (Gallese 2001; Wolpert et al. 2001). Data suggest that observing
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 Frans B. M. de Waal

Figure 3. The Russian doll model of intersubjectivity. Empathy covers all processes lead-
ing 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 can-
not 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 ac-
tivity 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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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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 chim-
panzee 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 PAM-
induced 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.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 16:54 F: AICR6803.tex / p.14 (647-684)

 Frans B. M. de Waal

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 mirror-
neuron 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 sur-
vival 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 be-
haviour is copied, too, at least by apes. Examples are the imitation of a specific
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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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), re-
sulting 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 surpris-
ing, 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 learn-
ing 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 prob-
ably 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 bene-
fit 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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 Frans B. M. de Waal

Figure 5ab. Cooperation and coordination come naturally to primates. It involves an ap-
praisal 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 cogni-
tive 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 be-
haviour 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 unmoti-
vated partner to help a motivated one achieve its goals: http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/
crawfordvideo.html
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The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation 

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 

Mirror neurons and origins of neurosocial

support of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity
and altercentricity
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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 ex-
change 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 corre-
spondence is temporarily broken. A further evidence of forms of intersubjectiv-
ity 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 psychol-
ogy (Trevarthen 1974, 1979, 1980; Stern 1985, 2004) favours the idea that very
early during development the infant is endowed with an innate capacity of subject-
subject 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 mecha-
nisms may underpin such capability. We will posit that the mirror neuron systems,
together with other mirroring neural clusters outside the motor domain, consti-
tute 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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 Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese

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, uncon-
scious, 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 experi-
ence, 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 visuo-
motor 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 prop-
erties 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 ac-
tions effective in activating them. Because of this congruence, it was hypothesized
that mirror neurons, by matching action observation with action execution, al-
low 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 ob-
served 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 and intersubjectivity 

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 in-
trinsically different as sounds, images, or voluntary body actions, nevertheless are
bound together within the same neural substrate, what we have is a mechanism in-
stantiating 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 in-
dividual with the observer seems to configure a mechanism that can be useful in
understanding actions but with no necessity to directly interact with another indi-
vidual. 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, re-
spond 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 pro-
trusion. 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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 Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese

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 rep-
resents 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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Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity 

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 “com-
municative” 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 im-
ply 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 re-
view, see Rizzolatti et al. 2001; Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004; Gallese et al. 2004).
Furthermore, the mirror neuron matching system for actions in humans is so-
matotopically 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 com-
municative 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 lip-
smacking action. Modified from Ferrari et al. (2003).
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 Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese

the observation of communicative mouth actions led to the activation of different

cortical foci according to the different observed species. The observation of hu-
man 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 reper-
toire 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, speech-
related 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 pos-
sible 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 fa-
cilitation, 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 ob-
server (or the listener) is activated specifically when an appropriate visual (and/or
acoustic) stimulus is presented.
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Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity 

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 mir-
ror 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 be-
haviour 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 feed-
ing 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 neu-
rons functioning, it is possible to postulate that in early imitation neonates’ motor
systems can innately respond specifically to the experimenter gesture without hav-
ing 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 imi-
tation 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 func-
tions 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 pref-
erentially to the conspecifics’ face. Although still anecdotal, we have observed a
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 Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese

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 demonstra-
tor 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 in-
troduced (Top) Experiment 1 (monkey heard and observed another individual eating),
(Middle) Experiment 2 (monkey heard another individual eating), and (Bottom) Exper-
iment 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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Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity 

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 sug-
gest 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 imita-
tion 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 dif-
ferent 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 some-
one else’s experience in a participatory sense. This ‘alter-centred participation’ is
one of the tenet of the “primary intersubjectivity” model (Bråten 1998). Accord-
ing 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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 Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese

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 in-
teractions. 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 ob-
served 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 mo-
tor 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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Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity 

But monkeys certainly do not entertain full-blown mentalization. Thus, what

makes humans different? At present we can only make hypotheses about the rel-
evant 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 sim-
ple 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 prop-
erties 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 ob-
served 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 addi-
tion 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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 Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese

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 ar-
eas 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 fre-
quently 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 ac-
tivity of sensory-motor and affective neural systems results in the simplification
and automatization of the behavioural responses that living organisms are sup-
posed 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 ap-
pears 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 ex-
periences 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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Mirror neurons and intersubjectivity 

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 experi-
ence 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 mecha-
nisms here described may represent the neurobiological grounding for the expres-
sion 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 in-
stantiation 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 reason-
ing about the contents of someone else’s mind. Our brains, and those of other
primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism, embodied sim-
ulation, 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 orga-
nized 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 em-
bodied 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.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:25/01/2007; 14:25 F: AICR6804.tex / p.14 (661-730)

 Pier Francesco Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese

The shareability of the phenomenal content of the intentional relations of

others, by means of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional at-
tunement (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 Con-

tract 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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chapter 

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 rea-
sonable 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 dy-
namically 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 bril-
liant 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 method-
ologically 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 demand-
ing 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 expecta-
tions, hypotheses, and predictions of the forthcoming events. Thus the external
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 Riitta Hari

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 inter-
action 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, ad-
dresses non-verbal communication via “mirror neurons” that were discovered in
the monkey frontal lobe a decade ago (for reviews, see Rizzolatti et al. 2001; Rizzo-
latti & 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 func-
tional 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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Human mirroring systems 

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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 Riitta Hari

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 acti-
vated 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 ma-
nipulation 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 ac-
tions. 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 sub-
ject 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 im-
itated 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 hu-
man 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 oro-
facial 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 pro-
gression 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. Sur-
face electromyogram from mouth muscles ruled out muscular activity during the
observation condition.
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Human mirroring systems 

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 pro-
posal, 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 phe-
nomenon: 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 af-
ter 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 As-
perger’s syndrome and known to have impaired imitation skills as well as difficul-
ties 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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 Riitta Hari

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 them-
selves used chopsticks during the last year (Järveläinen et al. 2004), implying that
the experience affects the strength of mirror-neuron system activation. It is con-
ceivable 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 mirror-
neuron 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 in-
teractions 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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Human mirroring systems 

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).
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 16:56 F: AICR6805.tex / p.8 (384-427)

 Riitta Hari

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 mo-
tor 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 notice-
able 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 in-
teraction 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 sol-
diers 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 af-
fect 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 philoso-
phers consider the body as the expression and display site of the mind. Folk psy-
chology and arts also contain frequent, and often humorous references to similar
phenomena (e.g. “Einen Mann von Geist erkennt mann auch von hinten” (Schopen-
hauer)). It is true that we unconsciously interpret many personal characteristics
of other persons on the basis of their gaze, posture, gait, gestures, and facial ex-
pressions, 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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Human mirroring systems 

brain, to observe the subject’s motor behaviour and expressions while she inter-
acts 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 mes-
sage stay tuned. In crickets, for example, acoustic communication is temperature-
coupled 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), as-
suming 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 sen-
sory 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 rep-
resentations 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 re-
quires 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.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 16:56 F: AICR6805.tex / p.10 (479-562)

 Riitta Hari

Acknowledgments

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

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chapter 

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 com-
prehension 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 evolu-
tionary importance since it is supposed to be at the basis of the way in which pri-
mates 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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 Luciano Fadiga and Laila Craighero

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 ac-
tive 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 inter-
action 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 in-
transitive (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 eventu-
ally 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 sub-
divided into “strictly congruent” and “broadly congruent” neurons (Gallese et al.
1996). Mirror neurons in which the effective observed and effective executed ac-
tions 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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Cues on the origin of language 

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 (intran-
sitive 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 in-
crease 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 fa-
cilitation 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 intracorti-
cal 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 ac-
tions done by others activates in humans a complex network formed by occipital,
temporal and parietal visual areas, and two cortical regions whose function is fun-
damentally 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 in-
ferior 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 addi-
tion 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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 Luciano Fadiga and Laila Craighero

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 fur-
ther 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, ac-
tivates 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 morpho-
logical 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 dur-
ing 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 or-
ganization 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 ac-
tions determined a somatotopically organized activation of premotor cortex. The
somatotopic pattern was similar to that of the classical motor cortex homuncu-
lus. 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 automat-
ically 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 per-
spective: 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 intran-
sitive 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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Cues on the origin of language 

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, there-
fore, 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 ac-
tion, 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 action-
related 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 dis-
charge 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 clas-
sically 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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 Luciano Fadiga and Laila Craighero

primitives that, during speech production, are at the basis of articulatory gesture
generation, while during speech perception, are activated in the listener as the re-
sult 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 motor-
ically “resonates” when the individuals listen to verbal stimuli. Normal subjects
were requested to attend to an acoustically presented randomized sequence of di-
syllabic words, disyllabic pseudo-words and bitonal sounds of equivalent intensity
and duration. Words and pseudo-words were selected according to a consonant-
vowel-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 mobiliza-
tion) 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 con-
trol. 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 move-
ments, 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 pres-
ence of “speech-related acoustic motor resonance” in humans, indicate that inde-
pendently from the sensory nature of the perceived stimulus, the mirror-resonant
system retrieves from action vocabulary (stored in the frontal cortex) the stimulus-
related motor representations.
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Cues on the origin of language 

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 dou-
ble 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 transform-
ing 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 sys-
tem 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 commu-
nicative 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 mecha-
nism that creates a common (parity requirement), non-arbitrary, semantic link
between communicating individuals.
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 Luciano Fadiga and Laila Craighero

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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chapter 

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 capac-
ity 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 complet-
ing 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 do-
ing, 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 man-
ifested 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 mouth-
opening (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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 Stein Bråten

Norwegian boy: 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).
Yanomami-girl: 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)).
Sports spectator: 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).
Sartre as listener: 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):
Beauvoir: “[I] say it’s odd, this contrast between your stiffness and a wel-
coming attitude, a kindness, a warmth a soon as . . . .”
Sartre: “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 pre-
enacting or co-enacting movements, anticipant or concurrent mirroring or simu-
lation 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 in-
take 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 mani-
festation 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

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 per-
spective, 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 ba-
sic 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 re-
enactment, as in learning by imitation, this intersubjective capacity for participant
perception entails that the perceiver resonates with what the other is doing or expe-
riencing 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 accompa-
nied by a virtual companion perspective, a virtual Alter, allowing for alter-
centric participation in actual others in the mode of felt immediacy (Bråten
1988, 2000).
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 Stein Bråten

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 evolu-
tion. 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 audi-
ence’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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Altercentric infants and adults 

When Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1983) published their reports on neona-
tal 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 in-
vite 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 gestu-
ral 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 resonat-
ing 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 be-
ing 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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 Stein Bråten

First, these infants show themselves capable of affording proto-care or recip-

rocating 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 participa-
tion 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 spoon-
feeding. 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 (Eibl-
Eibesfeldt 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

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 intersub-

jective 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 partici-
pant 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-to-
face 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 direc-
tion, 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 bod-
ily 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 recip-
rocating. 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 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 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
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 Stein Bråten

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.

On mirror reversal in face-to-face situations and computational simulations

Such other-centred participation enables the infant learners (i) to transcend a self-
centred 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 per-
ceiver 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 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. Hence, there is a mirror
reversal from the altercentric frame evoked in the perception to the body-centred
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Altercentric infants and adults 

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 dif-
ficult (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 ex-
posed to and transformed by mirror reversal. However, it turned out to be too
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 Stein Bråten

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 “Alter-
nets” 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 Ego-
net 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 alter-
centric (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 exam-
ple, 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 explic-
itly include a cerebellum module in addition to primary, premotor and temporal
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Altercentric infants and adults 

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, in-
verted 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 map-
ping 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 mir-
ror 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 at-

tributed 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 find-
ings 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 interac-
tion in humans (in home environment) and chimpanzees (in the Kristiansand
Zoo and Wildlife Park in Southern Norway) by observation, video- and photo-
recording, followed by drawings. Some of this has been succinctly reported in
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 Stein Bråten

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 chim-

panzee (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 groom-
ing, 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 ori-
ent themselves in the world in which they operate from the carrying mother’s
stance. Moving with her movements, they may even be afforded the opportu-
nity 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

mirror neurons system subserving learning to cope and take care by (m)other-
centred 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 al-
tercentric 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 vol-
ume 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 pro-
posed 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 chim-
panzee 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 pos-
sibly, 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 posi-
tion 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 capa-
ble 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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 Stein Bråten

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, facilitat-
ing 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 pat-
terns 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 some-
how 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 e-
motive 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 par-
ticipant 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

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 emo-
tional 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 Cin-
derella, 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 alter-
centric 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 manifesta-
tions of such virtual participation during verbal conversation between speech-
competent 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 participa-
tion 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 dur-
ing the fall and summer 1974 between Sartre (JPS) and de Beauvoir (SdB) there
sometimes occur passages in which one of them completes the unfinished utter-
ance 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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 Stein Bråten

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 in-
tention 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 philoso-
phy. 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, en-
tailing 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 formu-
lated the model, I offered the conjecture that through implicit simulation of the
coactor’s coding the actor regulates own coding from criteria serving conversa-
tional understanding (Bråten 1973: 77), or as voiced in a cybernetic conference at
Namur:
the actor regulates his encoding through covert predictory simulation of coac-
tor’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, en-
abled 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

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 mind-
reading 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 ac-
tivation [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 self-
simulation 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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 Stein Bråten

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 participa-
tory 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 partic-
ipation 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 qual-
ified 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 lec-
ture 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 suc-
cessful 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

intersubjective engagement the innate capacity for other-centred participation en-

ables 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 em-
pathic 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 con-
current 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, re-
ciprocate the caregiver’s spoon-feeding and sometimes open their mouth as they
clumsily offer the spoonful to the caregiver’s opening mouth. Such accompany-
ing 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 vir-
tual 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 in-
fant 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 par-
ticipation 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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 Stein Bråten

to the adult demonstrator’s (pretending to try and) failing to pull a dumbbell-

shaped 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 snap-
shots 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 participa-
tion 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 cumber-
some 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

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.

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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 un-
wittingly 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 be-
tween 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 vir-
tual 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 antici-
pates 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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Altercentric infants and adults 

Caregiver: Infant learner: Infant re-enacting:

Execution of feeding (E.p) While food intake (E.q) Spoon-feeding reciprocated
and anticipatory simulation othercentred participation in from e-motional memory of
by altercentric participation Alter’s spoon-feeding (*A.*p’) been a virtual co-author of
in Alter’s intake of food: invites circular re-enactment 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) The caregiver reveals by her mouth opening to take a virtual (other) part in the
baby’s food intake.
(Middle) While receiving the food the infant experiences to be a virtual co-author of the
feeding, leaving the baby with an e-motional memory.
(Right) 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 antici-
patory mouth movements revealing virtual other participation in the patient’s food intake is
anticipatory or concurrent embodied simulation (cf. Bråten 2002: 290–291).
JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/03/2007; 16:01 F: AICR6808.tex / p.1 (49-118)

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 neurode-
velopmental 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 ver-
bal 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 impair-
ment in applying the morphosyntactic rules of grammar. The deficit was charac-
terized 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 mem-
bers showed many over-regularization errors, suggesting that they had acquired
knowledge of the ‘ed’ rule for inflecting verbs but they were applying the rule in-
appropriately 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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From speech to gene 

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, un-
affected 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 sequen-
tial 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 clar-
ity, 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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 Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and Frédérique Liégeois

When the Word and Non-word Repetition results were further examined, it
was found that complex words and non-words (both types consisting of con-
sonant 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 promi-
nent 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 gra-
dation: 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 pa-
tients 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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From speech to gene 

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, in-
stead, the stroke patients perform better, presumably because of prior knowl-
edge;
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 par-
ticular which regions likely to be part of the circuitry that produces coherent and
intelligible speech, did not develop properly. In addressing this question, the is-
sues 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 adult-
hood, 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 hemi-
spheres 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 us-
ing 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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 Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and Frédérique Liégeois

ten affected and seven unaffected family members, as well as from 17 age- and
sex-matched normal controls. Findings included comparisons of affected with un-
affected members, and affected with controls. The results were mostly consistent
across both sets of comparisons. The most important finding was that the cau-
date 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 re-
gions 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 tech-
nique 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 ac-
curate 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 re-
gions 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 re-
gions that are also morphologically abnormal?
3. Are the regions activated by language distributed abnormally?
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From speech to gene 

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 con-
trols (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 re-
gions were significantly less (underactive) while others were significantly more
(overactive) active in the affected group than in the other groups. Significant un-
deractivation 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 addi-
tion, underactivation was detected in the right putamen/globus pallidus, and right
inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann’s area 45). There were numerous areas of overac-
tivation 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 abnor-
mality 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 pheno-
type 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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 Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and Frédérique Liégeois

of orofacial sequences, be they retrieved or repeated. Since responses were spo-

ken 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 activa-
tion 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 acti-
vation in the anterior part of the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area). However,
when average activation in the two groups was statistically compared, signifi-
cant 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 con-
trast, 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 in-
ferior 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 per-
forming 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 cir-
cuits. 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 bi-
lateral 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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From speech to gene 

to have delayed speech acquisition, articulation deficits, and language difficulties,

with impairments noted in the production of verbal and nonverbal motor se-
quences (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 corti-
cal 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 find-
ings 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 frontostri-
atal circuit has been critical for the emergence of early communicative behaviour
(Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998). How this circuit becomes adapted in humans to sub-
serve the exquisitely fast and precise function of articulate speech remains a mys-
tery. 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.

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 

From preverbal to verbal intersubjectivity

in child development
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:04 F: AICR6809.tex / p.1 (48-124)

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 rev-

olution 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 connected-
ness 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; Ia-
coboni, 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 Transac-
tions 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 intelli-
gence to sociology (Nehaniv & Dautenhahn 2007; Hurley & Chater 2005; Meltzoff
& Prinz 2002; the current volume).
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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

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 de-
velopment, 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 inter-
acting 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 assimi-
lated 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 intersub-
jective 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 intersubjec-
tivity 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 de-
tectors, 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 im-
portant 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 Merleau-
Ponty (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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Intersubjectivity before language 

Merleau-Ponty’s points on intersubjectivity in light of recent psychological find-

ings).

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 shar-
ing 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 experi-
ence of others, with important implications for emotions and language. Third, we
discuss experiments showing that in the second year of life infants have a grow-
ing 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 pro-
vides 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 as-
pect 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

means and mannerisms we use to achieve these results (Meltzoff 1996; Povinelli
2000; Tomasello & Call 1997; Williamson & Markman 2006; Whiten 2002). Ac-
tion 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 psychother-
apy 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, often-
times 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 in-
formation 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-day-
olds 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 im-
itated 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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Intersubjectivity before language 

(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 pro-
trude 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 iden-
tification.’ 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 prin-
cipal 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 tar-
get 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 infor-
mation (visual, tactile, motor, etc.). Metaphorically, we can say that exteroception
(perception of others) and proprioception (perception of self) speak the same lan-
guage; 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 equiva-
lence 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 pro-
posals 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

even at this time, we can say that they all converge on the idea of a close cou-
pling 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 in-
terlopers 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 in-
tersubjectivity’ (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 pre-
verbal referential triangle – mother-baby-object – in which the mother’s visual
glances refer infants to selected external targets. Among adults, detecting the di-
rection 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 exter-
nal 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 acquisi-
tion 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, & Ro-
jas 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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Intersubjectivity before language 

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 di-
rection 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, how-
ever, 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 ob-
served 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

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 particu-
larly 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 part-
ner 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, Bel-
lagamba, & Colonnesi 2004; Franco & Butterworth 1996; Liszkowski, Carpenter,
Henning, Striano, & Tomasello 2005).
We return now to the rationale for conducting this study. The non-social in-
terpretation of gaze following is that a visible movement simply drags infants’
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Intersubjectivity before language 

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 fol-

lowing 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 re-
cruited 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

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 im-

portant 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 func-
tion as closed eyes – both prevent visual access. Our results suggest that infants
understand the consequences of eye closure (a biological motion) before they un-
derstand 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 situ-
ation 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 blind-
fold 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 eye-
closure blocks contact with external objects, but do not yet understand the same
about inanimate occluders.
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Intersubjectivity before language 

‘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 blind-
fold. 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 blind-
folds 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’ in-
terpersonal mechanism at work. This mechanism and its philosophical and de-
velopmental implications are elaborated in more detail elsewhere (Meltzoff 2006,
2007).
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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

The relation between gaze following and language acquisition

Background and significance

On theoretical grounds, there is good reason for thinking that secondary intersub-
jectivity 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 ex-
ternal 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 gen-
eral), 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 sub-
sequent language. During the follow-up test at 2 years of age, this infant gaze-
following score at 10–11 months predicted a significantly larger productive vocab-
ulary 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 pro-
duced 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 cur-
rent findings complement other empirical reports that infant gaze following pre-
dicts 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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Intersubjectivity before language 

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. Inten-
tions 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 intention-
ally 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 cre-
ated 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 im-
itate, 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 al-
though 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 ‘cor-
rect 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) af-
ter 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

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 interven-
tion (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 chang-
ing 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 2-
sec 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) hy-
pothesis 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 cer-
tain types of entities are ascribed to intention and purposiveness. Chairs and
boulders rock and roll, but their motions are not seen as intentional. Most pro-
totypically, 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 re-
sponded 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 me-
chanical 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 move-
ments (bottom panel) (from Meltzoff 1995).
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Intersubjectivity before language 

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 appre-
ciate 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 autis-
tic, 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

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 neu-
roscience, 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 ex-
ample. 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 neu-
rons 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; Rizzo-
latti, 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 audi-
tory 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 neuro-
science can be especially informative (Meltzoff & Decety 2003). Developmentalists
would suggest that there are two ways of testing whether mirror neurons de-
velop 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 ex-
perimenter 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 an-
swered by tests of adults (whether monkey or man). These need to be supple-
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Intersubjectivity before language 

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 di-
rect 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 self-
other 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 inte-
gral 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 al-
ways been that this equivalence was thought to be a late achievement in ontogeny,
possibly dependent on language. The findings from developmental science, sug-
gest 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 frame-
work 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 ex-
perience 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 move-
ments 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

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 in-
fant 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 in-
fants 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 experi-
ence 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 in-
fants 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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Intersubjectivity before language 

Given this facile self-other mapping, early social encounters are more inter-
pretable 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 inter-
subjectivity 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 intersubjec-
tivity, 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 com-
puter 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 ac-
tions 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 inan-
imate 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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 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks

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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 im-
portance 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 influenc-
ing 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 in-
fants’ 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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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

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 categor-
ical 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 percep-
tion: infants’ ability to discriminate a variety of speech sounds occurring across
the world’s languages is initially unconstrained by the language of their commu-
nity; 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 & Sebastián-
Gallés 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 pro-
vided 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 per-
ception 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 cat-
egories in the adult’s native language (e.g., Best 1994; Best & McRoberts 2003;
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Early speech perception 

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 improve-
ment in native language phonetic perception throughout infancy accompanies a
reduction in nonnative perception (Kuhl et al. 2005). For these behavioural stud-
ies, 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 condition-
ing, 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 re-
sponses to the target sound in anticipation of the reinforcer, no-intensity cue trials

Figure 1. Conditioned head turn paradigm

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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

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 con-
trol; (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 in-
fants 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 native-
language 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 as-
pects 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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Early speech perception 

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 com-
mitment 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 ear-
lier than puberty. For example, Flege and colleagues have shown that learning a
second language after approximately 5 years of age leads to more difficulty per-
ceiving 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 ex-
plore 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 ad-
dress 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 in-
fants 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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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

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 Man-
darin from live native speakers who interacted with the infants in a naturalistic
way, while showing them toys and books. The second group of infants (English-
only 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 nat-
uralistic way and showed them the same toys and books. Remarkably, the infants
who received live exposure to Mandarin showed phonetic learning as assessed us-
ing 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 English-
speaking 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 ex-
posure 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 re-
viewed 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 disem-
bodied 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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Early speech perception 

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 Man-
darin 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 25-
minute 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 in-
fants 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 con-
trol 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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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

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 re-
quired 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 situ-
ation than controlled exposure to isolated instances of speech stimuli during an
experiment. Learning occurs in both instances. However, learning in the natu-
ral exposure experiments requires much more from infants; they must extract
phonetic information for the target contrast over a much broader and more vari-
able 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 exper-
iment, 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 in-
fants 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 mech-
anism 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 in-
fants 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 con-
dition 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 moti-
vation 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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Early speech perception 

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 partici-

pation 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 learn-
ing 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 natu-
ralistic – 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 infor-
mation 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 dis-
cussed 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 com-
municative interactions occurring between infants and their caregivers in the first
months of life set the stage for subsequent social, cognitive, and language devel-
opment (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 in-
teractions infants and adults mutually and reciprocally attend and attune to each
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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

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 sponta-
neous, 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 hu-
mans, 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 entail-
ing 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 ear-
liest 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 en-
vironment (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 percep-
tual filters or “native language perceptual magnets” (Kuhl 1993, 2000). Thus when
the infant experiences multiple exemplars of a phonetic prototype (the most rep-
resentative 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 speak-
ers 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 di-
rected 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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Early speech perception 

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 to-
wards 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 in-
fant’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 be-
haviours 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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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

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 mean-
ing (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 pro-
cess in which multiple pieces of information are gradually integrated (Hollich,
Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff 2000). When faced with a new language learning situa-
tion, 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 be-
haviours 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 gen-
eral 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 inten-
tions 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 in-
fants, 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 speak-
ers 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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Early speech perception 

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 inter-
actions 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 learn-
ing 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 in-
formation 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. In-
fants 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 show-
ing 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 short-
term 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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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

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 pre-
dicted 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 cogni-
tive and language outcomes. Previous research has shown that infants who receive
high levels of “mediated learning experiences” from their mothers show better per-
formance 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 fol-
lowing 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 (expres-
sions of excitement, appreciation, or affect in relation to objects, concepts, etc.);
(3) transcendence (attempts to expand the infant’s cognitive awareness); (4) me-
diation of feelings of competence (expressions of satisfaction with the infant’s
behaviour); and (5) regulation of behaviour (matching tasks to the infant’s capac-
ities, interests, etc.). Such experiences may be defined differently across cultures,
but are believed to be found universally. Other research has shown that adult re-
sponsivity 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; Tamis-
LeMonda & Bornstein 2002; Tamis-LeMonda et al. 1996, 2001). Based on this
previous work and the results of our studies reviewed in this chapter, we pre-
dict that both the quality of infant-tutor interactions during language exposure,
as measured by the amount of mediation provided by the adult and the respon-
sivity 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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Early speech perception 

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 rel-
evant 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 hy-
potheses 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 involv-
ing 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 di-
rected 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 con-
sistent 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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 Barbara T. Conboy and Patricia K. Kuhl

may be commented on by others in a contingent fashion (Schieffelin 1991). In-

fants 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 misun-
derstanding 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 mem-
bers 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. Fu-
ture 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 aso-
cial 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 cul-
tural 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 so-
cialization – the factual interaction between social and biological aspects, between
the micro and macro in the various phases of the process – is in fact surpris-
ingly 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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 Ivar Frönes

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 acquisi-
tion 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 under-
growth 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 spe-
cial 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 sub-
ject 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 over-
socialized 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 moti-
vation (see, e.g., Marcuse 1968) through unconscious psychological mechanisms.
General theories in sociology seek to grasp the interplay between subject and struc-
ture. 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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On theories of dialogue, self and society 

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 structura-
tion 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 fam-
ily 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 forma-
tion occurring during the first year in the family is radically different from later
formation.
Although human behaviour, according to structuralist and functionalist the-
ories, reflects institutionalized structures, economic actors represent the under-
socialized 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 opti-
mizing 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 explana-
tory 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 un-
available. The model of the over-socialized man largely entertains the view of so-
cialization 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 interac-

tionism, actors are both acting in and interacting with their contexts. Actions are
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 Ivar Frönes

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 pre-
sumptions. In both perspectives, however, subject and context are interwoven in a
complex whole.
In symbolic interactionism, interaction is emphasized and, to a varying de-
gree, 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 dia-
logues 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 capac-
ity, 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 inten-
tions. 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 an-
chored 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 re-
cipient 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 commu-
nication. Between two subjects, a variety of genres of dialogues can be established.
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On theories of dialogue, self and society 

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 sub-
ject 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 inter-
subjectivity. 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. Con-
cepts of internalization, habitus, or embodiment entail different perspectives on
this process. In several of such theories, the relation between individual and so-
ciety 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 “un-
pleasant” 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 au-
thentic, 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 har-
mony 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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 Ivar Frönes

Subject and society: Child’s path into the social

Development, according to psychological theory, unfolds in phases, and depend-

ing on the various perspectives, each phase includes particular dynamics. In psy-
choanalytic 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 pro-
files. In cognitive developmental psychology, the earlier stages influence the suc-
ceeding 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 commu-
nicative 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 intersub-
jective communication. Lacking the capacity to distinguish between itself and the
environment, the infant is not oriented toward other subjects as subjects, but to-
ward itself, albeit also engaging with what Winnicott terms ‘transitional objects’.
According to these theories, the infant develops from being amorphous to becom-
ing 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 sat-
isfaction, 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 ori-
ents itself toward others (the mother) to satisfy its needs. Freud’s child meets the
disagreeableness, the “Unbehagen”, of culture. Berger and Luckmann refer to so-
cialization as a fight about upbringing between child and society. Psychological
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On theories of dialogue, self and society 

theories invite an understanding consistent with sociology’s idea of primary so-

cialization: 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 so-
cialization (cf. Veer & Valsiner 1991). Formulated in a partially abstract form, his
conception of the relation between the social and the individual is given a gen-
eral 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 an-
other 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 semi-
otic 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 an-
other 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 actor-
structure 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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 Ivar Frönes

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, an-
chored 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 postu-
lated 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 experi-
ences 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 concep-
tualized 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 can-
cels the posited distinction between primary and secondary socialization (Kagan
2000).
It is the signifier-aspect of the symbol with which the child is first con-
fronted. 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 bi-
ographically. 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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On theories of dialogue, self and society 

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 com-
municative 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 ca-
pacity 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 eth-
nocentrism, 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 immedi-
acy (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 ba-
sis 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 intersub-
jective 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 in-
tersubjective 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 inter-
preter. 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 distin-
guishing 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 intersub-
jective 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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 Ivar Frönes

without links to contents. The child forms patterns of significance by virtue of

those patterns being different from prior patterns, and gradually from the realiza-
tion 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 object-
relations to subject-relations. For the dialogical child, one might conceive a reverse
sequence. First subjects are constituted, thereafter some are transformed into ob-
jects 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 con-
stituted 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 interact-
ing 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 cre-
ation 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 denota-
tions 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 no-
tions 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 ex-
pressions 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. Iden-
tity is also understood through the lens of class, gender, and ethnic roots. Concepts
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On theories of dialogue, self and society 

such as “habitus,” roles, and interpellations into discursive positions imply postu-
lating a social identity that mirrors social structures. In modern life, we meet social
identity as a strategic composition of symbols and consummation, which are influ-
enced 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 in-
volves 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 iden-
tity 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 man-
ner, 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 un-
derstood 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 ob-
jective 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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 Ivar Frönes

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 constitu-
tion 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 en-

abling 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 recip-
ient 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 alter-
centric 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 struc-
ture 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 socializa-
tion 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 pat-
terns; 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 depar-
ture for sociological and psychological conceptions of socialization, it also alters
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On theories of dialogue, self and society 

how we conceptualize the acquisition of language and culture, the parent-child re-
lation, 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 con-
notations to general cultural and denotational categories, somewhat in line with
Peirce’s pragmatic understanding of communication: language has strong idiosyn-
cratic, 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 individ-
ual 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 mech-
anisms 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 struc-
ture 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 them-
selves to a much lesser degree as “moulding” their children than mothers who had
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 Ivar Frönes

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 appren-
ticeships. 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 pop-
ular 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 education-
based, 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, en-
tail 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 en-
vironment, 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 im-
portance of parents and parenting, but of the idea that children are shaped by the
nurturing of parents.
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On theories of dialogue, self and society 

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 dialog-
ical 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 di-
alogical 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 socio-
logical 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,
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/02/2007; 14:23 F: AICR6811.tex / p.16 (798-910)

 Ivar Frönes

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.

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chapter 

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, imagina-
tion 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 as-
similation 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 funda-
mentally asocial and non-intersubjective. In recent developmental theories, like in
the Theory of Mind field, imagination is depicted as a form of mental representa-
tions 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 stabil-
ity (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 under-
lying 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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 Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

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 sub-
ject. 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 pro-
cesses, like representations, beliefs, “prebeliefs”, schemes, desires, or unconscious
wishes. The other does not naturally exist for the self as a person simply by perceiv-
ing 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 de-
velopment.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 de-
pends directly on the quality of the intersubjective interactions and relations of
the person. The personal development is a process that presupposes the atten-
tiveness, cooperation, interaction and the mutual support of at least two persons.
Normal development is impossible outside an emotionally supportive intersubjec-
tive 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 pro-
cesses, which lead subsequently to various different kinds of experience for the
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The intersubjectivity of imagination 

person. We can discern at least two, the second-person and first-person intersubjec-
tivity. By the second-person intersubjectivity we refer to the direct, non-mediated
interaction between two persons that is characterized by sharing, mutuality, com-
plementarity 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 in-
tersubjectivity based on complementarity between the two partners, and intersub-
jectivity based on sharing and tuning. Another division could be between the in-
tersubjective 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, ex-
perience, 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 na-
ture 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 abil-
ity 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 en-
vironment. 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 deter-
mine 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 differ-
ence from perception is this: while imagining the person does not actively explore
the actual environment (Thomas 1999b). The subject produces certain predic-
tions 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 ex-
periences, in the formation of these predictions. Perceptual experiences provide
imagination with raw data. Second, the perceptual-motor system participates fun-
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 Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

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 sponta-
neously 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 descrip-
tions 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, orga-
nization, 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 ex-
perience. 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 so-
matic 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 mean-
ings 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 in-
troduced 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 atten-
tion 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 develop-
mental 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 inter-
actions with the important others. Stern (1985) maintains that after approximately
the second month, infants can memorize the structure of various forms of interac-
tions 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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The intersubjectivity of imagination 

of interpersonal interactions and the ability to re-enact in imagination past experi-

ences 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, regard-
ing 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 dialog-
ical 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 de-
fined 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 posi-
tions 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 communi-
cated 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, pur-
poses, 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 inter-
actional 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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 Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

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 intentional-
ity 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 cer-
tain 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, rep-
resentations, 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 pro-
vide important information about its subjective meaning and quality. Fourth, a
first-person’s imagination can be understood by another person in an intersubjec-
tive 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 imagi-
nary 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 character-
istics 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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The intersubjectivity of imagination 

ii. Its basic contents and meaning forms are derived from the structure and orga-
nization 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 intersubjec-
tive interactions.
iv. Imagination and its contents can be communicated and shared in an intersub-
jective 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 rec-
ognizes 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 dialog-
ical 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 imagina-
tion 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 interac-
tions 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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 Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

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 compan-
ions. 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 con-
tained 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 com-
panions with human form. The majority of the girls (62,5%, N = 5) had 1 imag-
inary 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 spon-
taneously commented that they only “think of them” and another girl that her
imaginary companion existed only “in fantasy”.
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The intersubjectivity of imagination 

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

Group of girls With imag. companion Without imag. comp. df t

Mean S.D. Mean S.D.
Total amount of speech 110.3 32.5 90 28.5 7 1.941*
Communicational speech 80.3 32.7 59.6 25.8 7 3.550**
Verbal enactment of pretence 44 31.7 31.5 35.4 7 1.608*
Socially directed verbal
enactment of pretence 19.4 14.7 14 13.1 7 3.330***
Negotiation of pretence 45.6 30.7 21.6 14.8 7 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 con-
trary, 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). How-
ever, 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 pre-
tence (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 di-
rected 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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 Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

Discussion

The findings of this study confirmed the suggested hypotheses. Imaginary com-
panions where described by the girls as persons. They had some recognizable phys-
ical 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 char-
acterized 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 imagi-
nary 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 re-
garding 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 interper-
sonally, 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 establish-
ment 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 expert-
ness 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 communica-
tional 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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The intersubjectivity of imagination 

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 in-
ternal 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 fan-
tasy 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 en-
gaged in more interpersonally oriented verbal enactment of pretence. We discern
here the strong effect of their relation with the imaginary companion. This con-
text 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 pro-
posed instead that imagination is dialogically and intersubjectively constituted and
functioning. In order to portray this, we have chosen to refer especially on the phe-
nomenon 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 de-
cisively 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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 Stathis Papastathopoulos and Giannis Kugiumutzakis

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 intersubjectiv-
ity. 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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JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/02/2007; 14:48 F: AICR68P4.tex / p.1 (48-75)

 

Applications and therapeutic implications

JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:07 F: AICR6813.tex / p.1 (49-113)

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 in-
troduce 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 in-
timacy. 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, inde-
pendently 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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 Karsten Hundeide

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 compe-
tence 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 sub-
jects’ 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 imita-
tive 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 “con-
versational” 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 care-

giver 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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When empathic care is obstructed 

This demonstrates that what I have called the primary cycle of care1 is a dia-
logic 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 utter-
ances 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 interven-
tion 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 iden-
tified 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 ex-
ample; when children are placed in traditional institutions (Ryan & Tomas 1976),
when there is extreme poverty and the struggle for survival, when there is brutali-
sation and demoralization due to wartime violence, when there is high stress and
family-conflict involving alcohol and drug abuse, or when the child triggers neg-
ative 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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 Karsten Hundeide

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 ne-
glect and failure of care, i.e. negative, stigmatizing definitions of the child and dis-
tancing 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 chil-
dren 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 ca-
reer 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 per-
cent, 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 be-
cause 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 pro-
tect 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 nega-
tive assessment of the infant will be self-fulfilling, is considerably increased. Under
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When empathic care is obstructed 

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’ nega-
tive 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 empa-
thy 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 ex-
treme situations I have witnessed similar examples of the stigmatisation of chil-
dren 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 devia-
tion 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 con-
sequence of this diagnosis/definition (that was very often performed by the local
witch doctor) these children are rejected by their families, both physically and psy-
chologically. 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 im-
poverished 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 pro-
viding 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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 Karsten Hundeide

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, subju-
gated 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 chil-
dren 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 con-
vinced 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 posses-
sion. 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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When empathic care is obstructed 

– 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 preg-
nant 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 com-
ponents 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 coun-
try” . . .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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 Karsten Hundeide

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 rejec-
tion. 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 out-
wardly 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 unmedi-
ated 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 inti-
macy, from those whom we love and are part of our family, close friends and per-
sons 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 indicat-
ing 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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When empathic care is obstructed 

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 recognis-
ing 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 pre-
condition 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 sensitiv-
ity 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 identifica-
tion 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 co-
human 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
ABUSE/NEGLECT GOOD CARE
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
the child (p) Inclusion P

Empathic blockage/ Expulsion P Appropriate care

and withdrawal (p) based on empathic
in the caregiver Empathic identification with sensitivity
the child needs – psychological with the child
Objectification and physical/nutritional
Commitment to care:
Indifference/neglect Emotional and attentional Availability of
Abuse/rejection: availability for the child food, medicine.
Violence, torture Physical health

Three ways into the zone

1. Face-to-face 2. Bodily contact and 3. Imitation sensitive touch,

communication embracing and direct participation
and intimate in the child’s activity
dialogue

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 experi-
ences 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 num-
bers 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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When empathic care is obstructed 

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 temporar-
ily 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 net-
work: “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 nec-
essary 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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 Karsten Hundeide

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 relation-
ship 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 agi-
tated 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 help-
less 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 en-
counter 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-giver-
to-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 ex-
pressive, 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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When empathic care is obstructed 

the zone of intimacy, (P → (p)). In the example with the father who could not ac-
cept 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 fa-
ther 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 touch-
ing 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 hand-
icaps. 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 communi-
cation 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 touch-
ing. 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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 Karsten Hundeide

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 pos-
sible 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 follow-
ing 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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When empathic care is obstructed 

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 with-
out 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 estab-
lish 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 distin-
guish 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 commu-
nicative 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, becom-
ing 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 sim-
ilar 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 con-
tact 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 un-
steadily, 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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 Karsten Hundeide

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, non-
verbal, 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. Accord-
ing 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 re-
sponsibility 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 reci-
procity 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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When empathic care is obstructed 

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 funda-
mental 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 bureau-
crat – the glance from a distant and abstract position.
– The dangers of negative definitions that can legitimise dehumanisation and in-
fringement, 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 immedi-
ate 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).
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:07 F: AICR6813.tex / p.18 (916-991)

 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 viola-
tions 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 in-
structed 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 as-
pirations, 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 vio-
lence, 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 sensitiv-
ity 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-to-
face 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 con-
tact “. . . in which both partners create and undergo a joint experience. . . This resonant ex-
perience 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.
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:07 F: AICR6813.tex / p.19 (991-1112)

When empathic care is obstructed 

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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 des-
tiny, and its memory across generations, constitute a challenge for psychothera-
peutic 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) ob-
jects, (iv) family narratives, (v) name, and (vi) documents. These elements invite
descriptions in Stern’s terms of amodal perception, affect attunement, and pro-
tonarrative envelope, and in Bråten’s terms of felt immediacy, e-motional mem-
ory, 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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 Andrea Cabassi

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 des-
tiny 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 determin-
istic: 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 our-
selves 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 dou-
ble 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-
JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/02/2007; 14:53 F: AICR6814.tex / p.3 (158-218)

Family disseminate archives 

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 nar-
ratives, (v) name, and (vi) documents.
The first element may seem to be virtual but it is not. I refer to home atmo-
sphere. 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 per-
ceives 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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 Andrea Cabassi

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 doc-
uments 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 special-
ization. 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 pro-
tometaphor, 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 corre-
sponds 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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Family disseminate archives 

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 re-
presentational 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 move-
ments 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 el-
ement 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 dis-
tinctions 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 relation-
ship 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 synchro-
nised, 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, de-
scribes 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, ono-
matopeia, 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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 Andrea Cabassi

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 communi-
cation 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 partic-
ipation 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 phenom-
ena, 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 representa-
tion 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 oth-
ers, 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. Riz-
zolatti, 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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Family disseminate archives 

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 mon-
key 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 de-
scribed 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 appear-
ing 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 frag-
ments 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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 Andrea Cabassi

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 in-
fant, 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 care-
giving 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 hap-
pen 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 hap-
pen. 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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Family disseminate archives 

First example. Livio, his father and his peers. Counselling. Counselling with par-
ents 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 10-
11 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 genera-
tions. 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 vio-
lent 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 temper-
ament, 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 repeti-
tion 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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 Andrea Cabassi

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 at-
mospheres 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 alter-
centric participation, he lives the mother’s movements from the mother’s stance.
Movements of ill-treatment in his mother provokes movements in Ivo who co-
enacts, 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 multiprob-
lems 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 perse-
cuting 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 par-
ents, 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 writ-
ing about vicious circles, it is most likely that Ivo can repeat the mother’s move-
ments 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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Family disseminate archives 

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. Re-
construction 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 com-
panions 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 writ-
ten 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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 Andrea Cabassi

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.
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:09 F: AICR6815.tex / p.1 (48-107)

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 impro-
visation; 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 experi-
ence, 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 ques-
tion. Through this project we wish to examine how musical interaction between
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 Birgit Kirkebaek

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 expres-
sions, 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 communi-
cation.
– 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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Reaching moments of shared experiences through musical improvisation 

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 follow-
on hypotheses lead to following preliminary postulates interesting for the (special)
pedagogy:
– That external structure such as schemes programs and symbols do not neces-
sarily 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 es-
tablish 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 ex-
pansion 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 ped-
agogic, 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 in-
teraction 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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 Birgit Kirkebaek

An important methodical turning point is that we continuously compare

Cathrine Lervig’s “inside out” perspective with Birgit Kirkebæk’s “outside in” per-
spective. 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 ses-
sion, 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 move-
ments 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 in-
teraction. 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 mov-
ing. 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 sim-
ilar 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 nar-
ratives. 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 pre-
mature 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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Reaching moments of shared experiences through musical improvisation 

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 tak-
ing, 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 communica-
tion 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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 Birgit Kirkebaek

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 de-
scribes 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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Reaching moments of shared experiences through musical improvisation 

– 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 con-
duct 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 perfec-
tion 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 learn-
ing 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 be-
haviour, but continently the behaviour is perceived with a reasoned, dyadic and
dialogic perspective. He asks what does it take to redefine deviant behaviour to so-
cial 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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 Birgit Kirkebaek

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 out-
bursts 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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Reaching moments of shared experiences through musical improvisation 

– 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 fol-
lowed 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 expres-
sion, 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 ped-
agogical 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).
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:09 F: AICR6815.tex / p.10 (521-598)

 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 Communica-
tion 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 Lim-
fjordsskolen, 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 communica-
tion.” 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-Maximilians-
Universität München, Germany): “Temporal mechanisms of the brain as fundamentals of com-
munication – 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, Køben-
havns 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.
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:09 F: AICR6815.tex / p.11 (598-647)

Reaching moments of shared experiences through musical improvisation 

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: Universi-
tetsforlaget.
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
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the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Special Issue 1999–2000.
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:10 F: AICR6816.tex / p.1 (48-139)

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 cel-
ebrate 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 dif-
ferent 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 syn-
chrony (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, vocal-
izing 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-
  Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen
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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
F: AICR6816.tex / p.2 (139-139)

Saskia van Rees (van Rees & De Leeuw 1993). Spectrograph by Stephen Malloch.)
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:10 F: AICR6816.tex / p.3 (139-177)

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 con-
scious 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 imi-
tating 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 move-
ments of other animals – how we, and animals too, are naturally intersubjective,
making social collaboration by sensing in movements both intentions that formu-
late 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 ‘mim-
ing’ 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 vo-
cal, 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 in-
fant’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-
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:10 F: AICR6816.tex / p.4 (177-253)

 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

mically with integrated purpose – and the fundamental pulse and accelerations of
the movements appeared to match those of spontaneous and intuitive adult ex-
pressions (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 move-
ments 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 phenome-
nologists (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 ges-
tures 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 feel-
ings, 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 activa-
tion, 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 ex-
pressive 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, it is important to note that the biological
rhythms of animal action and of animal communication are never metric or con-
stant. Neural ‘clocks’ are not ‘hard wired’ or ‘mechanical’ generators of action. Like
all ‘biological clocks’ they have a preferred periodicity, but, unlike mechanical or
electronic clocks, are adaptable to circumstances of their actions in the body and in
engagement with the world, and consequently variable in their energy and power
(Looby & Loudon 2005). A mother-baby protoconversation is the product of a dy-
namic coordination or negotiation of moves, within the infant, within the mother,
and in the ongoing vital exchange between them. The baby enters the duet with the
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To sing and dance together 

Figure 2. ‘Protoconversation’ with a 6-week-old: A baby girl in the Infant Communication

Laboratory of Edinburgh University has a 26 second vocal exchange with her mother that
shows narrative form. The mother’s vocalisations are rhythmic and grouped in phrases or
‘bars’ with melodic modulation. The pitch of her voice starts and finishes on C4. It rises
through an octave to a climax at 15 sec., then descends. The baby occupies a vacant bar at
7–8 sec. The climax is marked by a rhythmic utterance by the mother, and the baby syn-
chronises with the last ‘note’ in this phrase. The mother’s utterances correspond to musical
bars, as follows (the infant’s vocalisations are indicated by white spaces in the figure and *
in the following transcription):
“|Come on | A-gain | Come on then | That-’s clev-er!| ** | Oh yes! Is that right? | | Well, tell
me some more then |* | Aaaah! | Come on | * * | E-goo! | | E-goo! |.”
(Photo by Colwyn Trevarthen, acoustic analysis by Stephen Malloch.)
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 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

mother by improvising with ‘swing’, as jazz duetists do (Schögler 1998, 1999). It is

their ability to conceive, enact and perceive variations in the tempo and expression
of their sympathetic rhythmic activity that makes the protoconversation musical.
That is how we enter this world and find affectionate company.
The sense of time for moving active in the brain of an infant rules experience of
all parts of the body as one Self (Trevarthen & Reddy 2006), and accepts perceptual
information about moving from all modalities, proprioceptive feel in the body,
exteroceptive seeing and hearing things outside the body, and exproprioceptively
monitoring sight, feel and sound reflected back to the self from moving. This same
core sense of time-in-movement enables a baby to engage with another person
by hearing, seeing, vocalizing and gesturing in one intersubjective timeframe of
intentions and experience. Remarkable evidence of this creation of consciousness
of Self and Other comes from analysis of a musical engagement between a totally
blind Swedish baby and her mother who was singing to her while giving her a
bottle (Figure 3).
The baby is moving her left hand up and down with an intuitive subtlety of
gestural imagination while her mother sings two baby songs composed by Al-
ice Tegner. As the little girl, who has never seen any human hand, listens to her
mother’s singing, she ‘dances’ or ‘conducts’ the melody of the song, matching sub-
tleties of rhythm and tone of voice with waving of the arm, lifts and rotations
of the wrist and spreading and pointing of the fingers in a 3-dimensional ‘pitch
space’ aligned to the vertical axis of her body. Microanalysis of the film compared
to a spectrograph of the mother’s voice proved that the infant is anticipating her
mother’s vocal gestures by an interval of 300 milliseconds. She knows the songs ‘in
her head’ and can lead her mother in their duet of expressive moving. Moreover,
the analysis reveals that her active participation is intermittent. At times she seems
to pause to just listen, and occasionally she appears to reflect on or ‘think about’ a
previous phrase, gesturing to herself, out of time with the singing at that moment.
Her creative and receptive musicality has to be seen as a part of a much more gen-
eral innate creative impulse driving actions and awareness, one that is seeking to
share with other persons the experience of moving. The blind baby was not taught
to ‘conduct’ – nobody knew she was doing it until the film was analyzed. It is her
instinctive performance of communicative musicality, to share a familiar and loved
vocal story.
Every human society uses baby songs or rhythmic action games to stimulate
play and joint participation after the infants are about three months old. From
that age the infants are highly attentive to the emotional quality or aesthetic style
of the adult’s performance. A song or action game made with joy and affection
elicits happy engagement, and the infant learns a repeated enjoyable ritual, shows
pleasure at hearing the beginning of a familiar melody, and can demonstrate antic-
ipation of ends of phrases or the climax and ending of a song by vocalizing ‘in tune’
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To sing and dance together 

Figure 3. Innate hand gestures to melody of song: A 5-month-old girl, born totally blind,
‘conducts’ the musical rhythms of her mother’s singing of a Swedish nursery song, with
her left hand. A plot of the movements of her left index finger in vertical and horizontal
directions shows that, compared to the pitch plot of her mother’s voice, shows that she is
leading the mother by c. 300 msec. (see events at 4, 16 and 28 sec.). The arrows indicate that
she is synchronising with the mother at other points. She knows the song and can perform
it her way, ‘dancing’ with the mother’s song. (From a video by Gunilla Preisler, Stockholm
University; plot of hand movements by Ben Schögler.)

(i. e. matching pitch and timbre), or by gesturing ‘in time’. The baby is then ap-
parently engaged by the ‘emotional envelope’ of the presentation, or its ‘narrative’
(Stern 1992, 1999; Trevarthen 1987, 1999; Malloch 1999).
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 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

What is innate here is an avidity to learn by moving expressively, and the parent
responds intuitively to teach by moving expressively. By six months simple culture
specific ways of moving in ‘performances’, such as the actions of a hand-clapping
song, are taken up and used or ‘shown off ’ by infants in games with their famil-
iar companions (Trevarthen 2002). These learned behaviours are associated with
strong expressions of shared enjoyment, or ‘pride’, which recall the emotion of
pleasure that is found to be associated with even neonatal imitations. A six-month-
old, now able to sit up and move arms and hands effectively, has limited vocal
capacity compared to a one-year-old, but can call, gurgle, giggle and squeal, and
can assume a special ‘singing’ voice, matching the rhythm of vocal expression with
waving or bouncing gestures (Littleton 2002).

Moving to move others

The concept of being ‘moved’ by music must be as old as music itself. The lan-
guage we use to describe the emotional effects of music is full of metaphors for
animal movement, a soaring crescendo, a dancing, or plodding melody, for ex-
ample. Daniel Stern uses the following adverbs to distinguish qualities of ‘time
contours’ or ‘feeling flow patterns’ of ‘vitality’ in subjective experience of social in-
teraction: surging, fading-away, fleeting, explosive, tentative, effortful, accelerating,
decelerating, climaxing, bursting, and drawn out (Stern 1999: 68). These ways of
moving with different profiles of energy or power are the essential aesthetic mes-
sages between musical communicators, or art communicators of any kind (Langer
1953; Dissanayake 1999, 2000).
All the sounds that musicians make in solo performance and in orchestral
concerts are a product of physical movement of human beings, either interacting
with the masses and resonance of an instrument or within the vocal apparatus of
their own body. Music is a product of bodies moving with perceptual control of
the quality or ‘e-motion’ of moving – it carries commands to move in all their vital
quality. That is why it moves us.
Analysis of dynamic emotional exchanges of all human activity, but especially
in the arts of theatre, music and dance, (which Adam Smith (1777/1982) wrote
about as the Imitative Arts) enables researchers to harvest a wealth of information
on the generation of motivated psychological time, thus clarifying the processes
of perception and cognition which depend on the mind’s work to move the body
effectively in engagement with the world. It gives us the key to understanding so-
cial communication in all animal species and humans (Donald 1999; Panksepp &
Bernatzky 2002; Panksepp & Trevarthen 2007). Artists in all their incarnations act
as mediators for emotion and aesthetics, translating narratives of expression and
experience between different modalities of perception.
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To sing and dance together 

When an artist seeks to recreate a form or gesture by translating it from

one modality to another, between different ‘actions of the musculature’ (Donald
1999: 41) (e.g., from expressions heard in sound to dance movements), they
demonstrate the inner workings of human creative, communicative and expressive
competence. In music with dance performers seek to engage others and tell stories
through the movement of their bodies in response to the narratives of emotion in
a tradition of music (Hanna 1979).

An exact science of musical movement

Micro-analytic research has proved that by coordinating their actions in sympathy

and with dynamic sensitivity, mother and infant come to share a dance of voice,
hand and face in one time. Although the modality of information they pick up
from each other is constantly shifting, the coordination and focusing of their at-
tention is fitted to coherent musical time units that form the building blocks for
their engagement. There is little doubt that when they are sharing time construc-
tively, whether engaged in explicitly musical forms of play or not, the interaction
between mother and infant is rhythmic, like music. But what is the crucial infor-
mation that makes this joint performance possible? What is the common currency
between body parts and modalities of perception? How can persons coordinate
and share motives and gestures that are expressed across changing modalities of
experience? How do they pick up and couple the rhythmic time units?
The ‘expressive’ information in music and dance has long been the focus of
research into creativity and expression (Scholes 1960; Dogantan 2002; Camuuri et
al. 2003; Haagendorn 2004; Stevens et al. 2003). There is also a well established
tradition of psychological research into the purposeful sequencing and perceptual
guidance of movements (Lashley 1951; Gibson 1966; Lee 1998). It is understood
that any efficient or creative act of expression employs all the levels of organiza-
tion – physiological, muscular, neural and behavioural – and the question of how
these levels, from biophysics to emotion, can be coordinated or integrated in the
brain is central to our understanding of the psychology and communication as a
whole (Panksepp & Bernatzky 2002). A persistent difficulty has been the lack of
a means of integrating information from different fields of enquiry in a coherent
theory that is sufficiently sensitive to their multidimensional nature and flexibility
of timing (Camurri et al. 2000).
Research at the Perception in Action Laboratories of Edinburgh University has
addressed this problem, applying Gibson’s ‘ecological perception theory’ (Gibson
1966) and principles of perceptuo-motor coordination (Bernstein 1967). The
‘prospective control of movements by perception’ (Lee 1998) is being investigated
in the context of the kinematic specification principle first established by Runeson
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 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

and Frykholm (1983) in experiments exploiting Johansson’s (1973) point light

technique for recording unencumbered movements of body parts. The method ac-
cepts that essential control principles of movement in a performance are specified
by the pattern of the motor events in time, and that these principles are detected by
a perceiver of the moving person. For example, one perceives whether a walker is
male or female in a point light movie from information specified in the kinematics
of the movements of their hips and legs to which the lights are attached. Runeson
and Frykholm, using Johansson’s principles of investigation, demonstrated that
dynamic properties of movement can be detected in changing sounds.
A wide range of research on expressive performance (Askenfelt 1988; Clynes
1973; Gabrielsson 1988; Jusslin & Sloboda 2001; Todd 1994) has demonstrated
that perceptual information about us, what we are doing and how we feel about
it, can be communicated to others in different modalities from the way we control
our movement. As we run, jump, dance, smile or laugh we exercise a variety of
body parts in a multitude of ways. The signal we offer may be a jiggle, a glance
seen, a touch or a sound, what the other perceives is a person doing something, and
more specifically how they are doing it. We infer purpose and manner to others’
actions. We offer information about ourselves in how we move, and we offer an
invitation for others to join in and move with us.
Recent research into musical behaviour of adults that uses ‘motion capture’
technology and physical analysis of sound recordings to make exact measurement
of forms of expression in musical performance, with mathematical examination of
the ‘functions’ that guide each movement to its goal, may provide a paradigm that
will explain how the intimate exchanges of mother and infant can be so efficiently
timed. This approach is giving movement scientists a privileged view of the ballet
acted out in every form of human communication where motives, consciousness
and understanding are transferred between minds. It calls for a general theory of
how the time/space dimensions of movement images are generated and controlled
in the brain.
General Tau Theory (Lee 1998, 1999, 2005) defines a precise model of how
information about intentions in movements and their regulations are formulated
in the brain of an actor. It facilitates accurate measurement of how movements
are made with purpose and efficiency. When examining how people move in a
communicative context, such as in a jazz duet (Schögler 1998) or in mother infant
interaction (Trevarthen 1999), we can apply this model to extract the gestural in-
formation about motives that is exchanged between individuals. Application of the
theory requires a mathematical analysis of how actions are guided in time. Without
going into the mathematical formulation, which is spelled out in David Lee’s pub-
lications, we can use his definition of the special temporal measure that provides
sufficient information necessary to guide the closure of a ‘motion-gap’ between a
mover’s body and the goal, i. e. “the time-to-closure of the motion-gap at the cur-
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To sing and dance together 

rent closure-rate”. This variable is defined as the ‘tau’ of the motion-gap, after the
name for the Greek letter ‘T’ (Lee 1998). The tau function has been demonstrated
to govern the prospective control of a wide range of animal movements (Lee 1998,
2005). This proves that animal brains have evolved capable of anticipating the ex-
perience of a movement to a goal (or the closure of a ‘motion gap’) by comparing
this experience to a function generated in the brain, the tau-guide, which provides
the perceptual system with dynamic temporal information for each movement
about the changing state of the system in relation to an anticipated goal state.
The ‘motion gap’ is defined in independence of either the physical nature of
the movement required, or the perceptual modality that monitors it – it can be the
felt angle of a joint rotation, the swing of a foot to kick a ball, the touch of fingers
grasping an object, a turn of the head in the visual array, a change in the sound of
a voice made by moving the larynx or the jaws, lips and tongue, the sounds echoed
back from the room by walking, or from objects being handled, and so on. Experi-
ments have shown that all ‘motion-gaps’ and the way they change can be described
with high accuracy through the application of tau theory, apparently for any form
of movement to a goal. This is a biological constant for animal movements.
To take a musical example, when a singer moves between two notes a ‘pitch-
gap’ is anticipated between the note the singer is on at first, and the note he or
she is trying to achieve. The hearing of such a musical event has the power to
reach inside our minds and evoke emotions through our experience of the human-
made movement. This power depends on the ability of the musician to engage us
with temporally coherent forms of changing purpose and to express such ‘narra-
tion’ to us in a manner appreciable by us (Trevarthen & Malloch 2001). The study
of musical/creative behaviours thus offers the movement scientist a way to catch
the human agent moving expressively, with intellectual guard down – to see the
mind not as a disembodied, ideal interpreter and thinker, but as a feeling, acting,
impulsive person, spontaneously alive in his or her body.

Being moved by song

Extracting tau information from a movement is a means of detecting the neural

information for action in a tau guided movement. It taps the kind of information
in movement that allows infants and adults to move in sympathy, communicating
motives and intentions from brain to brain simply by moving together. In experi-
mental settings, tau theory has been applied to a variety of performances, such as
bowing in double bass playing and the control of pitch in singing. We report here
a study of the art of song.
The Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith made a remarkably modern statement
in the 18th Century about the phenomena of musical art. He said:
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 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

Without any imitation, instrumental Music can produce very considerable effects;
though its powers over the heart and affections are, no doubt, much inferior to
those of vocal Music, it has however, considerable powers: by the sweetness of its
sounds it awakens agreeably, and calls upon the attention; by their connection and
affinity it naturally detains that attention, which follows easily a series of agree-
able sounds, which have all a certain relation both to a common, fundamental,
or leading note, called the key note; and to a certain succession or combination
of notes, called the song or composition. By means of this relation each foregoing
sound seems to introduce, and as it were prepare the mind for the following: by
its rhythmus, by its time and measure, it disposes that succession of sounds into
a certain arrangement, which renders the whole more easy to be comprehended
and remembered. Time and measure are to instrumental Music what order and
method are to discourse; they break it into proper parts and divisions, by which
we are enabled both to remember better what has gone before, and frequently to
forsee somewhat of what is to come after: we frequently forsee the return of a
period which we know must correspond to another which we remember to have
gone before; and according to the saying of an ancient philosopher and musician,
the enjoyment of Music arises partly from memory and partly from foresight.
(Smith 1777/1982: 203–204)

Smith has identified both the expressive quality and rhythm of musical movement,
and also the prospective control that encompasses the imagining or remembering
of a tune. We tested this conception as follows.
A professional jazz singer was invited to record an acapella version of the song
‘The Beat Goes On’. Her singing was recorded in a traditional studio setting but
with one addition. She was asked to try and move her right hand in a manner that
matched her vocal performance, paying particular attention to her movements
up and down in pitch. Thus, as she moved from a high note to a low note her
hand was to move down, and vice versa. While audio recordings were made of her
singing, her hand movements were also recorded using a Selspot Motion Capture
system. This uses an active light emitting diode (led) marker on the body part to
be tracked, and a special video camera that records the movement. We tracked the
singer’s hand in horizontal (x) and vertical (y) planes at 500 cycles per second. The
set up is shown in Figure 4.
After the singer had performed the song, the recorded sound was processed us-
ing Praat acoustic software (Boersma & Weenink 2000) to extract an accurate pitch
contour. Her gestures of voice (pitch) and hand (movement in x and y planes) as
she sang a phrase of 3.5 seconds are plotted in Figure 5. The song has a repeating
blues structure providing several examples of each distinct pitch movement, which
facilitated analytic comparison.
We search for a coherence in the functions of the nervous information con-
trolling movements of hand and voice that might correspond to the message we
receive from the singer. There are many ‘motion gaps’ being controlled by the brain
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To sing and dance together 

Figure 4. Experimental set up for the singing/gesturing experiment

Figure 5. Graph showing an excerpt from the recording of the singer’s voice, with move-
ments in pitch (cross-hatched line) and corresponding horizontal (dotted line) and vertical
(black line) hand movements. This represents the first repetition of the phrase, “Drums
keep pound-ing a rhy-thm to the brai-n”. A graph showing the kappas of the pitch change
and hand movement for repeated performance of the word “brai-n” (circled) is shown in
Figure 6.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:10 F: AICR6816.tex / p.14 (599-662)

 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

in this behaviour. The two selected for measurement and comparison here are the
‘pitch-gap’ between successive notes and the distance or ‘spatial gap’ that varies
with the movements of the hand.
The musical expression describes some common parameter of intention be-
hind the very different movements of the arm and hand, and of the respiratory
system and larynx, not the excitation of any particular muscle groups in combina-
tion. Tau functions have been identified in the neural activity of the motor cortices
in anticipation of any guided movement (Lee 1998). Its analysis ascertains how any
particular data set matches the hypothesized tau-guide in the brain. A movement
is said to ‘fit’ the tau-coupling model when 95% of the variance in that movement
(equivalent to a probability level of p < 0.05) can be accounted for by the tau-
coupling model. We are asking if the activity of this kind of nervous information
source can be detected and perceived as ‘musical’ in the movements of the singers
vocal system or of her hand. The tau-coupling analyses allow us to measure, not
just the effectiveness of movement, but also different ‘qualitative’ aspects of the
kinematics or control and expression of the ‘motion-gaps’ in question. Two key
components relate to expressive communication in the movements – the qualities
of moving described by the terms Daniel Stern used, as cited above, to describe
different ‘feeling flow contours’. They also help define what Adam Smith referred
to as the ‘sweetness of sound’ in music and its rhythmus.
First, the mean coupling constant, K, describes the dynamic pattern of the
whole movement – in short how the movement caused by changing muscle forces
is ‘coupled’ to the form of action anticipated by nervous activity in the brain. By
sending appropriate tau information to the muscles, the brain ‘intends’ to regu-
late the tau of a motion-gap so that its relation to the tau guide stays constant
at some value K set by the brain. K can be adjusted between movements to vary
their dynamical form or force and power. For example, if the movement acceler-
ated strongly and then followed a longer period of deceleration to arrive gently
and come to rest at its goal state with zero velocity or no impact, then this would
be described by a K changing between 0.0 and 0.5. That is, when the value of K
is between 0 and 0.5, the movement ends with touch contact, as when a person
is reaching carefully for something light and small. When K is between 0.5 and
1.0 the movement ends with hard contact or impact. The mean absolute force and
power involved in moving a part of the body are both raised by increasing K. For
example, perceiving and moving with tau guidance and keeping track of K enables
a musician to play or sing the right note in the right way at the right time (Lee &
Schögler 2007).
The second component of the mathematical account is a moment-to-moment
description of the process of coupling. This transcript of neural control takes the
form of a changing profile of the ratio of the movement tau and the prospective
neural guide tau, giving a resultant description of the process of control as the
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To sing and dance together 

movement unfolds. When this ratio of the tau of the movement to the tau guide
is plotted against time for the duration of a coupled movement a graphical repre-
sentation of the active process of ‘coupling’ is produced in what we have termed
a kappa graph. This transcript displays the adjustments made to the ‘motion-gap
tau’ to maintain proportionality with the ‘guide-tau’ provided neurally. This mea-
sure shows us the ‘flow’ of movements, and consistencies in the ‘way’ these kappa
profiles unfold may provide a glimpse of the underlying expressive ‘image’ or plan,
the quality or ‘tone’ of the gesture the artist is trying to convey through their
movements be they ostenato, vibrato or soaring glissando (Lee & Schögler 2006).
A graph of kappa gives a temporal description of the pattern of control of the
movement over its whole course. These graphs demonstrate a measurable effect of
putting a Sollwert (Bernstein 1967) or ‘motor plan’ (Jeannerod 2006) into action,
and they show systematic variation over different movements in different modali-
ties. We suggest that the mathematical form in a graphical representation of kappa
shows the emotional intention in the nervous plan for action behind the gesture. If
these graphs are the same shape for different types of movements, such as the ges-
tures of hand and voice of our singer, then they go deeper and show us a common
amodal state of emotionality in mind made apparent in both hand and voice, not
dependent on either one medium of changing pitch or spatial orientation – that is,
they convey that which is common to both hand and voice, the singer’s intended
expression.
So, in our study of this the singer’s performance of ‘the beat goes on’, we were
interested in several questions. Can tau analyses be used to accurately describe the
process of control in both vocal and hand movements? Is there coherence between
the tau variables of mean K and kappa for hand and voice? Can this information
communicate to us something about the feelings of the person singing? Coupling
analyses showed that the control of each and every vocal (pitch) and hand (spa-
tial) movements was accurately described by tau functions. However, in addition
to a striking concordance overall between the movements of hand and voice, there
were several instances where the K values did not match. This is an important fea-
ture, demonstrating that the relationship between the central nervous control and
expression of any one behaviour is a dynamic process in an adjustable experience
of activity. The singer had received very little direction regarding her hand gestures
and she had no practice. Her moving was the spontaneous expression of impulses
to move and to feel the movement whilst performing the song. She may have been
uncertain and hesitant in her movements at times, and different points in her ges-
tural narrative have different emotive consequences. To clarify this aspect more
investigation will be required. There were, nevertheless, several instances where
the control of both hand and voice described by the tau coupling analyses were
obviously very close, and we chose these for further attention. At several points
within her performance the way she moved her hand was the same as the way
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 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

Figure 6. Graph showing mean kappas, for hand and voice for 12 repetitions of the down-
ward pitch change, shown in Figure 5 (time is normalized for the different utterances of
the word to facilitate comparison).

she moved her voice. We conclude that the ‘sameness’ would give us information
about how her brain controlled the two activities.
The area within the elliptical line in Figure 5, at the end of the phrase when
she sings the words, “to the brain”, illustrates one such moment of high concor-
dance between vocal and manual gestures. As the singer lifts and drops her voice
we can see that the Y-movement of the hand (a vertical displacement relative to
the camera) anticipates this change by a short interval, and then follows a sim-
ilar time course. When the kappa graphs for both lift and fall of the hand and
pitch change for several such coincident actions of voice and hand in the per-
formance of the song are plotted on the same graph and time is normalized so
their shape can be closely compared, the result is quite remarkable (Figure 6). The
mean kappa graphs, with error bars to indicate the standard deviation of kappa,
for 12 corresponding hand and pitch movements (pitch in black, hand in grey)
show that the temporal pattern of control for both hand and voice are very sim-
ilar indeed. Despite being movements of a very different character made by very
different motor structures, and that take place over different periods of time, they
have similar dynamic form. It can be seen, for example, in Figure 5 that the du-
ration of the downward hand movement is much longer than the corresponding
fall of pitch. The common factor is the singer’s own intended expression evident in
the pattern of control for both hand and voice. This is evidence for a single source
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To sing and dance together 

Figure 7. The movement music cycle: A gesture or feeling is translated from the score to
the mind of a musician, and to the body of a dancer.

for these movements, a single ‘motor image’ or ‘plan’, a measure of what Bernstein
termed the Sollwert (Bernstein 1967). This and other similar experiments have led
to the formulation of a new approach to studying the expressive qualities of com-
municative behaviour, entailing a quest indicated by the simplified Figure 7 and
concerning these processes and relations: There is something measurable in the pat-
tern of flow communicative/expressive behaviour characterized in music and dance
that communicates the underlying emotion or expression. What is this something?
And how is it shared and translated between artists?

Coda: A strategy for finding the variables of human sympathy in movement

In collaboration with Professor David Lee and his team at the Perception in Action
Laboratories at Edinburgh University, we investigate the following theory: the in-
formation for communication between performers in the expressive or ‘imitative’
arts, and for the appreciation of their art by others’, relates to the special dynamic
or ‘kinematic’ properties of movements and sounds, and more specifically to the
tau-coupling information generated in the brain that determines how those kine-
matics are controlled. By means of accurate measurement of the changing form of
expressive actions in different media, perceived in their effects by different modal-
ities, it should be possible to isolate and track those components that relate to
the emotion or expression intended by the performing artist, and to the aesthetic
appreciation of their performances.
The work we report here is but a pilot study, and far from conclusive. However,
it enables us to propose that understanding the expressions of art will require fu-
ture research employing the same degree of precision. The method of tau analysis
affords a way to bring all forms of communicative behaviours in art and tech-
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:10 F: AICR6816.tex / p.18 (782-851)

 Ben Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen

nique under one form of scrutiny that is given meaning by one theory about their
motives.
The prospect of unlocking the fundamental psychobiological building blocks
that make possible the intuitive intersubjectivity discovered in interactions be-
tween very young infants and their parents – in protoconversations, baby songs
and rhythmic games – is exciting. It must be of significance for understanding
the learning and communal functions of language, and all other forms of culti-
vated rituals of human societies, as Mary Catherine Bateson (1979) predicted. By
augmenting the innovative approach of a detailed acoustic investigation of the
patterns of ‘communicative musicality’ in mother-infant play (Trevarthen & Mal-
loch 2000) with the tau analysis procedures it should be possible to trace with
confidence the communication of shared motives and emotions of human beings
of all ages as they dance between vocal prosody and words, with feeling also made
evident by a smile or a frown, a touch or a gesture. Human conversation is a multi-
talented performance ‘orchestrated’ by an innate sense of the time and energy of
moving generated in the emotional core of the mind.

Acknowledgements

The pilot experiments were carried out, under supervision of Professor David Lee
and Ben Schögler, by undergraduate students at Edinburgh University, R. Berger,
P. Biggs, B. Harvey, J. Scriven, and E. Ward, as research projects for their Honours
Dissertations in Psychology, 2004.

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chapter 

On circular re-enactment of care

and abuse, and on other-centred
moments in psychotherapy
Closing comments

Stein Bråten
University of Oslo

In this volume we have examined the origins and foundations of (pre)verbal in-
tersubjectivity in light of new findings, including the discovery of mirror neurons
and the identification of infant intersubjectivity and other-centred participation.
A number of contributions have highlighted modes of participant perception dur-
ing interaction and laid out its altercentric nature and some of its likely neurosocial
support. As the very reverse of perceiving the other – the model or the patient –
from an ego-centric perspective, altercentric participation entails the empathic ca-
pacity to identify with the other in a virtual participant manner that evokes present
moments of co-enactment or shared experience as if being in the other’s bodily
centre (cf. Bråten 1998, this volume (7); Stern 2000, 2004, this volume (2)). This
basic intersubjective capacity makes inter alia imitation, empathy, and identifi-
cation possible, as expressed by Stern. And what is more, by virtue of empathic
identification it may underlie activation of infant prosociality and even altruistic
behaviours in toddlers (cf. examples in Bråten 1996a, b; Freud & Burlingham 1973;
Whiting & Edwards 1988; Zahn-Waxler et al. 1979). No longer can the theoreti-
cal view be upheld of the egocentric toddler, dominated by the pleasure principle
(Freud 1911), awaiting a long developmental period of de-centration (Piaget 1959)
before becoming social.
In these concluding comments I shall first indicate how the capacity for other-
centred participation enables a general proclivity towards prosocial and even al-
truistic behaviour, and, then, how the altercentric capacity invites in the child as
a subject of care or abuse a mode of imitative learning by empathic identifica-
tion with the caregiver or abuser which may create virtuous and vicious circles of
re-enactment from an implicit participatory memory hidden from consciousness.
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 Stein Bråten

Finally, I shall touch upon questions on how dialogue and other-centred moments
of meeting in psychotherapy may play a role in bringing about change.

When toddlers afford proto-care, even altruism

Examples of helping and altruistic behaviours afforded by toddlers invite the ques-
tion about the foundations of such prosocial behaviours. In terms of the capacity
for other-centred participation which, while innate, requires to be sensitized by
early experience, two replies are offered, the first about nature, the second about
nurture: first, altercentric capacity enables empathic identification with the pa-
tient’s distress, evoking concern and attempts to relieve the patient of his distress;
second, when subjected to caregiving, altercentricity enables the child to learn to
afford care from virtually participating in the caregiver’s activity, leaving an e-
motional memory that invites circular re-enactment towards others felt to be in
need.
Here is the first of three propositions.
(i) By virtue of the innate capacity for other-centred participation in the patient’s
distress or felt need as if experiencing that from the patient’s centre, there is a
natural proclivity in the child to feel concern and sometimes attempt to help
the patient, perhaps even at own expense, if situational and motoric resources
permit (Bråten 1997).

Even wartime children, deprived of family life, may show themselves capable of
transcending own body-centred position and egoistical needs, as shown in this
episode, reported by Anna Freud:

Rose (19 months) sat at the table and drank her cocoa. Edith (17 months) climbed
up and tried to take the mug from Rose’s mouth. Rose looked at her in surprise,
then turns the mug and holds it for Edith so that she could drink the cocoa.
(Freud & Burlingham 1973: 574)

Rose’s reaction to Edith’s clumsy attempt to get cocoa is most telling, not only be-
cause of her altruistic act, helping Edith to drink cocoa at the cost of stopping her
own drinking, but because of the way in which she reverses the mug in view of
Edith’s bodily position. By turning the mug so that Edith can drink from Edith’s
position, reverse to that of her own, Rose here demonstrates her capacity to tran-
scend her own body-centred perspective. She affords proto-care to Edith by virtue
of other-centred participation, and Rose may have learnt such mirror-reversal with
the mug when she herself has been subjected to feeding from her care-givers.
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On circular re-enactment of care and abuse 

Basis for circular re-enactment

As we saw in the examples of infants reciprocating care-giving (this volume (7)),

while care-giving situations may appear to be unilateral activities, they have to be
re-defined to be reciprocal activities in virtue of which the infant takes part in
what the caregiver does, and thereby learns from alter-centric participation in that
very care-giving. This fits with studies revealing how the quality of the care-giving
background appears to play a role in children’s reaction towards others in need:
Those from a nurturant and caring background are most likely to help and offer
comfort to other children in need or distress (Berk 1994; Zahn-Waxler et al. 1979).
But potentially vicious circles are implied here:
(ii) The kind of caretaking frequently experienced by the infant in virtue of alter-
centric participation provides a basis for circular re-enactment of that kind of
caretaking towards other children in need or distress.

Thus, sensitive caretaking frequently experienced by the infant in the reciprocal

mode of felt immediacy provides a basis for circular re-enactment of semblant
kinds of caretaking towards other children in need or distress. But caretaking ex-
periences need of course not only be experiences of caring, comfort and holding
(in Winnicott’s sense). Parent, caretaker and others may provide various severe
forms of abuse.
In the way that sensitive care-giving invites circular re-enactment then we
should also expect that experiences of abuse sometimes may come to invite circles
of re-enactment towards others in the course of ontogeny.
(iii) Circular re-enactment of abuse somehow entails that the child victim has
been compelled not just to suffer the victim part, but to feel to participate in
the abusive movements, sharing the vitality contours reflecting the manner of
abuse and the feelings that direct the abuse. In virtue of such altercentric par-
ticipation the victim may come to experience engagement in the bodily mo-
tions and feelings of the abuser, not just the suffering. That leaves the victim
with a compelling bodily and emotional remembrance that increases the like-
lihood of circular re-enactment of abuse in peer relations or towards younger
children later in ontogeny from e-motional memory of having virtually par-
ticipated in actual alter’s abuse, while suffered by the victim’s bodily ego.

Empirical support: Abused toddlers are more likely to become abusive than
other toddlers, and many adult abusers have been childhood victims of abuse

Thus, prior to defence mechanisms setting in, the abused child is not just a victim
of the abuse, but virtually may take a part in the abusive and hurtful event as a
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 Stein Bråten

co-enactor of the abuse, inviting as one of several paths an increased likelihood of

circular re-enactment of abusive behaviour towards other potential victims.
The above implies that children who have experienced caretaking or parent-
ing in a harsh, punitive, neglecting or abusive manner should be more likely to
respond with fear, anger, or even attack peers or younger children in distress,
as compared to responses by children with a different experiential background.
Empirical studies point in this direction. For example, observing abused toddlers
abusing other infants George and Main (1979) indicate a vicious circle in the early
impact of the quality of the caretaking background. Severely abused toddlers have
been observed at a day-care centre to react fearfully or aggressive towards other
children in distress, and by the second year of their life to re-enact the abusive be-
haviour of their parents. Some of the toddlers found to having been abused were
never observed to express obvious concern for another child in distress. Some-
times, they even tormented the other child until it began crying and then, while
smiling, mechanically patted or attempted to quiet the crying child (Harris 1989;
George & Main 1979).
There is thus a double vicious circle in the tragedy of child victims of abuse.
Not only are they deprived of full emotional holding quality in their own life.
By virtue of circular re-enactment from e-motional memory of abuse, some of
them may even later in ontogeny be driven to deprive others of that same quality
of life, but certainly not every victim; many of them will pursue different paths,
including dissociation, i.e. divorcing the bodily self from the victim’s virtual other,
each running different independent courses. And sometimes the adult abuser may
come to realize, when his or her e-motional memory of having suffered abuse as a
child is brought to the surface, that theirs may be cases of circular re-enactment.
Classical theories of learning cannot be used to account for this kind of learn-
ing; only how to learn from being abused how to become and remain a victim.
Dornes (2002: 303–331) points to links between the above account of circular
re-enactment of abuse and the psychoanalytic notions of ‘identification with the
aggressor” and “identification with the introject”, albeit, as he stresses, the present
account implies a sort of “identification” at a sub-symbolic and body-near level
entailing no symbolic representations:
[Bråten’s] theory follows the intuition of Freud (1920) that compulsive repetition
(“Wiederholungszwang”) is a biologically founded phenomenon, albeit here not
anchored in the death instinct, but in a form of resonance theory.
(Dornes 2002: 319n.)

Thus, this means virtual participation in a more narrow sense, participation in

the sense of felt immediacy in the abuser’s movements as if being a co-author,
and leaving the victim with a bodily, not conceptual, remembrance that call upon
circular re-enactment. And, as Dornes makes clear, above has been accounted for
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:13 F: AICR6817.tex / p.5 (263-316)

On circular re-enactment of care and abuse 

the re-enactment of abuse in terms of the very same life-giving mechanism that
is operative in children’s proto-care and in their re-enacting the care-giving they
have experienced.
Again, as in the case of circular re-enactment of care, no conceptual or ver-
bal “memory” is required for experiences of abuse in felt immediacy to give rise
to re-enactment. Indeed, men and women who have been subjected to incest
and abuse in their infancy or early childhood may first come to realize that they
may have been victims when a crisis breaks out in adult years. But while the ex-
perience of abuse is not re-presented in virtue of any conceptual memory, the
child is certainly affected in the most profound way. That is why the composite
term e-motional “memory”, or what Fogel (2004) participatory memory, is useful
to denote the affective experience and remembrance of moving with the other’s
motions that afford the infant the feeling of participating in the movement and ac-
companying emotions. Different from higher-order conceptual memory, this kind
of “e-motional memory” will be ineffaceably affected by abusive motions felt to be
co-enacted, and increase the likelihood of circular re-enactment of the previously
felt co-enacted movements later in ontogeny.

Across several family generations. Sometimes, such vicious circles of re-enactment

may cross several family generations, such as reported and treated by Cabassi
and Zini (2004: 103–112, 118–120), reporting the paradigmatic case of Ivo. Ivo’s
mother was ill-treated by her mother, and began to ill-treat Ivo already in the first
months of his life. Five years old, Ivo is seen to be re-enacting such manners and
movement in his relation to his peers and to adults (see also Cabassi this volume
(14)).
But fortunately, even vicious circles are sometimes transformed into self-other
creative spirals transcending the tragic experiences, and sometimes counselling or
psychotherapy may break the cycles (see also the case of Livio in Cabassi (this
volume (14)), who re-enacts towards his peers the violent play modes of his father,
and where this vicious circle is broken by successful counselling).

Therapeutic dialogue in the intersubjective present

Such virtuous and vicious circles of intergeneration re-enactment may be seen to
evoke different kinds of characteristic vitality contours entailing what Stern (1995,
1999) terms ‘protonarrative envelopes’ which – while being extra-linguistic and
non-conceptual – await re-opening and transcendence in relations to others later
in life. Vicious circles of re-enactment of abuse, as well as other paths pursued by
the victims, for example, divorce of the victim’s virtual other from the bodily self
in what used to be called “multiple personality disorders”, entail a ‘past’ hidden
from consciousness, and which is devoid of existential meaning in a sense of being
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 Stein Bråten

brought to bear in the phenomenological present. May a window be opened in

therapeutic conversations for an alternative future path?
G. H. Mead (1932) made the point that nothing exists – no past, no future –
except in the present, in the extended present that includes an emergent future
as well as a past, resembling perhaps Husserl’s view of the present. Mead adds,
however, that the emergent future contained in the present demands a “re-writing”
of the past contained in the present. Now, if that is the case, then may be exis-
tential meaning can only be assigned in the intersubjective present constituted in
dialogue with the other – actual or virtual – holding the promise of an emergent
future that invites definition and re-definition of the past brought out in the open
to be meaningfully contained in the intersubjective present constituted with thera-
peutic companions who are sensitive in a threefold manner: First, that they refrain
from editing the narratives on the therapist’s premises. Second, that they do not
transform the I-You dialogue into an I-It conversation in which means and ends
are introduced, to use Buber’s terms, and third that the dialogue permits opening
for what Stern terms ‘moments of meeting’.

Avoiding being the narrative editor (Anderson)

Maybe such a dialogical conversation between client and therapist requires the
attitude of approaching the client in the way advocated and practised by Har-
lene Anderson and Harold Goolishian. Being concerned with the prerequisites for
dialoguing on the premises of the patient’s perspective in the intersubjective set-
ting of the conversation, they bracket any deficiency preconceptions, regarding the
client (they prefer not to use the label “patient”) rather as a companion for “tak-
ing a walk”. They regard the ideal therapist not as an expert on pathology, but as a
participant manager of conversation with the goal of creating a space for, and par-
ticipation in, dialogical conversation, avoiding what Bråten (1984) terms a ‘model
monopoly’. Here is their recommended proceeding:
The therapist does not control the interview by influencing the conversation to-
wards a particular direction in the sense of content or outcome, nor is the ther-
apist responsible for the direction of change. The therapist is only responsible
for creating a space in which the dialogical conversation can occur and for being
participant in maintaining the conversation. Bråten [1984] describes this as a con-
versation that is intersubjective and one in which participants can make room for
creativity and consciousness of each other. (Anderson & Goolishian 1987)

Being aware of the way in which the therapist’s potential model power may come
into play, expected by the client to be the source of the only valid replies, and hence
transforming the conversation into a monological conversation, they try to avoid
becoming the “narrative editor” (Anderson 1997: 96).
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:13 F: AICR6817.tex / p.7 (384-423)

On circular re-enactment of care and abuse 

And yet, the protonarrative envelopes 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 phe-
nomenological 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. This may sound unrealistic, and, yet I know of cases
of severe childhood abuse realized by the victims only in adult years and which,
attested by their poetry and writings, has been transformed and transcended
through dialogical conversations with themselves and with others, including psy-
chotherapists and friends.

The present moment in psychotherapy (Stern)

And then, as pointed out by Daniel Stern, critical ‘now-moments’ may arise in the
psychotherapeutic process, inviting resolution in ‘moments of meeting’ between
patient and therapist, entailing a qualitative change that need no words:
The major findings are the realization that even in a “talking therapy” a vast
amount of therapeutic change occurs in the realm of procedural knowledge that
is not conscious, especially implicit knowledge on how to act, feel and think
when in a particular relational context (implicit relational knowing). We suggest
that the mutative act in this domain is a specific “moment of meeting”, which
is an emergent property of the dyadic system that pushes it into a new state of
intersubjectivity, thus changing the relationship. (Stern 1998: 308)

We need no reminder of how verbal and nonverbal interaction unfolds in time,

but we have to stop and think when invited to pay attention to the fact that signif-
icant events entailing qualitative changes and leaving traces that make a difference
in such interactions may be moments of relatively short duration, maybe 3 to 5
seconds. Stern (2004, this volume (2)) affords insights into the nature and con-
tents of such moments in psychotherapy and everyday life: what he terms a “now
moment” entails a mini-crisis that may come to be resolved in moments of meeting.
He invokes the Greek term kairos to characterize the almost “moment of truth”
nature of such significant micro-events that sometimes entail qualitative leaps in
the relationship. Thus, during conversations in psychotherapy as well as in daily
life, there sometimes occur moments of meeting, entailing a temporal duration
of perhaps about five seconds, in which the participants share a present moment
entailing a resolution of a crisis in their relation that was marked by a critical
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 Stein Bråten

now-moment the resolution of which qualitatively changes their relationship in

an efficient manner.
A now moment suddenly emerges in the course of the therapeutic process as
an affectively charged occurrence that raises questions about the patient-therapist
relation. This may entail that the modes of being together and rules of conversation
that so far have characterized the relationship are being questioned: How should
they now relate to one another? Anxiety mounts as they are being pulled forcefully
into the present. No routine technical response will now do, the therapist feels,
becoming even more anxious. A crisis has emerged, calling for a resolution. The
resolution may come by subjecting the relationship to a novel interpretation, or it
may be afforded by another present moment in the form of a moment of meeting.
A moment of meeting is such a present moment that has the potential to resolve
the crisis between two participants that emerged in their now moment. Thereby,
their intersubjective field are reshaped and their relationship altered. Stern offers a
number of illustrations. Here is but one example:
Whenever entering the consulting room the patient shakes hands with the thera-
pist, conforming to the therapist’s regular practice, and upon leaving they shake
hands again as a goodbye. One day the patient, sad and almost overwhelmed, re-
counts a very moving series of events which affect him (and the therapist) deeply.
At the end of the session, during the “goodbye” handshake, the therapist brings up
his left hand and lays it on the patient’s right hand which he was already holding,
making it a two-handed handshake. They look at one another. Nothing is said.
(Stern 2004: 19)
The above episode lasted several seconds, entailing several characteristics, includ-
ing these four characteristics: First, they both implicit knew what had happened,
something telling about their relationship, and which did not need words to be
made explicit and, second, each of them sensed what the other was experiencing,
“and both sensed the mutual participating in the other’s experience” (p. 20), an
interpenetration of mind entailing mutual other-centred participation that gave
rise to their sharing a novel state of intersubjectivity. Third, while multiple events
in the preceding minutes and, perhaps, weeks or months, had prepared a platform
for what emerged, it happened spontaneously and unpredictably, thereby afford-
ing a change in the relationship that entailed a qualitative leap. “Life changes in
leaps” (p. 20). Fourth, during that moment a story unfolded, minimal and tightly
packed, and yet created a “world in a grain of sand” in that lived moment (p.
20), or in what we may characterize as a moment of felt immediacy in no need of
post-symbolization in re-presentational mediacy.
Stern (2004) lists a number of other features of a clinically relevant present
moment. Here are two such characteristics:
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:13 F: AICR6817.tex / p.9 (484-542)

On circular re-enactment of care and abuse 

(i) A present moment is what it is in awareness now: a moment presently felt

and as unfolding during a stretch of awareness during a moment lived in felt
immediacy, and not as mediated in a verbal account (p. 32).
(ii) The current contents of mind contained in a present moment may some-
times slide unnoticed or sometimes, as novel or problematic, unpredictably
jump into awareness as a first-person experience, a holistic happening felt
as a whole, not something that allows to be regarded from a third-person
perspective. Having short duration, of roughly several seconds, present mo-
ments occur “in the time slot of immediate presentness”, entailing a dynamic
of time-shapes, involving some sense of self and inviting the experiencing self
to take a stance (pp. 32, 34, 38–39).

Referring to mirror neurons and adaptive oscillators, Stern makes the point that
when people move in mutual attunement and synchrony with each other, they
are participating in an aspect of the other’s experience. “They are partially liv-
ing from the other’s center” (Stern 2004: 81), i.e. entailing mutual other-centred
participation.
The kind of present moments Stern terms ‘moments of meeting’ offers reso-
lution to critical now-moments, and entails, as he puts it in his abstract for the
keynote lecture at the present symposium (this volume (2)):
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. The resonant experience enlarges the intersubjective field be-
tween them ... (Stern 2004b: 8)

Sentence-completion as indication of an other-centred moment of meeting

For example, in a study of guided video-replay of depressed mothers with their
newborns, Kari Vik (2005) illustrates with her video records how critical now-
moments during the initial contact with the therapist came to be resolved by
other-centred moments of meeting during later video replays and conversations
with the therapist. In one of these cases, a refugee mother, at first could barely
manage to whisper, almost completely turned inwards in a self-centred manner
and treating her newborn almost as a package. When asked in the initial interview
by the therapist what the mother felt was most difficult in relating to her son, she
barely manages to whisper: “He does not know me.” This reluctant admission sig-
nifies an awkward moment, almost a now-movement of ‘kairos’ in Stern’s terms.
However, as she and the therapist jointly watch video replay of the mother with her
baby who invites communion, while the therapist, conforming to the Marte Meo
method, in order to encourage a path towards improved mother-child interaction,
takes care not to comment on negative episodes of neglect or detachment, and to
comment only on episodes containing promises of improved participation by the
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 Stein Bråten

mother, the mother gradually begins to show an interest in what is revealed on

the screen. And, then, suddenly there occurs a moment of meeting with the thera-
pist during a later session of guided video-replay, manifested by the way in which
the mother, breaking out of her self-centred state, completes what the therapist is
about to say:
Therapist: “And then you are saying ‘perhaps he is hungry”’
Mother: [nodding]
Therapist: “and you are not quite... it does not look like you are quite...”
Mother: “certain.”
Therapist: “certain.” (Vik 2005; cf. also Vik and Bråten (in prep.)).
Here, transcending her self-centred state, the mother demonstrates other-centred
participation in what the therapist is about to say by her completing the therapist’s
utterance, as if the mother were a co-author or speaking from the therapist’s stance
(marked by bold italics in the above extract). They join in a moment of meeting.
From then on, the mother reveals an improved spirit and degree of participation
in her conversation with the therapist, and which is also reflected in her increased
sensitivity and more frequent expressions of affect attunement in relation to her
baby. The quality of the infant-adult interplay is improved.
When the mother completed the therapist’s sentence that was a manifestation
of her other-centred participation in what the therapist was about to say, an in-
dication that her capacity for empathic identification was in the process of being
re-awakened, and which in turn could come to be at play in her interplay with her
infant.

Closing comment on therapeutic implications

Regarding the critical question about whether existential meaning can be assigned
to traumatic events of abuse in the past – hidden, as they were, from the victim’s
declarative memory – I have suggested that existential meaning and hence, tran-
scendence, can only be assigned in the intersubjective present moment, constituted
in dialogue with the other – virtual or actual – who may be the therapist, pro-
vided that the therapist be a dialogical participant in a shared inquiry involving
“a process of forming, saying, and expanding the unsaid and the yet-to-be said”
(Anderson 1997: 118), because e-motional memory is per definition non-verbal,
hidden in the body or the heart, as it were.
In a phenomenological and existential sense, I have suggested with G. H. Mead
that the past can only exist in the intersubjective present holding the promise of
an emergent future that invites a re-definition of the past brought out in the open
to be meaningfully contained in the intersubjective present shared with dialogical
companions (Bråten 2000).
JB[v.20020404] Prn:7/03/2007; 17:13 F: AICR6817.tex / p.11 (607-690)

On circular re-enactment of care and abuse 

The threefold meaning of the term “present” gives a clue, perhaps for the
therapist-client relationship: First, they are present to one another, in each other’s
presence; second, they are in one another’s present, partially sharing here and now,
and third, each one is offering herself or himself as a gift, as a present, for such in-
tersubjective sharing which may be communion or communication constituting a
shared and novel intersubjective present. The resolution by ‘moments of meeting’
of what Stern (2004, this volume (2)) terms ‘now-moments’ opens a window to
a qualitative change, holding promise of a novel emerging future within such an
intersubjective present.

Notes
. It need not come to circular re-enactment of abuse, however; several other paths are open
to the victim. One such alternative path is to disengage from the body subjected to abuse, or
to divorce the bodily ego from the virtual alter, each running their separate course. Circular re-
enactment of abuse may be also be prevented if the previous victim’s capacity for altercentric
participation is not “turned off ” in relation to other potential victims, unless pain-seeking has
become a motivating force.

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Author index

A Bateson, M. C. , , , Bovet, P. 

Acebo, C.  ,  Bowlby, J. , , 
Adamson, L. B. ,  Batson, C. D.  Bracken, P. , 
Addessi, E.  Baudelaire, C. ,  Bradley, B. S. 
Addy, D.  Bauman, Z. , ,  Brandt, S. A. 
Adelson, E.  Baumgarten, A. G.  Brass, M. 
Adolphs, R. , ,  Baumwell, L. ,  Bråten, S. , , , , , , , ,
Adret, P.  Beebe, B. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Adrian, E. P.   , , , , , , , ,
Ainsworth, C.  Behne, T.  , , , , , ,
Aitken, L. , ,  Bekkering, H.  , , , , , ,
Akhtar, N. , ,  Bellagamba, F.  , , , , , ,
Alcock, K. J. ,  Belsky, J.  , , , , , ,
Alony, S.  Belton, E. ,  , , , , , ,
Altschuler, E. L.  Benigni, L.  , , , , , ,
Altusser, L.  Benjamin, W. ,  , , , , , ,
Anderson, H. ,  Benson, P. J.  , , 
Anderson, J. R. ,  Berger, P. L. , , ,  Brodal, P. 
Berger, R.  Broca, P. 
Andreasen, E. 
Bergman, A.  Brooks, R. , , , , ,
Arbib, M. , , , –, ,
Berk, L. E.  , , , , 
, , , , 
Bernatsky, G. ,  Bromberg, P. M. 
Argyle, M. 
Bernstein, N. , , , Brown, J. , 
Armstrong, A. C. 
 Bruner, J. , , , , ,
Askenfelt, A. 
Bert, J.  
Aslin, R. N. , , , 
Best, C. T. ,  Brunet, E. 
Astington, J. W. 
Biggs, P.  Bruschweiler-Stern, N. 
Augustine, St. 
Billard, A. , , ,  Bruce, W. 
Aureli, F. , 
Binkofski, F.  Buber, M. , , 
Avikainen, S. , 
Bischof-Köhler, D.  Buccino, G. , , , ,
Bishop, D. V. M.  
B Björgo, T.  Bullowa, M. 
Baddeley, A. D.  Björkvold, J. R. , , , Burlingham, D. , 
Bahrick, L. E.   Burnham, D. K. 
Baldwin, D. A. , ,  Blakemore, S.-J.  Burns, T. C. 
Baldwin, J. M. , ,  Butterworth, G. , , 
Bloom, L. , 
Bakeman, R. ,  Byrne, R. W. 
Boersma, P. 
Baker, C. I.  Bohn, O. S. 
Bakhtin, M.  Bornstein, M. H. , ,  C
Baptista, L. F.  Bosch, L. ,  Cabassi, A. , , 
Bargh, K. A.  Boston Change Process Study Caldwell, M. C. 
Baron-Cohen, S. , – Group ,  Caldwell, D. K. 
Bates, E. , , ,  Bourdieu, P.  Call, J. , 
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/03/2007; 16:03 F: AICR68AI.tex / p.2 (184-327)

 Author index

Camaioni, L.  de Beauvoir, S. , , , Fenson, L. , 

Cammuri, A.   Ferguson, C. A. 
Card, J.  Decety, J. , , , , , Fernald, A. , 
Carey, D. P.  , ,  Ferrari, P. F. , , , , , ,
Carew, J. V.  de C. Williams, A. C.  , –, , , 
Carlsson, S. M.  de Gelder, B.  Fiese, B. 
Carney, A.  de Leeuw, R.  Fiez, J. A. 
Carpenter, M. , , , Demarais, A. M.  Flack, J. C. 
,  Dennett, D. C. ,  Flanagan, J. R. 
Carrel, T. D.  Descartes, R. – Flege, J. E. 
Chaminade, T.  Desimone, R.  Fodor, J. 
Chartrand, T. L.  de Waal, F. B. M. , , , , Fogassi, L. , , , , ,
Chater, N.  , , , , , , , , , , , 
Cheour, M.  , , ,  Fogel, A. , 
Christie, N.  di Pellegrino, G. , , , , Fonagy, P. 
Church, R. M.   Foucault, M. 
Dimberg, U. , 
Cisek, P.  Fragaszy, D. 
Dissanayke, E. 
Clarke-Stewart, K. A. ,  Fraiberg, S. H. 
Dogantam, M. 
Clynes, M.  Franco, F. 
Donald, M. , , , 
Cochin, S.  Freud, A. , , 
Dornes, M. 
Coffey-Corina, S.  Freud, S. , , , , ,
Doswell, S. 
Cohen, B. H.  , , 
Doupe, A. J. 
Cohen, S. E.  Friesen, W. 
Doyle, A. B. , 
Colantonio, C.  Frith, C. , 
Dronkers, N. F. 
Colonnesi, C.  Dunham, P. J.  Frith, U. 
Conboy, B. T. , , , , Dunn, J. , , ,  From, E. 
,  Durkheim, E.  Frönes, I. –, , , ,
Concoran, K. M  
Connolly, J. ,  Frykholm, G. –
Connor, R. C.  E
Cook, M.  Eales, L. A. 
Corballis, M. C.  Eco, U.  G
Costa, A.  Edwards, C. P.  Gabrielsson, A. 
Coussi-Korbel, S.  Edwards, L.  Galef, B. G. 
Egebjerg, I.  Gallagher, S. , 
Craighero, L. , , , , ,
Eilers, R. E. ,  Gallaway, C. 
, 
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. , , , Gallese, V. , , , , , , ,
Crawford, M. P. 
, , ,  , , , , , , , ,
Crosson, B. 
Eimas, P. D.  , , , , , ,
Crown, C. L. 
Eisenberg, N. , , ,  , , , , , 
Crown, S. 
Ekman, P. ,  Gallino, T. G. 
Csibra, G. , 
Elman, J. E.  Gallup, G. G. 
Curtin, S. 
Emde, R. N.  García Pérez, R. M. 
Custance, D. M. 
Estes, D.  Garvey, C. 
Gastaut, H. J. 
D F Gathercole, S. E. 
Dale, N.  Fadiga, L. , , , , , , Gavin, W. J. 
Damasio, A. R. ,  , , , ,  Genet, J. 
Darwin, C. ,  Falk, D.  George, C. 
Dautenhahn, K.  Farrar, M. J.  Gergely, G. , , 
Davies, M.  Faulconbridge, J.  Ghez, C. 
Dawkins, R.  Feldstein, S.  Giddens, A. 
Dawson, G.  Fennell, C. T.  Giffin, H. , , 
JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/03/2007; 16:03 F: AICR68AI.tex / p.3 (327-484)

Author index 

Gibson, J. J. ,  Hollich, G.  Kohonen, T. 

Goffman, E.  Holquist, M.  Kohler, E. , , 
Gogate, L. J.  Hommel, B.  Koski, L. , 
Goldman, A. , , , , Hornblow, A. R.  Kugiumutzakis, G. , , ,
,  Howe, N. ,  , , , , , , ,
Golinkoff, R.  Howes, C. ,  , 
Good, XX  Hoy, R. R.  Kuhl, P. K. , , , , ,
Goodall, J. ,  Hubel, D.  , , , , , ,
Goodell, E.  Huber, L.  , , , , , 
Goodman, J. C.  Hubley, P. , , , , ,
Goodsitt, J. V. ,  , 
Goolishian, H.  Hundeide, K. , , , , L
Gopnik, A. , ,  , , , ,  Lacan, J. , , , 
Gopnik, M. ,  Hunt, McVicker  Ladygina-Kohts, N. N. 
Gordon, R. M. ,  Hurley, S.  Laeng, B. 
Grafton, S. T.  Husserl, E.  Lai, C. S. 
Grandell, L. E.  Hurst, J. A.  Lakoff, G. , , 
Greenspan, S. I. , ,  Huxley, T. H.  Lalonde, C. , 
Grèzes, J. , ,  Landry, S. H. 
Griffiths, R.  Langer, S. 
I
Gross, C. G.  Langton, S. R. H. 
Iacoboni, M. , , , 
Guion, S. G.  Lashley, K. S. 
Immelmann, K. 
Lasky, R. E. 
Leakey, R. 
H
J LeDoux, J. E. 
Habermas, J. 
Jackson, P. L. ,  Lee, A. , , 
Hagendoorn, T. G. 
Jaffe, J. , ,  Lee, D. N. , , , ,
Halliday, M. A. K. 
Jamieson, D. G.  , , 
Hämäläinen, M. 
Jang, S.  Lenneberg, E. H. 
Hanna, J. L. 
Järveläinen, J.  Lervig, C. , , , ,
Hari, R. , , , 
Jasnow, M.  
Harlow, H. F. 
Jeannerod, M.  Levenson, R. W. 
Harlow, M. K. 
Jellema, T.  Levinas, E. , , , ,
Harris, P. , , , , 
Johannson, G.  
Harrist, A. M. 
Johansson, R. S.  Leslie, A. M. 
Hart, B. 
Johnson, M.  LeVine, R. , 
Harvey, J. 
Johnson, S. C.  Lévi-Strauss, C. 
Hatfield, E. 
Jürgens, U.  Liberman, A. M. , , , ,
Haynes, O. M. 
Jusczyk, P. W. , , ,  
Heath, S. B. 
Jusslin, P. N.  Liégeois, F. –, , 
Hebb, D. O. 
Heede, D.  Llinas, R. 
Heidegger, M. ,  K Lints, T. 
Heimann, M. ,  Kagan, J. , ,  Lipps, T. 
Henning, A.  Kalaska, J.  Liszkowski, U. 
Hermans, H. J. M.  Kant, I. ,  Littletone, D. F. 
Hietanen, J. K.  Keysers, C. , ,  Liu, H.-M. , , , ,
Hillis, A. E.  Kirkebaek, B. –, , , 
Hinshelwood, R.  ,  Lively, S. E. 
Hirsh-Pasek, K.  Kirkpatrick, J.  Logan, J. S. 
Hobson, R. P. , , , , Klein, P. S. , ,  Lonsdorf, E. V. 
, , ,  Kleinke, C. L.  Looby, P. 
Hoffman, M. L. , , , , Knoblauch, S. ,  Lorentzen, P. , 
 Kohlberg, L.  Loudon, S. S. I. 
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/03/2007; 16:03 F: AICR68AI.tex / p.4 (484-637)

 Author index

Luckmann, T. , , , Moore, M. K. , , , , Papousek, H. , , 
 , , , , , ,  Papousek, M. , , 
Lyons-Ruth, K.  Morales, M.  Parnas, J. 
Morgan, A. C. ,  Parsons, T. 
Morgan, J. L.  Patrick, M. P. H. 
M Morosan, D. E.  Paus, T. 
MacKay, I.  Moses, L. J. ,  Payne, K. 
MacLean, P. D.  Moss, C.  Pearson, D. 
Mahler, M. S. ,  Most, XX  Peery, J. C. 
Main, M.  Möttönen, R.  Peg, J. E. 
Manthey, S.  Mundy, P.  Peirce, C. S. , 
Malinowsky, B.  Munson, J.  Pembrey, M. E. 
Malloch, S. N. , , , , Murray, L. , ,  Perani, D. 
, , , , , , Myowa, M.  Perrett, D. I. , , 
 Myowa-Yamakoshi, G.  Perrin, J. 
Maratos, O.  Perucchini, P. 
Marcuse, H.  N Peters, K. –
Marino, L.  Nadeau, S. E.  Petrakos, H. 
Markman, E. M. ,  Nagell, K. ,  Petrides, M. 
Märtha Louise, princess  Nagy, E.  Petrinovich, L. 
Martini, M.  Nahum, J.  Petty, C. , 
Masserman, J.  Nakayama, K.  Piaget, J. , , , , ,
Matsuzawa, T.  Nehaniv, C.  , , 
Mattingly, I. G.  Neisser, U.  Pickett, E. R. 
Maye, J. , ,  Nelson, K.  Pine, F. 
Mazokopaki, K. ,  Neville, H. J.  Pinker, S. 
Mazziotta, J. C.  Newport, E. L.  Pires, A. 
McCandliss, B. D.  Nicely, P.  Pisoni, D. B. 
McClaskey, C. L.  Nishitani, N. , , ,  Plomin, R. 
McClelland, J. L.  Nöklestad, A.  Plunkett, K. 
McRoberts, G. W. ,  Norris, K. S.  Polka, L. , 
McVie, K.  Nottebohm, P.  Pöppel, E. , 
Mead, G. H. , , , , NRK1 (Norwegian Port, R. 
, , ,  Broadcasting Corporation) Potter, C. 
Meador, D.   Pourtois, G. 
Meltzoff, A. N. , , –, Nusbaum, H. C.  Povinelli, D. J. 
–, –, , , , , Preisler, G. 
, , , , , , O Premack, D. 
, , , , , , Ochs, E.  Preston, S. D. , , , , 
, , , , , , O’Connell, S. M.  Prinz, W. , , 
, , , ,  Ohta, M.  Proust, M. , 
Mendes, I.  Oller, D. K. 
Mendes, P.  Ono, K.  R
Menzel, E.  Oppenheim, D.  Radke-Yarrow, M. 
Merleau-Ponty, M. ,  Oram, M. V.  Rall, J. , 
Meyer, J. A. ,  Osterling, J.  Reddy, V. , , , , ,
Miller, P. ,  , 
Mills, D. L. ,  P Repacholi, B. M. , 
Michotte, A.  Pallier, C.  Reich, V. 
Mitra, P. P.  Pandya, D. N.  Reiss, D. 
Moll, H.  Panksepp, J. , ,  Reuf, A. M. 
Molnár, P.  Papastathopoulos, S. , , Richards, B. J. 
Moore, C. ,  ,  Richards, P. –
JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/03/2007; 16:03 F: AICR68AI.tex / p.5 (637-787)

Author index 

Rilke, R. M.  Sergent, J.  Tegner, A. 

Rimbaud, A. , ,  Shanker, S. G.  Teodorescu, D. S. 
Rimm-Kaufman, S. E.  Shapiro, V.  Thierry, G. 
Rinaldi, C. M.  Sigman, M.  Thoman, E. B. 
Rinaldi, J.  Silva-Pereyra, J.  Thomas, N. J. T. 
Risley, T.  Simms, K.  Thompson, E. 
Rivera-Gaxiola, M. , , Singer, D. G.  Tidball, G. 
 Singer, J. L.  Todd, N. P. 
Rizzolatti, G. , , , , , Singer, T. ,  Todd, J. 
, , , , , , , Sithole, N. M. ,  Tomas , –
, , , , , , Skinner, B. F. ,  Tomasello, M. , , , ,
 Skoe, E.  , , , , , ,
Roberts, M.  Sloboda, J.  , , , 
Rochat, P. ,  Smedslund, J.  Tomita, H. 
Rodning, C.  Smith, A.  Tonyan, H. , 
Rogers, G.  Snider, R. S.  Torras, C. 
Rogers, S. J.  Snow, C. E.  Toth, K. 
Rogoff, B. , , ,  Sollied, S. ,  Trehub, S. E. 
Rohner, R.  Sommerville, XX  Trevarthen, C. , , , , ,
Rojas, J.  Sorce, J. E.  , , , , , , , ,
Rommetveit, R. , , , Sorter, D. ,  , , , , , , ,
,  Stager, C.  , , , , , ,
Rosicky, J. G.  Stamenov, M. , , , , , , , , , , ,
Rossnes, R.  , ,  , , , , , ,
Rouse, H.  Stark, L. W.  , , , , 
Runeson, S. – Stern, D. N. , , , , –, Tronick, E. Z. , 
Rustin, J. ,  , , , , , , , , Tsao, F.-M. , , , ,
Rvachew, S.  , , , , , , , , 
Ryan, J. , – , , , , , ,
, , , , , , U
, , , , , , Umiltà, M. A. 
S
, , , , , , Unger, O. 
Saarela, M. 
, 
Saffran, J. R. , 
Stevens, C. 
Salmelin, R.  V
Stone, T. 
Salmond, C. H.  Valsiner, J. 
Stowell, A. 
Sander, L. W.  Vanderberg, B. , –
Strafella, A. P. 
Sartre, J. P. , , ,  van Gelder, T. 
Strange, W. 
Saussure, F. de  van Hooff, J. A. R. A. M. ,
Strayer, J. , 
Savage-Rambaugh, E. S.  
Streeter, L. A. 
Sameroff, A. J.  van Rees, S. 
Striano, T. , 
Sander, L. W.  van Roosmalen, A. 
Sundara, M. 
Scheper-Hughes, N. ,  Varela, F. 
Swingley, D. 
Schieffelin, B. B. ,  Vargha-Khadem, F. –, ,
Schino, G.  , , 
Scholes, P. A.  T Veer, R. 
Schopenhauer, A.  Takada, A.  Vetlesen, A. J. , 
Schögler, B. , , , , Tallal, P.  Viemeister, N. 
, , , ,  Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. , Vihman, M. 
Schou Wetlesen, T.   Vik, K. –
Schürmann, M. ,  Taylor, M.  Visalberghi, I. E. 
Scriven, J.  Taylor, S. E.  Voelkl, B. 
Sebastian-Gallés, N. ,  Tchernichovski, O.  Volterra, V. 
Selby, J. M.  Tees, R. C. ,  Vygotsky, L. S. , 
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/03/2007; 16:03 F: AICR68AI.tex / p.6 (787-840)

 Author index

W Westlye, L. T.  Wittman, M. , 

Walker-Andrews, A. S.  Whalen, D. H. ,  Wolpert, D. M. 
Ward, E.  Whaley, S. E.  Woolley, J. D. 
Ward, M. C. ,  Whittaker, C. 
Watanabe, S.  Wicker, B. 
Y
Watson, J. S.  Widin, G. 
Yerkes, R. M. 
Watkins, K. E. , , ,  Wiesel, T. 
Watt, R. J.  Williams, J. H. G. 
Watts, D. P.  Williamson, R. A.  Z
Waugh, R. M.  Winnicott, D. , , , Zahavi, D. , 
Weenink, D.   Zahn-Waxler, C. , , , ,
Weider, S. ,  Whiten, A. ,  , 
Weinholdt, T.  Whiting, B. B.  Zang, Y. 
Werker, J. F. , , , , Woodruff, G.  Zanzotto, A. , , 
,  Woods, R. P.  Zini, M. T. , 
West, M. M.  Wispé, L. ,  Zukow, P. G. 
JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.1 (43-146)

Subject index

A allocentric perception ,  basis of identification ,

abuse , , , –, altercentric  
n frame of reference shift basis of imitation , 
action(s) upon own execution basis of sympathy 
and intersubjectivity  – definition –, , 
and mirror neurons – learning  entailed by primary
communicative in participatory perception intersubjectivity ,
monkeys  –, , , ,  –
congruence between seen perception  during face-to-face
and executed  simulation of conversation interaction –, 
generalization of goal to partner’s mind  in fictional absorption 
actions outside of altercentricity ,  in infant learning –,
monkey’s repertoire 
in infants –,  –
goal directed , 
in primary intersubjectivity manifested by
ingestive mouth –
– sentence-completion
mouth –
in secondary , 
object-oriented –
intersubjectivity manifested in overt
object-related activating
– behaviours –,
somatotopically
in tertiary intersubjectivity –
organized motor
 mirror neuron systems
circuits 
vs. egocentricity , , support of , ,
observation of
 –
(in)transitive 
altercentric/other-centred mutual in moments of
of intransitive action 
participation , , , meeting , 
of transitive action 
, , , , –,  operating characteristics
understanding required in
and altruism , – 
imitation 
active intermodal mapping and emotional absorption reversal of perspective ,
(AIM)   –, 
adaptive oscillators  and family disseminate shift to body–centred
aesthetics archives , , (egocentric) execution
artists as mediators of  – –
dimensions  and mirror neurons underlying mechanism 
in special education (matching system) , vs. egocentric observation
– – 
affect attunement , , and muscle activation altero-centric participation,
 –,  see altercentric
and family disseminate and neonatal imitation  participation
archives  and simulation of mind  alteroception , 
in felt immediacy  basis of emotional altruistic behaviour
in mother-infant contagion  and caring responses by
interaction , ,  basis of empathy ,  mammals 
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.2 (146-247)

 Subject index

by virtue of other-centred autism Brodmann’s area , 

participation  and the intersubjective Cerebellum 
entailing other-oriented matrix – in the affected KE family
motivation  and theory of mind deficit members –
involved in sympathy   FOXP2 gene mutation
in apes , – Aspberger’s syndrome , –
in children –  brain studies , 
in toddlers  from deficit at “bottom-up” vs.
amodal perception , , socio-affective level  “top-down” approaches
, ,  gender differences – 
animal empathy  imitation ,  brain imaging 
animal conflict perspective reversal errors double-pulse TMS
and consolation behaviour  technique 
 autism deficits single neuron recording
and Do-as-I-Do tests  
and contact with victim of
aggression  in intention reading  transcranial magnetic
of perceptual reversal  stimulation (TMS) 
animal learning
of socio-affective
from conspecifics  Broca’s centre/area/region (left
relatedness  inferior frontal gurys)
programme-level copying
theory of mind  , , , , , , 

see also imitation activated upon silent
anticipatory matching ,  B speech 
by audience , – behavioural re-enactment affected by the FOXP2 gene
by spectators –, experiments , , mutation , , 
–, – –, , , – morphological parallel to
vs. imitation response  and embodied simulation monkey premotor area
of completion  F5 
aphasia 
and other-centred upon manipulation of
FOXP2 gene mutation
participation  complex objects 
–
and reading of intention upon observation of
archeion –
and arcontes   monkey lip-smacking
and social help – 
arm movement observation
 results 
human versus mechanical
Asperger’s syndrome ,  C
model –
attention caretaker responsiveness
interpretation of results
attunement  abuse/neglect 
, , 
control  (out)definition of the child
being moved
joint – , , 
by music , , 
sharing – by the patient being fed upon postnatal depression
attunement – –
affect ,  by song – Central Nervous System
attuned to the other’s  by song in special (CNS) 
by virtue of multiple education , ,  Cerebellum 
mirroring systems feeling flow contours , abnormality in the affected
–  KE family 
in infant-adult interaction body scheme ,  module in Billard-Arbib
 Bonding-and computational model
intentional  Identification-Based 
reciprocal  Observational Learning upon observation of arm
staying in – (BIOL)  movement 
to others’ communicative brain pathology pertaining to temporal
intentions  Broca’s area , ,  move sequences 
JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.3 (247-348)

Subject index 

reversed somatosensory consolation among  computer simulation

maps  feeding another – connectionist 
child care imitation of conspecific of dialogue 
and dialogic closure  models ,  of imitation 
and protoconversation newborns compared to ‘neural net’ 
 human newborns conditioned head turn (HT)
and stigmatizing definition – procedure , –,
of the child , circular re-enactment –
– in intergenerational in exposure to second
and zone of intimacy transmission – language –,
–,  of abuse – –
as a communicative of caretaking behaviour consolation behaviour
process –  afforded recipients of
emotional withdrawal of object-oriented acts aggression 
– – definition 
empathic identification vs. of spoon-feeding in infancy
in chimpanzees –
distancing  –, –, 
not found in macaques 
physical neglect of vicious circles ,
conversation
– –
and the listener’s sentence
primary cycle of  clinical psychology 
completion , , ,
child soldier(s) –, n computer simulation
, 
in Angola  connectionist 
mental simulation of
child victim(s) of dialogues 
talker’s searching for the
in the abstract view of the of imitative learning 
right word , 
bureaucrat  of mirror reversal by
of abuse – “Alter-nets” 
of affective deprivation tlearn network  D
 CNS  decentration , 
of attributed cognitive empathy
in hominin children 
demon-possession according to the ‘Russian
in the sense of Piaget ,
– Doll’ model 

of extreme neglect in chimpanzee 
of the mirror neuron
– not typical of macaques
system , –
of rejection –, 
decentred mirror (neurons)
– communication
system , 
helped by social facilitator and felt connection 
– hominin infant
emotionally mediated in
decentration hypothesis
re-enacting abuse – non-human primates
, –
serving as “scapegoats” 
–, n distal forms of –, in phylogeny 
children’s early language  subserving conversational
learning; see language emotionally mediated in efficiency 
learning non-human primates subserving hominin infant
children’s peer interaction  learning efficiency
in socialization  hominid – –
musical culture  communicative mouth mirror destiny –, , 
children’s prosocial neurons – dialogue
behaviours , – comparative study – see also conversation
chimpanzee(s) –,  communicative musicality and epistemology 
back-riding infants  and intersubjectivity 
compared to hominin in infant-adult interaction inner 
infants – –,  in the matrix of
cooperation  in special education intersubjectivity ,
cognitive empathy  – 
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.4 (348-463)

 Subject index

self as – emotional and social and primary care –

virtual  referencing ,  Event-related potentials
Do-as-I-Do test emotion(s)  (ERP’s)
on persons with autism disgust  in infant listening to
 in affectionate infant-adult speech 
on chimpanzees – engagements  in infant exposure to words
Double Video replay perception of  
experiment  shared  evoked companion
results  empathic identification and imagination , 
blocked or obstructed in family disseminate
– archive context 
E by virtue of altercentric evolution 
egocentricity participation , and the hominin infant
decentration in phylogeny – decentration hypothesis
 definition of  –
Piagetian attribution , , in the primary cycle of care entailing retention of
  elementary forms ,
vs. altercentricity – manifested at the layer of 
vs. intersubjectivity in primary entailing transformation of
infants – intersubjectivity structures 
egocentric (body-centred) –
hominin –
map underlying altruism 
of intersubjectivity 
recentering  with one’s child , 
of language –,
shift to – empathy
–, 
embodied simulation  and parental care 
of speech –
anticipatory , – in animals 
concurrent  in apes compared to
monkeys 
definition of  F
as based on altercentric
of the other’s effort  face-to-face interaction
participation 
of the other’s feeding act see also protoconversation
as based on equivalence
 altercentric participation
between self and other
of the other’s mouth intake 

– entailing perceptual mirror
in the caretaker 
subserved by mirror reversal –
“changing places in fancy
neuron system – inclusion into the zone of
with the sufferer” 
emotional contagion  intimacy –
cognitive , , 
by virtue of altercentric in Do-as-I-Do test 
collapse of 
participation  evolution of  perceptual reversal
definition  gender difference  –, 
developing into empathy layers of , – feeling
 in the mode of felt direct access to others 
in monkeys ,  immediacy  flow patterns , 
emotional expressions in the ‘Russian Doll’ model felt immediacy , , 
immediate recognition of of , – in a moment of meeting
 related to personal distress 
in monkeys and apes   in infant-adult interaction
e-motional memory  related to sympathy  
definition ,  serving to evaluate other in intergenerational
in intergenerational animals’ emotional state transmission 
transmission , ,  in intersubjective
, ,  ethics of closeness attunement 
of abuse – and “appeal of the face” vs. ‘cool cognition’ 
participatory ,   fictional absorption 
JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.5 (463-561)

Subject index 

FOXP2 gene mutation –, by back-riding chimpanzee as virtual other 

– infant  comparative study of girls
aphasia – characteristic of secondary with and without
brain functional intersubjectivity  –
abnormalities – eyes open/closed test definition 
brain pathology in affected – prevalence 
KE family members in infant presence of sociality in peer
– blindfolded adult  conversation –
Broca’s area affected , gender differences imagination 
,  in autism – and e-motional memory
Brodmann’s area   in emotional contagion  –
Cerebellum  in empathy  and evoked companion
core deficits  genetic mutation, see FOXP2; 
manual rhythms KE family defined 
production  goal(s) forms of 
neural base – attributed or not to functioning in a dialogical
striato-frontal system inanimate objects , mode 
–  in the history of
verbal and orofacial directed finger movements psychological ideas
dyspraxia  in MEG studies  –
frame of reference shift , directed ‘try and try again’ operating characteristics
–, , ,  exploration by infants –
from other-centred to own 
viewed as egocentric 
body-centred ,  state attributed by virtue of
imitation
potential role of mirror neurons 
and facilitation of action
cerebellum  perceived in others’ actions
vs. imitative learning
simulations with computer 

models  based on altercentric
Freudian tradition , , , H participation 
 Hominin Infant Decentration body mirroring during
bird’s egg metaphor of the Hypothesis – psychotherapy 
human infant  Homo erectus ,  in autism , 
functional Magnetic human mirror (neuron) in chimpanzees –, 
Resonance Imaging system computational model of
(fMRI)  MEG studies of – , 
combined with MEG shaping of – deferred in toddlers upon
studies  HT-tasks TV exposure 
in the study of the KE see infants listening to Do-as-I-Do tests with
family abnormalities speech chimpanzee –
–
early –
study of contagious yawns
I in face-to-face situations

identification  –, 
study of disgust 
with others as basis of and identification 
imitation  learning by –
G imaginary companion mimesis 
gaze following – and play in dyads – neonatal , , , , ,
and emotional display  and pretend play , , , 
and language acquisition – and programme-level
– and speech copying 
and proto-declarative communication , neural support
pointing  – neurocomputational
as triadic communication as evoked companion , network simulation
  
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.6 (561-648)

 Subject index

as release of stereotypic infant intersubjectivity infants

motor patterns  –, – following gaze in eyes
as re-enacting mirroring and socialization  open/closed tests
 appreciating the other’s –
requiring action situation – reciprocating care-giving
understanding  entailing a paradigmatic , –, 
of simple arm raising shift , – reciprocating
– significance of new spoon-feeding ,
vs. anticipatory embodied paradigm for special –
simulation , – education – sharing others’ attention
vs. coming to virtual aid understanding referential –
,  intent  infant speech perception
vs. ‘mere mimicry’  see also primary and attention control 
vs. pre-enacting or intersubjectivity; in live condition vs. tape
co-enacting mirroring secondary exposure 
,  intersubjectivity native language perceptual
see also infant imitation; infant learning magnets 
neonatal imitation and clarity of mother’s research 
imitative learning , – speech  role of attention 
by altercentric and joint attention and inferior parietal lobe (IPL) 
participation –, engagement behaviours
institutions for mentally
– 
handicapped –
in chimpanzees  by altercentric
intentionality , 
computational model of participation –
intention-detecting centre 
 by imitation –
intention-reading , –,
in face-to-face situation entailing e-motional or
–
–,  participatory memory
and autism 
from a distance  –
from e-motional or from caregiver – by infants exposed to
participatory memory from speech perception animated TV cartoons
– – 
infant-adult interaction role of other children in neuroscientific model of
communicative musicality ,  
of –, ,  to feed a companion by toddlers in behavioural
comparative studies of  – re-enactment
dyadic during language see also language learning; experiment , –
exposure  learning interaction, see social
in chimpanzee  infants’ listening to speech interaction
infant-adult-object triangle communicative intergenerational
 development inventory transmission
of 5-months-old blind girl (CDI)  and affect attunement 
with mother  conditioned head turn and altercentric
of 2-month-old premature (HT) technique participation , ,
with father – – , , 
perspective reversal during culturally specific speech and evoked companion
face-to-face  sound perception , 
triadic , ,  – and psychotherapy
infant imitation event related potentials –
see also neonatal imitation (ERP’s)  as family disseminate
from e-motional or Mandarin Chinese archive –, 
participatory memory phonetic discrimination e-motional memory in
– by – , –, –
upon TV-exposure of perceiving vowel contrast in light of poetry , ,
model act  at 6 months  
JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.7 (648-780)

Subject index 

vicious circles of in the primary cycle of care L

re-enactment , ,  language
– in therapeutic context acquisition , –,
International Child ,  –
Development Programme layers , –, – development 
(ICDP) , –,  modes of ,  evolution –, –,
interpersonal sensation operating characteristics of 
activation of SII-PV  – origin of , , 
observing and paradigmatic revolution language acquisition ,
experiencing disgust , ,  –
 perception-action and gaze following
observing and being mechanism (PAM)  –
touched  preverbal ,  early –
intersubjective matrix , –, primary , , –, , conditioned head turn
, –, , , n , – (HT) technique ,
and autism – space  –, –
and culture ,  secondary , –, –, meaningful social cues for
and meaning acquisition , –, , –, –
–  role of social interaction in
and moral emotions of tertiary , –, ,  –
shame, guilt, and see also infant
language learning, early
embarrassment  intersubjectivity,
and motherese 
and socialization – intersubjective matrix
and mother’s speech clarity
in a dialogical perspective Intrinsic Motive Pulse (IMP)

,  
cultural diversity –
in an evolutionary frame invisible companion, see
discrimination of native
,  imaginary companion
and foreign language
paradigmatic revolution 
phonetic units 
intersubjective understanding
J initial word learning game
in conversational context
Java programming language 
, , 
,  lexically based 
infants understanding
jazz , – meaning acquisition 
referential intent 
of intention , , 
joint attention mediated 
and referential lexicon native –
in narrative context ,
development  Native Language Magnet

in early language learning model 
see also understanding
,  perceptual magnet effect
intersubjectivity 
gaze following by 
and pig-tailed macaque 
back-riding chimpanzee role of other children ,
and sympathy –
offspring  
as innate 
definition – second –, 
developmental findings on K see also infant speech
–,  KE family , , – perception
dimensions of – brain pathology – learning
evolutionary perspective core deficits  see also infant learning;
– on oral movement  language learning
from a phenomenological on orofacial movement by altercentric
point of view   participation ,
lacking in autism  sequential hand and finger –, , 
in chimpanzee  movement ,  bonding- and
in human infants , , striat-frontal system identification-based
–, –, –, – observational (BIOL)
– verbal dyspraxia  
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.8 (780-870)

 Subject index

by imitation , –, and meta-understanding of F5 , –, , 

–, –, ,  other’s mind and generalization 
robot – emotion  IFG inferior frontal gurys
left inferior frontal gyrus, see and self-simulation vs. 
Broca’s region other-simulation ingestive mouth , 
‘like me’ interpersonal – IPL inferior parietal lobe
mechanism –,  by virtue of other-centred 
‘Like Me’ bridge – participation , macaque ventral premotor
‘like me/like you’ , –,  cortex 
– entailing recentering of mechanism pertaining to
‘like you’ interpersonal egocentric map  origin of speech ,
mechanism  in behavioural –
re-enactment monkey data –, ,
experiments ,  
M in light of the mirror mouth action –
Macaque monkey(s) , ,  neurons discovery , mouth communicative 
appear to lack cognitive  not evoked upon acts that
empathy  of co-actor processes  are not object-oriented
eating action  of conversational partner’s 
eating behaviour mind –, – not only actions, but
experiment – of other minds –, intentions 
experiment revealing – original macaque monkey
mirror neurons –, of unrealized movements experiment –, , 
, –,  – parietal 
consolation behaviour not vs. theory of mind , PF posterior parietal cortex
found in  –,  
neonatal imitation of see also embodied question about experience
human model’s tongue simulation; simulation dependency 
protrusion  mirroring question of innateness
MacArthur-Bates anticipatory  –
Communicative co-enacting  specific goal related 
Development Inventory concurrent  STS superior temporal
(CDI)  (m)other-centred  sulcus , , 
Magnetoencephalography pre-enacting  mirror neuron (matching)
(MEG) ,  sensation of being touched system
studies of human mirror  for actions in humans ,
(neurons) system mirror neuron(s) ,  –, –
– and bi-directional mutual and altercentric
combined with fMRI  exchange  participation ,
recording set-up illustrated and communication –
 –,  basis of speech perception
Marte Meo method and communicative mouth 
afforded mothers with – Broca’s region 
postnatal depression and resonance  core of 
– audio-visual –, , decentred in human
meaning acquisition   phylogeny –, ,
in the intersubjective defining characteristics of 
matrix –  frontal node upon
memory discovery of –, , observation of
e-motional –, , –, , , , , intransitive actions 
, – – brain-imaging
implicit  distinction in terms of experimental data 
participatory  broad or strict decentred in hominin
mental simulation , , – congruence  infants 
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Subject index 

and intention reading entailing felt immediacy and link with

–,   communication ,
and mind-reading ,  in psychotherapy , , –, 
neurophysiological – in blind baby interaction
evidence , ,  through empathic with mother –
involving somatotopically identification , n in infant-adult interaction
organized motor motherese  –
circuits  motor cortex in mother-infant play ,
and origin of language activation upon exposure –, –
, – to tool use  in protoconversation ,
other-centred  motor evoked potentials , –
parietal and frontal lobe (MEP) , – in special education
upon observation of motor primitives in speech –
transitive actions  production – in therapy , 
and secondary motor representations ,
intersubjectivity – 
subserving learning to cope motor theory of speech N
and take care  perception , ,  native language perceptual
TMS studies ,  mouth mirror neurons in magnet 
monkey – and neural commitment
and virtual participation in
what another is doing grasping and holding 
 – neonatal imitation , , ,
lips protrusion – , , , 
mirror related mechanisms
lip-smacking –
– see also infant imitation
movement(s)
mirror reversal – active intermodal mapping
accompanying mouth- (AIM) 
frame of reference shift ,
–
,  after activation of
accompanying muscle-
neurocomputational corresponding body
, , 
networks trained for part –
and dance in special
 and altercentric
education 
of perspectives in participation 
co-enacting 
face-to-face interaction and ‘like me’ mechanism
co-ordination in
 –, , –
protoconversation 
mirror self-recognition (MSR) and ‘like you’ mechanism
expressive 
 
extracting tau information
connection with cognitive and organ identification
–
empathy  
goal-directed finger 
mirror system kinematic specification drawing on embryonic
fine-tuning in human (principle) ,  body scheme 
development – musical – in macaques 
in humans , –, of mouth while feeding in non-human primates
–  –, 
(m)other-centred  oral (in the KE family)  of facial acts 
upon intransitive action orofacial  of facial gestures , ,
observation  pre-enacting  , 
upon transitive action re-enacting  self-oriented vs.
observation  resonating with the other-oriented code 
resonant  performer/patient of tongue protrusion by
moment of meeting ,  – pig-tailed macaque 
entailing mutual sequential hand/finger- (in vocal –, 
other-centred the KE family)  neural commitment in
participation , , musical expressions  native-language learning
– and dance ,  
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.10 (965-1070)

 Subject index

neurocomputational and perceptual magnet see also infants listening to

simulation  effect  speech; speech
of altercentric vs. and proprioception  perception
egocentric perception egocentric  Piagetian
, – exteroception  attribution of egocentrism
neurophysiological of others’ actions  to infants , 
experiments  of vowels by 6-month-olds attribution of inborn
neuroscience , –  solipsism 
newborn imitation; see tradition , 
participant –, , ,
neonatal imitation theories 
–, , –, 
now moment , –,  post-natal depression –
see also infant speech
predictive interaction , ,
perception; speech

O perception
during feeding 
object-oriented Perception-Action Mechanism
in sport , 
acts – (PAM) , , –
selective advantage of 
learning by participant links to mirror neurons  vs. imitation –
perception  at the core of the ‘Russian predictive movement , ,
object relations theory  Doll’ model of empathy , 
organ identification   in audience 
other-centred, see altercentric perspective of own mouth during
altercentric ,  feeding 
P body-centred  in sport spectators –
participant perception  egocentric ,  prefrontal cortex 
see also altercentric reversal –, ,  and activation of memory
participation perspective-taking retrieval 
as other-centred  altercentric ,  present moment
definition  based on equivalence in psychotherapy ,
enabled by mirror neurons between self and other –, 
  in infant-adult interaction
examples of –,  “changing places in fancy” 
of object-oriented acts   Kairos 
in efficient infant learning in apes – moment of meeting , ,
– , –
phonetic learning
manifested by overt now-moment , , 
and adult responsivity to
behaviours –,  pretend play –
infants 
leaving an e-motional or preverbal intersubjectivity ,
and native language
participatory memory , , , , 
perceptual magnets 
 preverbal mind 
without having to imitate and neural commitment primary cycle of care –
  and altercentric
participation  by infants exposed to participation 
altercentric or second language definition 
other-centred  – primary intersubjectivity ,
in another’s action without role of shared perception in , , 
having to imitate ,  and manifestation of
 through social interaction other-centred
in another’s mental life  participation  participation ,
virtual, supported by upon live vs. –
mirror neurons  non-contingent definition 
perception exposure –, in neonatal imitation 
allocentric  –, – in therapeutic context 
altercentric  vowel discrimination at 6 operating characteristics of
amodal , , – months of age  –
JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.11 (1070-1172)

Subject index 

see also infant with another in synchrony equivalence 

intersubjectivity ,  self-other connectivity 
proprioception with the perceived implications for shared
vs. alteroception ,  performer/patient emotions 
vs. exteroception  – vs. ‘isolationist’ perspective
protoconversation ,  response to another’s distress 
inherent musicality of , in young children ,  sensory-motor system
– in chimpanzee  and mirror neurons 
nature of  in monkeys  set for coordination with
preparing for language consolation behaviour another 
acquisition  – sentence completion by
precise timing  listener , , 
protodeclarative pointing significant other , 
S
– signifier –, , 
secondary intersubjectivity ,
by 12-months olds  simulation
–, –, , 
when adult has eyes open of mind conversation
definition –
 model , , 
gaze following: eyes
protonarrative envelope  embodied , , –,
open/closed test 
in intergenerational , , –
in development of speech
transmission  enabled by altercentric
perception –
psychoanalytic theory  mechanism 
manifestation of
view of child  inferred from self or
altercentricity –
psychotherapy through other-centred
operating characteristics of
and intergeneration simulation –
–
transmission – of co-actor’s coding 
protodeclarative pointing
and intersubjective present of co-actor processes 

, –,  of conversational partners’
roots of 
as dialogue ,  minds , –, ,
shift to 
body mirroring  
triangular relatedness 
change process , and mirror systems
see also infant
– support , 
intersubjectivity;
child psychiatric service  in terms of other-centred
intersubjectivity
now moment , –, map 
second language learning
 see also computer
situation
moment of meeting , simulation; embodied
HT task , –,
– simulation; mental
–
exposure to Mandarin simulation
R Chinese –, simulation variant of Theory
resonance  – of Mind
acoustically evoked during exposure to Spanish self- vs. other-simulation
speech perception  – –, 
as identification  phonetic perception at see also mental simulation
as mirror neurons 9–10 months – singing-gesturing experiment
activation  self –
as participant perception and the intersubjective single neuron recording
 matrix  technique 
as pre-enacting mirroring “dissolved”  socialization , –
 -subjectivity as a scaffold and intersubjectivity
audio-motor  for the subjectivity of –, 
co-enacting mirroring  others  and parents –
mechanism facilitating self-and-other and peers 
response  coupling or connectivity between nature and culture
self-with-other-  ,  –
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.12 (1172-1280)

 Subject index

in the matrix of production – in resonance with one

intersubjectivity speech perception , – another –
– acoustically evoked motor tau theory of , –
primary ,  resonance 
secondary ,  altercentric –
social facilitation  and motor primitives T
in primates  – tau theory , –
of response by means of conditioned head turn analysis –
resonance  procedure  applied to
social identity – infant ability to singing/gesturing
social interaction  discriminate speech experiment –
and shared experience  sounds , – coupling information
and shared frame of timing mirror neurons system  –
 mother speech clarity  general –
and mouth mirror neurons motor theory of , ,  temporal coordination ,
 native-like  –
anticipating the partner’s of non-native phonemes tertiary intersubjectivity
movements   definition of 
conversation  of vowel contrast  operating characteristics
prediction of move by research overview – –
partner/opponent , shared – and simulation of mind
 striato-frontal system –
predictive , , – and speech acquisition  theory of mind (ToM)
reciprocal , ,  in affected KE-family about feeling, not
social referencing members – cognition 
in twelve-month-olds  supramodal and autism –, 
joint emotional  act space 
and representation of false
socioemotional development representational system
beliefs 
 
anticipated by simulation
roots and nurture of symbolic interactionism 
of mind conversation
development  sympathetic identification
model , , 
‘solipsistic’ –
in chimpanzees 
attribution of ,  by virtue of other-centred
in light of the mirror
somatosensory maps  participation 
neurons discovery 
somatotopically organized sympathy
intention-reading in
motor circuits in animals 
human infancy 
involved by the mirror based on altercentric
matching system  participation  objections to theory
special education and empathy  version 
influenced by the new and intersubjectivity relying on resonance or
infant paradigm – simulation 
–,  root and definition of term theory theory approach
of deaf-blind children  ,  versus simulation
speech act theory  recognized in philosophy approach , , 
speech  see also mental simulation;
act  synchronous movements , simulation
apraxia  –, ,  tlearn network 
dyspraxia  adaptive oscillators  therapy, see psychotherapy
origin from gestural innate contingency time
communication  detection analysers  and adaptive oscillators 
origin from sound-based by means of imitation  and Kairos , 
communication  in moments of meeting  difference between
phylogenesis of , and mutual other-centred imitation and embodied
– participation  simulation 
JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/03/2007; 10:24 F: AICR68SI.tex / p.13 (1280-1339)

Subject index 

qualitative ,  triadic infant-adult W

quantitative ,  interaction ,  Wernicke’s area 
see also present moment; word perception –
synchronous V compared to MEP results
movements verbal dyspraxia in the KE on other verbal stimuli
family  
toddlers
ventral premotor cortex 
being altruistic , 
virtual co-author , 
circular re-enactment in and listener’s Z
 sentence-completion zone of intimacy , 
reaction to another’s  and child rejection
distress  of another’s attempt –
reading of intention  – inclusion by way of
of another’s doing  imitation and
TV replay test; see Double
of another’s food intake , participation ,
Video Technique
– –
Transcranial Magnetic
of another’s effort , inclusion of child victims
Stimulation (TMS) ,
– –
, , 
of another’s saying ,  inclusion through
evidence of mirror system face-to-face contact
virtual other or virtual alter
in humans  –
, , , , , –,
experiment in support of , , , n outside 
simulation of mind  vitality affects contours , ways in and out of
upon listening to speech   caretaker’s –
Advances in Consciousness Research
A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers’ website, www.benjamins.com

71 Krois, John Michael, Mats Rosengren, Angela Steidele and Dirk Westerkamp (eds.):
Embodiment in Cognition and Culture. Expected September 2007
70 Rakover, Sam S.: To Understand a Cat. Methodology and philosophy. Expected July 2007
69 Kuczynski, John-Michael: Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind. A defense of
content-internalism and semantic externalism. x, 478 pp. + index. Expected June 2007
68 Bråten, Stein (ed.): On Being Moved. From mirror neurons to empathy. 2007. x, 333 pp.
67 Albertazzi, Liliana (ed.): Visual Thought. The depictive space of perception. 2006. xii, 380 pp.
66 Vecchi, Tomaso and Gabriella Bottini (eds.): Imagery and Spatial Cognition. Methods, models and
cognitive assessment. 2006. xiv, 436 pp.
65 Shaumyan, Sebastian: Signs, Mind, and Reality. A theory of language as the folk model of the world.
2006. xxvii, 315 pp.
64 Hurlburt, Russell T. and Christopher L. Heavey: Exploring Inner Experience. The descriptive
experience sampling method. 2006. xii, 276 pp.
63 Bartsch, Renate: Memory and Understanding. Concept formation in Proust’s A la recherche du temps
perdu. 2005. x, 160 pp.
62 De Preester, Helena and Veroniek Knockaert (eds.): Body Image and Body Schema.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on the body. 2005. x, 346 pp.
61 Ellis, Ralph D.: Curious Emotions. Roots of consciousness and personality in motivated action. 2005.
viii, 240 pp.
60 Dietrich, Eric and Valerie Gray Hardcastle: Sisyphus’s Boulder. Consciousness and the limits of
the knowable. 2005. xii, 136 pp.
59 Zahavi, Dan, Thor Grünbaum and Josef Parnas (eds.): The Structure and Development of Self-
Consciousness. Interdisciplinary perspectives. 2004. xiv, 162 pp.
58 Globus, Gordon G., Karl H. Pribram and Giuseppe Vitiello (eds.): Brain and Being. At the
boundary between science, philosophy, language and arts. 2004. xii, 350 pp.
57 Wildgen, Wolfgang: The Evolution of Human Language. Scenarios, principles, and cultural dynamics.
2004. xii, 240 pp.
56 Gennaro, Rocco J. (ed.): Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. An Anthology. 2004. xii, 371 pp.
55 Peruzzi, Alberto (ed.): Mind and Causality. 2004. xiv, 235 pp.
54 Beauregard, Mario (ed.): Consciousness, Emotional Self-Regulation and the Brain. 2004. xii, 294 pp.
53 Hatwell, Yvette, Arlette Streri and Edouard Gentaz (eds.): Touching for Knowing. Cognitive
psychology of haptic manual perception. 2003. x, 322 pp.
52 Northoff, Georg: Philosophy of the Brain. The brain problem. 2004. x, 433 pp.
51 Droege, Paula: Caging the Beast. A theory of sensory consciousness. 2003. x, 183 pp.
50 Globus, Gordon G.: Quantum Closures and Disclosures. Thinking-together postphenomenology and
quantum brain dynamics. 2003. xxii, 200 pp.
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