Development of Joint Action: Years 1-2

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

What (if any) joint actions are humans capable of just at the point they are beginning to communicate referentially (typically around the first birthday)?

Slides

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Notes

A Second Inconsistent Triad

We can summarise the position we have reached so far in this lecture with another inconsistent triad (the first was in What Joint Action Could Not Be):

1. One- and two-year-olds are capable of performing joint actions.

2. All joint action involves shared intention.

3. A function of shared intention is to coordinate two or more agents’ plans (as Bratman’s account implies).

As we saw, Carpenter and others hold that all three claims are true. But these claims lead to the incorrect prediction that one- and two-year-olds are capable of coordinating their plans with others’. For this reason, at least one of the claims should be rejected. But which?

Can we reject the first claim?

One- and Two-Year-Olds Are Capable of Performing Joint Actions

As we will see in the seminar, a variety of evidence indicates that although they have quite limited capacities to coordinate their actions with others, even fourteen-month-olds will spontaneously initiate joint action with an adult. Children of around this age also demonstrate awareness in the context of joint action that success requires another person’s contribution.

Indeed, carpenter makes a strong case for the claim that one- and two-year-olds are capable of performing joint actions:

‘By 12–18 months, infants are beginning to participate in a variety of joint actions which show many of the characteristics of adult joint action.’ (Carpenter, 2009, p. 388)

As does Brownell:

‘infants learn about cooperation by participating in joint action structured by skilled and knowledgeable interactive partners before they can represent, understand, or generate it themselves. Cooperative joint action develops in the context of dyadic interaction with adults in which the adult initially takes responsibility for and actively structures the joint activity and the infant progressively comes to master the structure, timing, and communications involved in the joint action with the support and guidance of the adult. … Eager participants from the beginning, it takes approximately 2 years for infants to become autonomous contributors to sustained, goal-directed joint activity as active, collaborative partners’ (Brownell, 2011, p. 200).

Two Problems

The pattern of success and failure in infants’ capacities for joint action in the first and second years of life leaves us with two problems:

First Problem

In the first and second years of life, there is joint action (this section), but it does not appear to involve planning agency or shared intention (see Development of Joint Action: Planning).

Therefore we cannot characterise it using Bratman’s account.

What alternative account might characterise joint action in the first and second years of life?

Second Problem

Two-year-olds perform some joint actions but not others. What distinguishes the joint actions they can perform from those they cannot?

References