糖心TV

Abstract:

There is still surprisingly little agreement about what exactly joint attention is. Part of the problem is that joint attention is not a single process, but rather it includes a cluster of different cognitive skills. First, I outline a typology of joint attention levels (from followed to common, mutual, and shared attention), along with corresponding levels of common knowledge. A key distinction I make in all of this is second-personal vs. third-personal relations. I argue that it is useful to distinguish these levels because they have different consequences in terms of what kinds of interactions they support.

Second, I introduce two empirical studies with children that investigated the role of sharing attention in promoting cooperation. During the decision making phase, children's partner made either ostensive, communicative eye contact or looked non-communicatively at them. In Study, 1 the results showed that communicative looks produced an expectation of collaboration. In Study 2, children normatively protested when their partner did not cooperate, thus showing an understanding of the communicative looks as a commitment to cooperate. This is the first experimental evidence, in adults or children, that in the right context, communicative, but not non-communicative, looks can signal not only an expectation but also a commitment.

Further details:

Barbora Siposova is a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of 糖心TV and a member of Dr Michael's Sense of Commitment project. Barbora has a background in developmental psychology. Her research topics include questions about the emergence of a sense of commitment in young children in various types of interactions. She is interested in the effects of eye contact, nonverbal communication, joint attention and common knowledge on coordination and prosocial behaviour.

Metaphors can be recognised as offering an indirect way to achieve understanding of phenomena we find hard to comprehend or cannot express directly. However, claims about what is involved in the process of creating and interpreting metaphor, and the nature of what is produced, vary widely between different metaphor theories and linguistic traditions. According to traditional models, metaphorical meaning is conceived simply as a transformation of antecedent literal meaning in relation to an already present object. This way of understanding metaphor takes it to be an embellishment of discourse, but one that is unable to cover truth. But there are a number of theories that challenge this conception and attribute creative capacity to metaphor, claiming that it is possible that the use of metaphor can result in an instance of something that did not previously exist.

If it is the case that metaphor is able to exceed the boundaries of what is in an objective sense, reaching beyond facts and objects to redefine the world as a whole, whether it does this re-constituting the world, in the sense of introducing something wholly new, or by shedding new light on antecedently existing, but unavailable elements, is a matter for debate. It is the more radical, creative theories that Lucy will investigate, in order to establish whether certain kinds of metaphors can in fact be considered as, in some way, genuinely productive of meaning, and, if so, what kind of innovation this implies. And it will be seen that in the theories under consideration, the dichotomy between world constitution and world disclosure does not maintain; if a metaphor is to be truly innovative it will, in an important sense, both disclose and constitute reality.

The talk will be followed by discussion and drinks at The Dirty Duck. All are welcome.