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)?

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Notes

We have just seen that the available evidence appears to disconfirm a key prediction of Carpenter’s hypothesis that one- and two-year-old children have shared intentions in roughly Bratman’s sense (see Development of Joint Action: Planning). What follows from this?

Two possibilities:

1. One- and two-year-old children are not capable of performing any joint actions at all.

2. Not all joint actions involve shared intentions (or Bratman is wrong about shared intentions being linked to planning).

We can rule out the first possibility …

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