We explain metacognition as a management of cognitive resources that does not necessitate algorithmic strategies or metarepresentation. When pragmatic, world‐directed actions cannot reduce the distance to the goal, agents engage in epistemic action directed at cognition. Such actions often are physical and involve other people, and so are open to observation. Taking a dynamic systems approach to development, we suggest that implicit and perceptual metacognition emerges from dyadic reciprocal interaction. Early intersubjectivity allows infants to internalize and construct rudimentary strategies for monitoring and control of their own and others' cognitions by emotion and attention. The functions of initiating, maintaining, and achieving turns make proto‐conversation a productive platform for developing metacognition. It enables caregiver and infant to create shared routines for epistemic actions that permit training of metacognitive skills. The adult is of double epistemic use to the infant—as a teacher that comments on and corrects the infant's efforts, and as the infant's cognitive resource in its own right. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A recent version of the view that aesthetic experience is based in empathy as inner imitation explains aesthetic experience as the automatic simulation of actions, emotions, and bodily sensations depicted in an artwork by motor neurons in the brain. Criticizing the simulation theory for committing to an erroneous concept of empathy and failing to distinguish regular from aesthetic experiences of art, I advance an alternative, dynamic approach and claim that aesthetic experience is enacted and skillful, based in the recognition of others’ experiences as distinct from one’s own. In combining insights from mainly psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science, the dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning. While entrainment merely plays a preparatory part in this, aesthetic engagement constitutes the phenomenological side of coupling to an artwork and provides the context for exploration, and eventually for moving, seeing, and feeling with art. I submit that aesthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via the complementary processes of the perception–action and motion–emotion loops. The former involves the embodied visual exploration of an artwork in physical space, and progressively structures and organizes visual experience by way of perceptual feedback from body movements made in response to the artwork. The latter concerns the movement qualities and shapes of implicit and explicit bodily responses to an artwork that cue emotion and thereby modulate over-all affect and attitude. The two processes cause the viewer to bodily and emotionally move with and be moved by individual works of art, and consequently to recognize another psychological orientation than her own, which explains how art can cause feelings of insight or awe and disclose aspects of life that are unfamiliar or novel to the viewer.

ABSTRACT.Intentional communication is perceptually based and about attentional objects. Three attention mechanisms are distinguished: scanning, attention attraction, and attentionfocusing. Attention-focusing directs the subject towards attentional objects. Attentionfocusing is goal-governed (controlled by stimulus) or goal-intended (under the control of the subject). Attentional objects are perceptually categorised functional entities that emerge in the interaction between subjects and environment. Joint attention allows for focusing on the same attentional object simultaneously (mutual object-focused attention), provided that the subjects have focused on each other beforehand (subjectsubject attention). It results in intentional communication if the subjects attend to each other as subjects (i) capable of attending, and (ii) attending in a goal-intended way. Intentional communication is fundamentally imperative and adapted to action.

We trace the difference between the ways in which apes and humans co-operate to differences in communicative abilities, claiming that the pressure for futuredirected co-operation was a major force behind the evolution of language. Competitive co-operation concerns goals that are present in the environment and have stable values. It relies on either signalling or joint attention. Future-directed co-operation concerns new goals that lack fixed values. It requires symbolic communication and contextindependent representations of means and goals. We analyse these ways of co-operating in game-theoretic terms and submit that the co-operative strategy of games that involve shared representations of future goals may provide new equilibrium solutions. Co-operationHuman beings as well as animals co-operate in order to reach common goals. There are many ways of co-operating, some of which may not merit being called 'co-operation' in the literal sense of the word. Among these one may count the more or less instinctive co-ordination of behaviour that emerges among ants building heaps or honeybees gathering food. On the opposite side of the scale, we find co-operation that builds on elaborate long-term planning and an open discussion of the means and the goal. In this article, we will compare and elucidate the similarities and differences between humans and apes as concerns co-operation. There is no doubt that apes co-operate, but, as we will argue, humans are able to do so in more flexible ways. Our aim is to spell out the crucial role of communication for different kinds of co-operation.To co-operate is to work together for a joint benefit. A group of agents is co-operating when the agents together employ a certain means, or series of actions, to achieve a common goal. Co-operation can be achieved directly by a co-ordination of behaviour. It can also arise indirectly through a mutual sharing of representations of means and goal. It is vital for true co-operation that all the participants are actively involved. For instance, when a person manipulates other people in order to reach his goal, we do not say that the others are co-operating with him. This is the case even if the goal is of use to them all. Co-operation demands that all the Thanks to Joëlle Proust, Bernhard Schroeder, and the participants of the seminar at LUCS for helpful comments. A shorter and in several respects different version of this paper has been published as 'Co-operation in Apes and Humans' (2003).

Taking a psychological and philosophical outlook, we approach making as an embodied and embedded skill via the skilled artisan's experience of having a corporeal, nonlinguistic dialogue with the material while working with it. We investigate the dynamic relation between maker and material through the lens of pottery as illustrated by wheel throwing, claiming that the experience of dialogue signals an emotional involvement with clay. The examination of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of habit, the skilled intentionality framework, and material engagement theory shows that while these theories explain complementary aspects of skillful engagement with the material world, they do not consider the dialogic dimension. By way of explanation, we submit that the artisan's emotional engagement with the material world is based in openness and recognition and involves dialogue with the material. Drawing on the intimate relationship between movement and emotion, it promotes an openended manner of working and permits experiencing with the material, acting into its inherent possibilities. In conclusion, we suggest that dialogue, whether verbal or nonverbal, constitutes a primary means for making sense of the world at large, animate and inanimate.