No abstract

Previous research has shown that children aged 4-5 years, but not 2-3 years, show adult-like interference from a partner when performing a joint task (Milward, Kita, & Apperly, 2014). This raises questions about the cognitive skills involved in the development of such "corepresentation (CR)" of a partner (Sebanz, Knoblich, & Prinz, 2003). Here, individual differences data from one hundred and thirteen 4- to 5-year-olds showed theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control (IC) as predictors of ability to avoid CR interference, suggesting that children with better ToM abilities are more likely to succeed in decoupling self and other representations in a joint task, while better IC is likely to help children avoid interference from a partner's response when selecting their own response on the task.

Two of the most important milestones in children's development are joint action (acting with others) and joint attention (attending with others). These are popular fields in both psychology and philosophy but have formed surprisingly independent literatures despite the close similarities they share in terms of theoretical and methodological issues. This article systematically compares these fields and draws attention to specific and more general ways in which each could benefit from the other if communication between them were increased. We highlight a clear opportunity within these fields, but this could be a useful approach in cognitive science more generally. | INTRODUCTIONSocial interaction is a crucial and pervasive component of human behaviour and is consequently a skill at which we are highly adept. As a result, cognitive development research has focussed heavily on the developmental milestones that allow us to perform both simple and more complex joint behaviours. Two of the most important of these milestones are joint action and joint attention. These abilities have attracted a huge amount of interest from both philosophers and psychologists, studying both children and adults, but have each become the centre of largely independent literatures. Despite the relative lack of communication between these literatures, they have evolved in very similar ways and stumbled across similar issues. We argue that they would benefit from direct comparison, particularly where each area has identified different solutions that could be shared. Here, we thus aim to initiate the building of a bridge between the fields of joint action and joint attention from both a psychological and a philosophical perspective. We start by highlighting the similar problems these fields have come across when attempting to define these concepts, particularly when defining what level of interaction constitutes "jointness." We go on to discuss how researchers in each field have attempted to identify jointness using experimental studies, pointing out where crossover could be beneficial. This is followed by a discussion of how we achieve jointness when acting and/or attending together. We then highlight some additional issues that can be compared across fields and provide ways in which comparison can aid progress in both methodology and theory.