Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination

Abstract

The evolution of language was likely facilitated by a special predisposition for social interaction, involving a set of communicative and cognitive skills summarized as the ‘interaction engine'. This assemblage seems to emerge early in development, to be found universally across cultures, and to enable participation in sophisticated joint action through the addition of spoken language. Yet, new evidence on social action coordination and communication in nonhuman primates warrants an update of the interaction engine hypothesis, particularly with respect to the evolutionary origins of its specific ingredients. However, one enduring problem for comparative research results from a conceptual gulf between disciplines, rendering it difficult to test concepts derived from human interaction research in nonhuman animals. The goal of this theme issue is to make such concepts accessible for comparative research, to promote a fruitful interdisciplinary debate on social action coordination as a new arena of research, and to enable mutual fertilization between human and nonhuman interaction research. In consequence, we here consider relevant theoretical and empirical research within and beyond this theme issue to revisit the interaction engine's shared, convergently derived and uniquely derived ingredients preceding (or perhaps in the last case, succeeding) human language. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination’.

Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean

“…This characterization of Gricean follows reformulations of Grice’s original ideas developed by Strawson ( 16 ) and, in particular, Sperber and Wilson ( 17 – 19 ). The labels “interactional engine” and “ostensive communication” are often used more or less synonymously with how we use Gricean here ( 7 , 20 – 23 ). What unites this family of approaches is that they all identify the roots of linguistic meaning in the expression and recognition of intentions.…”

“…With this goal, the mind can be treated as a black box: Sensory input goes in, and behavior comes out ( 4 ). This approach has proven productive, but there are now many demands to scratch beneath the surface: to ask what computational tasks are performed inside the black boxes ( 5 – 8 ). Furthermore, existing computational descriptions of meaning and communication in humans do not include many gradations, which limits the utility of cross-species comparisons ( 8 , 9 ).…”

Bodies at play: the role of intercorporeality and bodily affordances in coordinating social play in chimpanzees in the wild

“…Recently, Levinson (2006) hypothesized that the evolution of language was possible because humans possessed a set of skills that he calls the “interaction engine.” These skills involve both the cognitive (e.g., intentionality, prosocial motivation) and the communicative (e.g., sequence organization, turn-taking organization, communication through multiple sensory modalities) domains. This interaction engine hypothesis does not represent distinct brain modules but rather should be viewed metaphorically as describing distinct principles of human interaction ( Levinson, 2006 ; Heesen and Frohlich, 2022 ). While language considerably transformed human interactions (e.g., enhanced intersubjectivity; Enfield and Sidnell, 2022 ), the interaction engine hypothesis suggests that this distinctive set of skills involved in social interactions not only preceded the evolution of language but made language evolution possible in the first place.…”

“…One skill is the ability to act and communicate intentionally ( Levinson, 2006 ; Heesen and Frohlich, 2022 ; Roberts et al, 2022 ). Intentionality, defined as the voluntary and goal-directed use of actions ( Dennett, 1983 ; Townsend et al, 2017 ), has been a major focus in comparative research of animal communicative interactions ( Graham et al, 2020 ; Rodrigues and Fröhlich, 2021 ; Schel et al, 2022 ) intentionality can function by switching recipient’s understanding of behavior to understanding of intention when the cognitive distraction inhibits it ( Roberts and Roberts, 2022 ).…”

“…Additionally, there are other elements such as gaze and relative body position that make up the communicative interaction ( Wilkinson et al, 2012 ; Rossano, 2013a , b ). While intentionality is an important component of the interaction engine ( Levinson, 2006 ; Heesen and Frohlich, 2022 ), it is not the only one. For other components of the interaction engine (e.g., sequence organization or turn-taking organization), one needs to investigate all elements which are part of the interaction independent of whether they may have been produced intentionally or not (e.g., Rossano, 2013b ; Mondada and Meguerditchian, 2022 ).…”