The role of shared practice in the origins of joint attention and pointing

The infant's participation in sequences of joint activity that require visual attention, or what is often called joint attention (e.g., gaze following, social referencing, pointing), is usually argued to be an outcome of and evidence for the existence of particular psychological competencies on the part of the infant. This convergence in opinion occurs, I contend, because social developmental theory is predicated in large part on a causal-psychological-representational picture of meaning and mind. In a review of the relevant literature I suggest that what is presupposed or at least underappreciated in most theories of joint attention is the role of social practice in the understanding of other minds. Rather than assuming that these joint activities requiring attention reveal psychological competencies, I argue that: (a) it is with recourse to such practices that researchers theorize about the infant's understanding of mind in the first instance, (b) the mind is not some entity that is separable from human activity, (c) knowledge of such practices is what the developing agent requires to come to an understanding of other minds, and (d) because non-language using agents do not understand mental states, young babies, a fortiori, do not understand their own attention or that of others. I then focus on a single infant activity typically thought to reveal a leg hold on other minds (i.e., pointing) and I report two empirical studies of its development. In the first I evaluate theories of the emergence of pointing by investigating the ways in which infants first get into shared activities involving pointing. In the second I investigate the development of pointing within mother-infant interaction. In neither study do I find support for the position that pointing gestures emerge as a result of some conceptual revolution on the part of the infant.