Structuring unleashed expression: Developmental foundations of human communication.

The target article highlights the sources of open-endedness of human communication. However, the authors' perspective does not account for the structure of particular communication systems. To this end, we extend the authors' perspective, in the spirit of evolutionary extended synthesis, with a detailed account of the sources of constraints imposed upon expression in the course of child development.

Dynamics of Remote Communication: Movement Coordination in Video-Mediated and Face-to-Face Conversations.

The present pandemic forced our daily interactions to move into the virtual world. People had to adapt to new communication media that afford different ways of interaction. Remote communication decreases the availability and salience of some cues but also may enable and highlight others. Importantly, basic movement dynamics, which are crucial for any interaction as they are responsible for the informational and affective coupling, are affected. It is therefore essential to discover exactly how these dynamics change. In this exploratory study of six interacting dyads we use traditional variability measures and cross recurrence quantification analysis to compare the movement coordination dynamics in quasi-natural dialogues in four situations: (1) remote video-mediated conversations with a self-view mirror image present, (2) remote video-mediated conversations without a self-view, (3) face-to-face conversations with a self-view, and (4) face-to-face conversations without a self-view. We discovered that in remote interactions movements pertaining to communicative gestures were exaggerated, while the stability of interpersonal coordination was greatly decreased. The presence of the self-view image made the gestures less exaggerated, but did not affect the coordination. The dynamical analyses are helpful in understanding the interaction processes and may be useful in explaining phenomena connected with video-mediated communication, such as "Zoom fatigue".

Parcellation of the human amygdala using recurrence quantification analysis.

Several previous attempts have been made to divide the human amygdala into smaller subregions based on the unique functional properties of the subregions. Although these attempts have provided valuable insight into the functional heterogeneity in this structure, the possibility that spatial patterns of functional characteristics can quickly change over time has rarely been considered in previous studies. In the present study, we explicitly account for the dynamic nature of amygdala activity. Our goal was not only to develop another parcellation method but also to augment existing methods with novel information about amygdala subdivisions. We performed state-specific amygdala parcellation using resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) data and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). RsfMRI data from 102 subjects were acquired with a 3T Trio Siemens scanner. We analyzed values of several RQA measures across all voxels in the amygdala and found two amygdala subdivisions, the ventrolateral (VL) and dorsomedial (DM) subdivisions, that differ with respect to one of the RQA measures, Shannon's entropy of diagonal lines. Compared to the DM subdivision, the VL subdivision can be characterized by a higher value of entropy. The results suggest that VL activity is determined and influenced by more brain structures than is DM activity. To assess the biological validity of the obtained subdivisions, we compared them with histological atlases and currently available parcellations based on structural connectivity patterns (Anatomy Probability Maps) and cytoarchitectonic features (SPM Anatomy toolbox). Moreover, we examined their cortical and subcortical functional connectivity. The obtained results are similar to those previously reported on parcellation performed on the basis of structural connectivity patterns. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that the VL subdivision has strong connections to several cortical areas, whereas the DM subdivision is mainly connected to subcortical regions. This finding suggests that the VL subdivision corresponds to the basolateral subdivision of the amygdala (BLA), while the DM subdivision has some characteristics typical of the centromedial amygdala (CMA). The similarity in functional connectivity patterns between the VL subdivision and BLA, as well as between the DM subdivision and CMA, confirm the utility of our parcellation method. Overall, the study shows that parcellation based on BOLD signal dynamics is a powerful tool for identifying distinct functional systems within the amygdala. This tool might be useful for future research on functional brain organization.

Abandoning the code metaphor is compatible with semiotic process.

We agree with Brette's assessment that the coding metaphor has become more problematic than helpful for theories of brain and cognitive functioning. In an effort to aid in constructing an alternative, we argue that joining the insights from the dynamical systems approach with the semiotic framework of C. S. Peirce can provide a fruitful perspective.

Beyond fixation durations: Recurrence quantification analysis reveals spatiotemporal dynamics of infant visual scanning.

Standard looking-duration measures in eye-tracking data provide only general quantitative indices, while details of the spatiotemporal structuring of fixation sequences are lost. To overcome this, various tools have been developed to measure the dynamics of fixations. However, these analyses are only useful when stimuli have high perceptual similarity and they require the previous definition of areas of interest (AOIs). Although these methods have been widely applied in adult studies, relatively little is known about the temporal structuring of infant gaze-foraging behaviors such as variability of scanning over time or individual scanning patterns. Thus, to shed more light on the spatiotemporal characteristics of infant fixation sequences we apply for the first time a new methodology for nonlinear time-series analysis-the recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). We present how the dynamics of infant scanning varies depending on the scene content during a "pop-out" search task. Moreover, we show how the normalization of RQA measures with average fixation durations provides a more detailed account of the dynamics of fixation sequences. Finally, we link the RQA measures of temporal dynamics of scanning with the spatial information about the stimuli using heat maps of recurrences without the need for defining a priori AOIs and present how infants' foraging strategies are driven by the image content. We conclude from our findings that the RQA methodology has potential applications in the analysis of the temporal dynamics of infant visual foraging offering advantages over existing methods.

What Dynamic Approaches Have Taught Us About Cognition and What They Have Not: On Values in Motion and the Importance of Replicable Forms.

Over the past several decades, research in the cognitive sciences has foregrounded the importance of active bodies and their continuous dependence on the changing environment, strengthening the relevance of dynamical models. These models have been steadily developed within the ecological psychology approach to cognition, which arguably contributes to the "ecological turn" we are witnessing today. The embodied and situated nature of cognition, regarded by some as a passing trend, is presently becoming a largely accepted assumption. In this paper, I claim that in light of these developments, ecological psychology, in alliance with related approaches, such as enactivism and interactivism, has the potential to deeply transform our perspectives on cognition and action, restoring their pertinence to humans as persons. However, an important challenge to the realization of this potential has to be noted: neither the mainstream information-processing approach nor the dynamics-oriented perspective on cognition provides an account of how the capacity of humans to use language and think "symbolically" can be derived from the continuous flow of agent-environment interaction. I will attempt to show that posing the "dynamical" and "computational" hypotheses about the nature of cognition as mutually exclusive approaches to cognition results in undesirable reductionism, which makes it difficult to meet this challenge. There are good reasons, advanced over half a century ago by, for example, Michael Polanyi or Howard Pattee, to think that we need complementary descriptions to understand cognizing systems, in order to grasp the fact that they are governed both by physical laws and by emergent historical constraints. Details of such a complementarity-based approach still await elucidation, but some proposed solutions have the potential to ease the tension between the information-processing and dynamical approaches to cognition and to lead to a better understanding of their interrelation.

Is love an abstract concept? A view of concepts from an interaction-based perspective.

Research concerning concepts in the cognitive sciences has been dominated by the information-processing approach, which has resulted in a certain narrowing of the range of questions and methods of investigation. Recent trends have sought to broaden the scope of such research, but they have not yet been integrated within a theoretical framework that would allow us to reconcile new perspectives with the insights already obtained. In this paper, we focus on the processes involved in early concept acquisition and demonstrate that certain aspects of these processes remain largely understudied. These aspects include the primacy of movement and coordination with others within a structured social environment as well as the importance of first-person experiences pertaining to perception and action. We argue that alternative approaches to cognition, such as ecological psychology, enactivism and interactivism, are helpful for foregrounding these understudied areas. These approaches can complement the extant research concerning concepts to help us obtain a more comprehensive view of knowledge structures, thus providing us with a new perspective on recurring problems, suggesting novel questions and enriching our methodological toolbox. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Editorial concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences.

This theme issue aims to view the literature on concepts through a novel lens, that of social interaction and its influence on inner experiences. It discusses unsolved problems in literature on concepts, emphasizing the distinction between concrete versus abstract concepts and external versus internal grounding. This introductory article reflects the two research streams that the theme aims to bridge-in this area, the dimension of embodied interaction with others and how this influences the interaction with ourselves is still underexplored. In the first part, we discuss recent trends in social cognition, showing how interacting with others influences our concepts. In the second part, we address how social interactions become part of our inner world in a Vygotskian fashion. First, we illustrate how interoception, emotion and metacognition are connected with concepts and knowledge. Second, we deal with how language, in both its outer and inner form, can empower cognition and concepts. We also briefly describe how novel experimental and computational methods contribute to investigating the online use of concepts. Overall, this introductory article outlines the potentialities of an integrated and interactive approach that can give new, fresh life to a topic, that of concepts, which lies at the root of human cognition. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Beyond Single-Mindedness: A Figure-Ground Reversal for the Cognitive Sciences.

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists.

Co-regulation of movements during infant feeding.

The process by which infants move from liquid feeding to caregiver-assisted spoon feeding of semi-solid food is quite a dramatic transition. In previous studies, we observed that in the weeks after the introduction to solid food, mother-infant dyads showed increased co-regulation and synchronization of their respective feeding behaviors (e.g. offering food, accepting/refusing, timing). Learning this new way of feeding and eating requires that infants coordinate their position and movements with the complementary position and movements of the caregiver. The present study augments the category-based analysis of this co-regulation by the analysis of coupling in the dyads based on automatically extracted movement data. Previously collected video data from 10 mother-infant dyads were re-analyzed for the purpose of this study. Movement trajectories of mother's hand and infant's face were obtained by applying an automatic movement detection algorithm (TLD, Kalal et al., 2012; for applications to mother-infant interactions see López Pérez et al., 2017). Coordination was assessed by the method of Diagonal Cross Recurrence Profiles (DCRP), which expresses the degree of synchronization at different time lags. Profiles for each dyad from two different occasions --with one visit in the first week of solid feeding and one approximately 4-5 weeks later-- were compared. The results showed that, on average, most synchronization occurred in the first visit at lag 0. In the second visit there was an average delay in synchronization of about 1 s, with leading behavior starting from the infant. This suggests that the coordination was initially closely synchronized and became somewhat looser over time. Possibly, infants have begun to anticipate and guide the feeding movements enacted by the mother. However, our findings underline the idiosyncratic and complex nature of co-regulation of movements during the introduction of solid food. Whereas some dyads showed signs of increased organization, others seemed to disorganize, re-organize, or showed no organization at all. Many (interacting) factors --both individual and contextual-- may be responsible for the observed differences between dyads. Further research is needed to understand why specific synchronization pathways emerge and whether and how these might relate both to later feeding and eating and to the emergent patterns of participation.

Recurrence quantification analysis in the study of online coordination in Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus).

In social animals, studying interactions with conspecifics is crucial for understanding even basic physiological, behavioral, and cognitive processes. Due to a visible "ecological turn" in behavioral research, we observe a rapid development of novel methods devoted to studying interaction. In this article, we offer a case study of an animal interactive behavior, which uses new methods of video-recorded motion capturing combined with time-series analysis called recurrence quantification analysis. We apply the method to the video-recorded behavioral sequence observed in Rattus norvegicus to evidence the fine-grained structure of this behavior. We show how such dynamical analyses can lead to insights about the processes behind such behavioral patterns and their change. Finally, we show how this approach can be successfully applied to other examples of highly coordinated behaviors in the animal world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Enactivism and Ecological Psychology: The Role of Bodily Experience in Agency.

This paper considers some foundational concepts in ecological psychology and in enactivism, and traces their developments from their historical roots to current preoccupations. Important differences stem, we claim, from dissimilarities in how embodied experience has been understood by the ancestors, founders and followers of ecological psychology and enactivism, respectively. Rather than pointing to differences in domains of interest for the respective approaches, and restating possible divisions of labor between them in research in the cognitive and psychological sciences, we call for a deeper analysis of the role of embodiment in agency that we also undertake. Awareness of the differences that exist in the respective frameworks and their consequences, we argue, may lead to overcoming some current divisions of responsibility, and contribute to a more comprehensive and complementary way of dealing with a broader range of theoretical and practical concerns. While providing some examples of domains, such as social cognition and art reception, in which we can observe the relative usefulness and potential integration of the theoretical and methodological resources from the two approaches, we demonstrate that such deeper synergy is not only possible but also beginning to emerge. Such complementarity, as we envisage, conceives of ecological psychology that allows felt experience as a crucial dynamical element in the explanations and models that it produces, and of an enactive approach that takes into consideration the ubiquitous presence of rich directly perceived relations among variables arising from enactments in the social and physical world.

Cultural Artifacts Transform Embodied Practice: How a Sommelier Card Shapes the Behavior of Dyads Engaged in Wine Tasting.

The radical embodied approach to cognition directs researchers' attention to skilled practice in a structured environment. This means that the structures present in the environment, including structured interactions with others and with artifacts, are put at least on a par with individual cognitive processes in explaining behavior. Both ritualized interactive formats and artifacts can be seen as forms of "external memory," usually shaped for a particular domain, that constrain skilled practice, perception, and cognition in online behavior and in learning and development. In this paper, we explore how a task involving the recognition of difficult sensory stimuli (wine) by collective systems (dyads) is modified by a domain-specific linguistic artifact (a sommelier card). We point to how using the card changes the way participants explore the stimuli individually, making it more consistent with culturally accrued sommelier know-how, as well as how it transforms the interaction between the participants, creating specific divisions of labor and novel relations. In our exploratory approach, we aim to integrate qualitative methods from anthropology and sociology with quantitative methods from psychology and the dynamical systems approach using both coded behavioral data and automatic movement analysis.

Reconciling symbolic and dynamic aspects of language: Toward a dynamic psycholinguistics.

The present paper examines natural language as a dynamical system. The oft-expressed view of language as "a static system of symbols" is here seen as an element of a larger system that embraces the mutuality of symbols and dynamics. Following along the lines of the theoretical biologist H.H. Pattee, the relation between symbolic and dynamic aspects of language is expressed within a more general framework that deals with the role of information in biological systems. In this framework, symbols are seen as information-bearing entities that emerge under pressures of communicative needs and that serve as concrete constraints on development and communication. In an attempt to identify relevant dynamic aspects of such a system, one has to take into account events that happen on different time scales: evolutionary language change (i.e., a diachronic aspect), processes of communication (language use) and language acquisition. Acknowledging the role of dynamic processes in shaping and sustaining the structures of natural language calls for a change in methodology. In particular, a purely synchronic analysis of a system of symbols as "meaning-containing entities" is not sufficient to obtain answers to certain recurring problems in linguistics and the philosophy of language. A more encompassing research framework may be the one designed specifically for studying informationally based coupled dynamical systems (coordination dynamics) in which processes of self-organization take place over different time scales.

Taking Up an Active Role: Emerging Participation in Early Mother-Infant Interaction during Peekaboo Routines.

Dynamical systems approaches to social coordination underscore how participants' local actions give rise to and maintain global interactive patterns and how, in turn, they are also shaped by them. Developmental research can deliver important insights into both processes: (1) the stabilization of ways of interacting, and (2) the gradual shaping of the agentivity of the individuals. In this article we propose that infants' agentivity develops out of participation, i.e., acting a part in an interaction system. To investigate this development this article focuses on the ways in which participation in routinized episodes may shape infant's agentivity in social events. In contrast to existing research addressing more advanced forms of participating in social routines, our goal was to assess infants' early participation as evidence of infants' agentivity. In our study, 19 Polish mother-infant dyads were filmed playing peekaboo when the infants were 4 and 6 months of age. We operationalized infants' participation in the peekaboo in terms of their use of various behaviors across modalities during specific phases of the game: We included smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to cover and uncover themselves or their mothers. We hypothesized that infants and mothers would participate actively in the routine by regulating their behavior so as to adhere to the routine format. Furthermore, we hypothesized that infants who experienced more scaffolding would be able to adopt a more active role in the routine. We operationalized scaffolding as mothers' use of specific peekaboo structures that allowed infants to anticipate when it was their turn to act. Results suggested that infants as young as 4 months of age engaged in peekaboo and took up turns in the game, and that their participation increased at 6 months of age. Crucially, our results suggest that infants' behavior was organized by the global structure of the peekaboo game, because smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to uncover occurred significantly more often during specific phases rather than being evenly distributed across the whole interaction. Furthermore, the way mothers structured the game at 4 months predicted infant participation at both 4 and 6 months of age.

Social adaptation in multi-agent model of linguistic categorization is affected by network information flow.

This paper explores how information flow properties of a network affect the formation of categories shared between individuals, who are communicating through that network. Our work is based on the established multi-agent model of the emergence of linguistic categories grounded in external environment. We study how network information propagation efficiency and the direction of information flow affect categorization by performing simulations with idealized network topologies optimizing certain network centrality measures. We measure dynamic social adaptation when either network topology or environment is subject to change during the experiment, and the system has to adapt to new conditions. We find that both decentralized network topology efficient in information propagation and the presence of central authority (information flow from the center to peripheries) are beneficial for the formation of global agreement between agents. Systems with central authority cope well with network topology change, but are less robust in the case of environment change. These findings help to understand which network properties affect processes of social adaptation. They are important to inform the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of centralized systems.

Combining Recurrence Analysis and Automatic Movement Extraction from Video Recordings to Study Behavioral Coupling in Face-to-Face Parent-Child Interactions.

The analysis of parent-child interactions is crucial for the understanding of early human development. Manual coding of interactions is a time-consuming task, which is a limitation in many projects. This becomes especially demanding if a frame-by-frame categorization of movement needs to be achieved. To overcome this, we present a computational approach for studying movement coupling in natural settings, which is a combination of a state-of-the-art automatic tracker, Tracking-Learning-Detection (TLD), and nonlinear time-series analysis, Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA). We investigated the use of TLD to extract and automatically classify movement of each partner from 21 video recordings of interactions, where 5.5-month-old infants and mothers engaged in free play in laboratory settings. As a proof of concept, we focused on those face-to-face episodes, where the mother animated an object in front of the infant, in order to measure the coordination between the infants' head movement and the mothers' hand movement. We also tested the feasibility of using such movement data to study behavioral coupling between partners with CRQA. We demonstrate that movement can be extracted automatically from standard definition video recordings and used in subsequent CRQA to quantify the coupling between movement of the parent and the infant. Finally, we assess the quality of this coupling using an extension of CRQA called anisotropic CRQA and show asymmetric dynamics between the movement of the parent and the infant. When combined these methods allow automatic coding and classification of behaviors, which results in a more efficient manner of analyzing movements than manual coding.

Performance of Language-Coordinated Collective Systems: A Study of Wine Recognition and Description.

Most of our perceptions of and engagements with the world are shaped by our immersion in social interactions, cultural traditions, tools and linguistic categories. In this study we experimentally investigate the impact of two types of language-based coordination on the recognition and description of complex sensory stimuli: that of red wine. Participants were asked to taste, remember and successively recognize samples of wines within a larger set in a two-by-two experimental design: (1) either individually or in pairs, and (2) with or without the support of a sommelier card-a cultural linguistic tool designed for wine description. Both effectiveness of recognition and the kinds of errors in the four conditions were analyzed. While our experimental manipulations did not impact recognition accuracy, bias-variance decomposition of error revealed non-trivial differences in how participants solved the task. Pairs generally displayed reduced bias and increased variance compared to individuals, however the variance dropped significantly when they used the sommelier card. The effect of sommelier card reducing the variance was observed only in pairs, individuals did not seem to benefit from the cultural linguistic tool. Analysis of descriptions generated with the aid of sommelier cards shows that pairs were more coherent and discriminative than individuals. The findings are discussed in terms of global properties and dynamics of collective systems when constrained by different types of cultural practices.

Beyond mechanistic interaction: value-based constraints on meaning in language.

According to situated, embodied, and distributed approaches to cognition, language is a crucial means for structuring social interactions. Recent approaches that emphasize this coordinative function treat language as a system of replicable constraints on individual and interactive dynamics. In this paper, we argue that the integration of the replicable-constraints approach to language with the ecological view on values allows for a deeper insight into processes of meaning creation in interaction. Such a synthesis of these frameworks draws attention to important sources of structuring interactions beyond the sheer efficiency of a collective system in its current task situation. Most importantly, the workings of linguistic constraints will be shown as embedded in more general fields of values, which are realized on multiple timescales. Because the ontogenetic timescale offers a convenient window into the emergence of linguistic constraints, we present illustrations of concrete mechanisms through which values may become embodied in language use in development.