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Overthinking and Other Minds: The Analysis Paralysis
Abstract
Although many cases of knowledge require careful, conscious deliberation, knowledge of other minds is different, for it requires in some sense that we not think too much about it. The primary way that we come to know what others are thinking is by interacting with them, and the interactive context requires real-time engagement such that conscious intellectual deliberation is disruptive in that it disturbs the flow of the interaction. Understanding that part of what we know when we know others comes from nonpropositional, noncognitive know-how in a joint context can help elucidate the common wisdom behind the claims about how we should not overthink our interactions with other people.
... Past research investigating overthinking and motor performance demonstrated that greater amounts of time spent thinking about an action correlates to worse task performance (Flegal & Anderson, 2008). Moreover, overthinking when interacting with others can induce anxiety and cognitive distraction, which may further impair task performance (Talbert, 2017). Individuals higher in premeditation may have engaged in overthinking, thus impairing their estimation ability. ...
Until recently, marijuana research has often relied on self-reported frequency of use (e.g., days used per month). These estimations may oversimplify use at times, as they can only infer the quantity that one uses, rather than directly measure it. While some studies have estimated quantity (e.g., number of joints, grams), research has supported that user estimates of marijuana weight are often inaccurate and overestimate the true quantity. Since weight misestimation varies by participant, it may be important to identify individual difference factors (e.g., personality) that influence weight estimation. One such factor may be impulsivity, as it is known to relate to other marijuana-use measures (e.g., frequency, consequences). However, research has yet to examine the specific relation between impulsivity and misestimation of marijuana weights. The present study investigated impulsivity as a predictor of marijuana quantity estimation, using objectively weighed quantity data. We hypothesized that impulsivity facets would relate to marijuana quantity misestimation. We asked attendees at a marijuana-related event to roll a joint or pack a bowl, and then take, among a battery of measures, the SUPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale. We found that negative urgency, positive urgency, and lack of perseverance were not significantly associated with misestimation, while lack of premeditation was significantly negatively related to misestimation. Findings indicated that individuals who lacked in premeditation made more accurate quantity estimates than those higher in premeditation. Future directions should investigate the relation between impulsivity, marijuana intoxication, and marijuana quantity estimation.
... Using continuous fields of values enables using approximate-continuous instead of combinatorial reasoning, making it a very effective mechanism that can be seen in today's deep neural networks. If we were to use combinatorial reasoning in complex and fast situations, we would be paralyzed in decision-making under our cognitive limits, and coordination would be rare [75]. Even worse would be trying to calculate Nash equilibrium on the fly, outside the realm of games with a choreographer. ...
We shall have a hard look at ethics and try to extract insights in the form of abstract properties that might become tools. We want to connect ethics to games, talk about the performance of ethics, introduce curiosity into the interplay between competing and coordinating in well-performing ethics, and offer a view of possible developments that could unify increasing aggregates of entities. All this is under a long shadow cast by computational complexity that is quite negative about games. This analysis is the first step toward finding modeling aspects that might be used in AI ethics for integrating modern AI systems into human society.
... Using continuous fields of values enables using approximate-continuous instead of combinatorial reasoning, making it a very effective mechanism that can be seen in today's deep neural networks. If we were to use combinatorial reasoning in complex and fast situations, we would be paralyzed in decision-making under our cognitive limits, and coordination would be rare (Talbert, 2017). Even worse would be trying to calculate Nash equilibrium on the fly, outside the realm of games with a choreographer. ...
We shall have a hard look at ethics and try to extract insights in the form of abstract properties that might become tools. We want to connect ethics to games, talk about the performance of ethics, introduce curiosity into the interplay between competing and coordinating in well-performing ethics, and offer a view of possible developments that could unify increasing aggregates of entities. All this is under a long shadow cast by computational complexity that is quite negative about games. This analysis is the first step toward finding modeling aspects that might be used in AI ethics for integrating modern AI systems into human society.
... On the contrary stress and anxiety are a twofold part of the human mental process which is often related to boredom [1]. In facts, while it has been proven many times that occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time [7], the lack of a practical involvement during a long waiting time and the related boredom are typical precursors for well known mentalization processes that often end in overthinking [19]. ...
Stress and anxiety are part of the human mental process which is often unavoidably yield by circumstances and situations such as waiting for a flight at the airport gate, hanging around before an exam, or while in an hospital waiting room. In this work we devise a decision system for a robotic aroma diffusion device designed to lessen stress and anxiety-related behaviors. The robot is intended as designed for deployments in closed environments that resembles the aspect and structure of a waiting room with different chairs where people sit and wait. The robot can be remotely driven by means of an artificial intelligence based on Radial Basis Function Neural Networks classifiers. The latter is responsible to recognize when stress or anxiety levels are arising so that the diffusion of specific aromas could relax the bystanders. We make use of thermal images to infer the level of stress by means of an ad hoc feature extraction approach. The system is prone to future improvements such as the refinement of the classification process also by means of accurate psychometric studies that could be based on standardized tests or derivatives.
... On the contrary stress and anxiety are a twofold part of the human mental process which is often related to boredom [1]. In facts, while it has been proven many times that occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time [7], the lack of a practical involvement during a long waiting time and the related boredom are typical precursors for well known mentalization processes that often end in overthinking [19]. ...
... We suggest that children might be trying too hard to make sense of the utterance they heard; they overthink their first implicit conclusion (possibly engaging System 2 capacities), which hinders their object-choice performance (cf. Talbert, 2017). ...
Interpreting a speaker’s communicative acts is a challenge children face permanently in everyday life. In doing so, they seem to understand direct communicative acts more easily than indirect communicative acts. The current study investigated which step in the processing of communicative acts might cause difficulties in understanding indirect communication. To assess the developmental trajectory of this phenomenon, we tested 3- and 5-year-old children (N = 105) using eye tracking and an object-choice task. The children watched videos that showed puppets during their everyday activities (e.g., pet care). For every activity, the puppets were asked which of two objects (e.g., rabbit or dog) they would rather have. The puppets responded either directly (e.g., “I want the rabbit”) or indirectly (e.g., “I have a carrot”). Results showed that children chose the object intended by the puppets more often in the direct communication condition than in the indirect communication condition and that 5-year-olds chose correctly more than 3-year-olds. However, even though we found that children’s pupil size increased while hearing the utterances, we found no effect for communication type before children had already decided on the correct object during object selection by looking at it. Only after this point—that is, only in children’s further fixation patterns and reaction times—did differences for communication type occur. Thus, although children’s object-choice performance suggests that indirect communication is harder to understand than direct communication, the cognitive demands during processing of both communication types seem similar. We discuss theoretical implications of these findings for developmental pragmatics in terms of a dual-process account of communication comprehension.
... This finding is incongruent with our prediction, although it does not invalidate our conclusion that changing the neural activity in right TPJ would affect PI processing but not GI processing. To this finding, one possible explanation is that the individuals' increased ToM ability by anodal stimulation may go well beyond what might be needed to interpret PI in the stimuli and may lead her/him to overthink the speaker's intention behind the indirect replies with PI (Talbert, 2017). Given that individuals do not know the formulaic answer of the speaker's meaning on many occasions in daily life, they will be inclined to consider more possible interpretations of the speaker's meaning when they have adequate resources of ToM processing. ...
A speaker’s intended meaning can be inferred from an utterance with or without reference to its context for particularized implicature (PI) and/or generalized implicature (GI). Although previous studies have separately revealed the neural correlates of PI and GI comprehension, it remains controversial whether they share theory-of-mind (ToM) related inferential processes. Here we address this issue using functional MRI (fMRI) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Participants listened to single-turn dialogues where the reply was indirect with either PI or GI or was direct for control conditions (i.e., PIC and GIC). Results showed that PI and GI comprehension shared the multivariate fMRI patterns of language processing; in contrast, the ToM-related pattern was only elicited by PI comprehension, either at the whole-brain level or within dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Moreover, stimulating right TPJ exclusively affected PI comprehension. These findings suggest that understanding PI, but not GI, requires ToM-related inferential processes.
... For some examples, seeSmithies and Stoljar (2012: p. 4),Dretske (2012: p. 49), Siewert (2012: p. 129), or Spener (2012. 2 SeeStump (2010: chs. 3, 4),Talbert (2015Talbert ( , 2017, orBenton (2017).3 Contrast the set up in Schwitzgebel 2008 that does build in a commitment to uniqueness: "Think of introspection as you will-as long as it is the primary method by which we normally reach judgments about our experience in cases of the sort I'll describe. ...
In part one, I clarify the crucial notion of “introspection”, and give novel cases for the coherence of scenarios of local and global deception about how we access our own minds, drawing on empirical work. In part two, I evaluate a series of skeptical arguments based on such scenarios of error, and in each case explain why the skeptical argument fails. The first main upshot is that we should not over-estimate what it takes to introspect: introspection need not be accurate, or non-inferential, or exclusive of perception, or even exclusive of confabulation. The second main upshot is that, while skeptical challenges by figures such as Carruthers, Doris, and Schwitzgebel are rich and empirically informed, these skeptical challenges founder on how they are epistemologically under-informed.
The acquisition of second-person knowledge in first encounters is a relatively unexplored area of investigation. In this study, we aim to shed light on this topic by systematically reviewing published research articles that describe the strategies and patterns observed when people seek to gain knowledge about one another in first encounters. Drawing on the framework of second-person knowledge and epistemics in conversation, we extracted relevant findings from the selected studies and explained the patterns of interactions in different interactional settings. Our findings showed that there are differences in the way second-person knowledge is acquired in both institutional and mundane settings. In institutional settings, the process is often asymmetrical and initiated by the party with institutional power to achieve institutional goals. Participants’ professional roles and expertise are emphasized through the display of their epistemic stance and status. Although the party with a lower authority position mostly provides information within their personal experience domain, there are attempts to gain knowledge about their conversational partner using certain conversational strategies. Whereas in mundane settings, second-person knowledge exchange is reciprocal between conversational partners, and this knowledge serves as both a topic and a facilitator for the continuation of conversations. Sometimes, speakers trespass on their partners’ epistemic territories to show an inclination toward creating a common ground. The findings of this review provide a better understanding of how people gain, disclose, withhold, and display knowledge about one another during the first encounter, which is an important communication event in everyday interaction.
Consumer choice and decision making are often influenced by various covert and inadvertent factors in day-to-day lives, also known as externalities. Prior studies and economists have always stressed and based their models on the ‘assumption’ that consumers are perpetually rational in their decision making and are adept at pursuing the source of their satisfaction. But real-life observations paint a contradictory picture. They have an irrational compulsion to keep options open and have as many goods in their basket as possible, as long as it is on or under their budget curve. While measuring their options and calculating their potential opportunity costs, an average consumer oversees the most important opportunity cost them time. By considering their time they spend taking a decision as constant or irrelevant, they fail to take into account the consequences of not deciding and end up being miserable. This study aims to trace the effect of externalities like choice overload, nudges and unconscious bias on consumer choice among Indians students. Further, a relationship has been established between the three externalities after performing PCA after including certain demographic factors. Our findings indicate that the choice paradox in terms of Choice overload, Nudges and Unconscious bias is very much dependent upon the demographic factors of the individuals such as education, gender and number of family members and economic factors such as the household’s income. Further, these dependencies are not uniform. We found that if the individual is a student, then all three types of choice paradox are present.
If a person has a small number of good alternatives, this person can usually make a good decision, i.e., select one of the given alternatives. However, when we have a large number of good alternatives, people take much longer to make a decision—sometimes so long that, as a result, no decision is made. How can we explain this seemingly non-optimal behavior? In this paper, we show that this “decision paralysis” can be naturally explained by using the usual decision making ideas.
We often acquire sensory information from another person’s actions to make decisions on how to move, such as when walking through a crowded hallway. Past interactive decision-making research has focused on cognitive tasks that did not allow for sensory information exchange between humans prior to a decision. Here, we test the idea that humans accumulate sensory evidence of another person’s intended action to decide their own movement. In a competitive sensorimotor task, we show that humans exploit time to accumulate sensory evidence of another’s intended action and utilize this information to decide how to move. We captured this continuous interactive decision-making behaviour with a drift-diffusion model. Surprisingly, aligned with a ‘paralysis-by-analysis’ phenomenon, we found that humans often waited too long to accumulate sensory evidence and failed to make a decision. Understanding how humans engage in interactive and online decision-making has broad implications that spans sociology, athletics, interactive technology, and economics.
Hubert Dreyfus argues that explicit thought disrupts smooth coping at both the level of everyday tasks and of highly-refined skills. However, Barbara Montero criticises Dreyfus for extending what she calls the ‘principle of automaticity’ from our everyday actions to those of trained experts. In this paper, I defend Dreyfus’ account while refining his phenomenology. I examine the phenomenology of what I call ‘esoteric’ (as opposed to ‘everyday’) expertise to argue that the explicit thought Montero invokes belongs rather to ‘gaps’ between or above moments of reflexive coping. However, I agree that the ‘principle of automaticity’ does not adequately capture the experience of performing such skills. Drawing on examples of expert performance in sport and improvised music and dance, I argue that esoteric action, at its best, is marked by a distinct state of non-conceptual awareness- an experience of spontaneity, flow and ‘owned-ness’- that distinguishes it from the automaticity of everyday actions.
There are three non-exclusive theoretical explanations for the paradoxical collapse of performance due to large financial incentives. It has been proposed that “choking under pressure” is either due to distraction, interference via an increase in top-down control and performance monitoring, or excessive levels of arousal in the face of large losses. Given the known neural architecture involved in executive control and reward, we used fMRI of human participants during incentivized motor performance to provide evidence to support and/or reconcile these competing models in a visuomotor task. We show that the execution of a pre-trained motor task during neuroimaging is impaired by high rewards. BOLD activity occurring prior to movement onset is increased in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and functional connectivity between this region and motor cortex is likewise increased just prior to choking. However, the extent of this increase in functional connectivity is inversely related to a participant's propensity to choke, suggesting that a failure in exerting top-down influence on motor control underlies choking under pressure due to large incentives. These results are consistent with a distraction account of choking and suggest that frontal influences on motor activity are necessary to protect performance from vulnerability under pressure.
There is a nuanced interplay between the provision of monetary incentives and behavioral performance. Individuals' performance typically increases with increasing incentives only up to a point, after which larger incentives may result in decreases in performance, a phenomenon known as "choking." We investigated the influence of incentive framing on choking effects in humans: in one condition, participants performed a skilled motor task to obtain potential monetary gains; in another, participants performed the same task to avoid losing a monetary amount. In both the gain and loss frame, the degree of participants' behavioral loss aversion was correlated with their susceptibility to choking effects. However, the effects were markedly different in the gain and loss frames: individuals with higher loss aversion were susceptible to choking for large prospective gains and not susceptible to choking for large prospective losses, whereas individuals with low loss aversion choked for large prospective losses but not for large prospective gains. Activity in the ventral striatum was predictive of performance decrements in both the gain and loss frames. Moreover, a mediation analysis revealed that behavioral loss aversion hindered performance via the influence of ventral striatal activity on motor performance. Our findings indicate that the framing of an incentive has a profound effect on an individual's susceptibility to choking effects, which is contingent on their loss aversion. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the ventral striatum serves as an interface between incentive-driven motivation and instrumental action, regardless of whether incentives are framed in terms of potential losses or gains.
It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental.
People commonly interpret others’ behavior in terms of the actors’ underlying beliefs, knowledge, or other mental states, thereby using their “theory of mind.” Two experiments suggest that using one’s theory of mind is a relatively effortful process. In both experiments, people reflexively used their own knowledge and beliefs to follow a speaker’s instruction, but only effortfully used their theory of mind to take into account a speaker’s intention to interpret those instructions. In Experiment 1, people with lower working memory capacity were less effective than people with larger working memory capacity in applying their theory of mind to interpret behavior. In Experiment 2, an attention-demanding secondary task reduced people’s ability to apply their theory of mind. People appear to be reflexively mindblind, interpreting behavior in terms of the actor’s mental states only to the extent that they have the cognitive resources to do so.
Understanding others' behavior often involves attributing mental states to them by using one's "theory of mind." We argue that using theory of mind to recognize differences between one's own perspective and another's perspective is a deliberate process of inference that may be influenced by incidental mood. Because sadness is associated with more systematic and deliberate processing whereas happiness is associated with more heuristic processing, we predicted that theory-of-mind use would be facilitated by sadness compared with happiness. Two experiments supported this prediction, demonstrating that participants were more likely to utilize knowledge about others to make inferences about their mental states when they were induced to feel sad than when they were induced to feel happy. These results provide both theoretical insight into the psychological mechanisms that govern theory of mind as well as practical insight into a common source of variability in its use.
The authors introduce the construct of I-sharing--the belief that one shares an identical subjective experience with another person--and the role it plays in liking. In Studies 1-3, participants indicated their liking for an objectively similar and an objectively dissimilar person, one of whom I-shared with them and the other of whom did not. Participants preferred the objectively similar person but only when that person I-shared with them. Studies 4 and 5 highlight the role that feelings of existential isolation and the need for closeness play in people's attraction to I-sharers. In Study 4, people with high needs for interpersonal closeness responded to I-sharers and non-I-sharers with great intensity. In Study 5, priming participants with feelings of existential isolation increased their liking for I-sharers over objectively similar others. The results highlight the importance of shared subjective experience and have implications for interpersonal and intergroup processes.
People consider the mental states of other people to understand their actions. We evaluated whether such perspective taking is culture dependent. People in collectivistic cultures (e.g., China) are said to have interdependent selves, whereas people in individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) are said to have independent selves. To evaluate the effect of culture, we asked Chinese and American pairs to play a communication game that required perspective taking. Eye-gaze measures demonstrated that the Chinese participants were more tuned into their partner's perspective than were the American participants. Moreover, Americans often completely failed to take the perspective of their partner, whereas Chinese almost never did. We conclude that cultural patterns of interdependence focus attention on the other, causing Chinese to be better perspective takers than Americans. Although members of both cultures are able to distinguish between their perspective and another person's perspective, cultural patterns afford Chinese the effective use of this ability to interpret other people's actions.
Sontag discusses war and atrocity imagry. "The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images". Meaning and response to a photo depends on words. Photos are useful against an unpopular war but "absent such a protest, the same antiwar photograph may be read as showing pathos, or heroism." Photos help us remember, but not understand. "Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us." "Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image". Images are meant to invite reflection and consideration but "cannot dictate a course of action".
… Scientific work is chained to the course of progress; whereas in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense. It is not true that the work of art of a period that has worked out new technical means, or, for instance, the laws of perspective, stands therefore artistically higher than a work of art devoid of all knowledge of those means and laws — if its form does justice to the material, that is, if its object has been chosen and formed so that it could be artistically mastered without applying those conditions and means. A work of art which is genuine “fulfilment” is never surpassed; it will never be antiquated. Individuals may differ in appreciating the personal significance of works of art, but no one will ever be able to say of such a work that it is ‘outstripped’ by another work which is also “fulfilment.”
Ryle's paper ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ (1945), like chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind (1949), is concerned with how “thinking affects the course of practice,” but the paper treats a more compendious category of practice than the chapter does, and Ryle's arguments are best understood when this is taken into account. I argue that Ryle's central claim in both places was that putting propositional knowledge into practice requires a sort of knowledge that could not itself be propositional. This claim is rejected by those of Ryle's opponents who maintain that propositional knowledge is ascribed whenever someone is said to know how to do something. I argue against their account of ‘know how to.’ And I explain why they might be seen as complicit in a sort of Cartesianism that it was the purpose of The Concept of Mind to trounce.
Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice.
This is the book on knowing how-an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action.
Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in intelligent action? This book contains fifteen state-of-the-art chapters by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that amplify and sharpen the debate between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists about mind and action, highlighting the conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and sustain the conflict. The chapters also explore various ways in which this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice. This is the book on knowing how-an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action.
What does it mean to know another person, and how is such knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge? These questions constitute an important part of what I call ‘second‐person epistemology’ – the study of how we know other people. I claim that knowledge of other people is not only central to our everyday lives, but it is a kind of knowledge that is unlike other kinds of knowledge. In general, I will argue that second‐person knowledge arises from repeated interactions with another person, and that it also requires employment of certain cognitive abilities and a unique kind of second‐order knowledge.
This paper provides the framework for a second‐person epistemology by examining some of our ordinary claims about what it means to know another person. I describe four conditions that typically characterize knowing another person. Then I describe the psychological grounds of knowing a person. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts about the unique symmetries of second person knowledge and the role of such knowledge in our broader epistemological endeavours.
People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. We propose, however, that closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the closeness-communication bias. In one experiment, participants who followed direction of a friend were more likely to make egocentric errors—look at and reach for an object only they could see—than were those who followed direction of a stranger. In two additional experiments, participants who attempted to convey particular meanings with ambiguous phrases overestimated their success more when communicating with a friend or spouse than with strangers. We argue that people engage in active monitoring of strangers’ divergent perspectives because they know they must, but that they “let down their guard” and rely more on their own perspective when they communicate with a friend.
Pairs of friends wrote descriptions of abstract stimuli for one another. Later, each subject attempted to identify the referents of three sets of messages: those created by the subject, those created by the friend, and those created by a stranger for his J her own friend. Subjects were most accurate with their own messages, but, more interestingly, they were more accurate with their friends' than with strangers' messages. The lexical characteristics and content of messages for friends were compared with those intended for a generic ‘other student’ or for oneself in Fussell and Krauss (1989). Contrary to our expectations, friends' messages were similar to those for another student in length, vocabulary distribution, and figurative language use, while both differed significantly from messages for oneself: The findings are discussed within a ‘common ground’ framework for communication.
It makes sense that the more information people share, the better they communicate. To evaluate the effect of knowledge overlap on the effectiveness of communication, participants played a communication game where the "director" identified objects to the "addressee". Pairs either shared information about most objects' names (high overlap), or about the minority of objects' names (low overlap). We found that high-overlap directors tended to use more names than low overlap directors. High overlap directors also used more names with objects whose names only they knew, thereby confusing their addressees more often than low-overlap directors. We conclude that while sharing more knowledge can be beneficial to communication overall, it can cause communication to be locally ineffective. Sharing more information reduces communication effectiveness precisely when there is an opportunity to inform-when people communicate information only they themselves know.
Book description: * Ground-breaking investigation of a key aspect of cognition
* Truly interdisciplinary collaboration between psychologists and philosophers
* International team of highly-respected contributors
Some time around their first birthday, children begin to engage in 'triadic' interactions, i.e. interactions with adults that turn specifically on both child and adult jointly attending to an object in their surroundings. Recognized as a developmental milestone amongst psychologists for some time, joint attention has recently also started to attract the attention of philosophers. This volume brings together, for the first time, psychological and philosophical perspectives on the nature and significance of joint attention. Original contributions by leading researchers in both disciplines explore the idea that joint attention has a key foundational role to play in the emergence of communicative abilities, psychological understanding, and, possibly, in the very capacity for objective thought.
Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To
- Sian Beilock
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping-updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer, and
- Paco Underhill
Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon
- Margaret Gilbert
Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address
- Gilbert Ryle
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind
- Alison Gopnik
- Andrew N Meltzoff
- Patricia K Kuhl
Joint Intention, We-mode and I-mode.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy
- Raimo Tuomela
Less Is More: A Minimalist Account of Joint Action in Communication
- Hadas Shintel
- Boaz Keysar
First Paperback Edition ed
- Ludwig Wittgenstein