Shared intentionality is a concept in psychology that describes the human capacity to engage with the psychological states of others. According to conventional wisdom in cognitive sciences, shared intentionality supports the development of everything from cooperative interactions and knowledge assimilation to moral identity and cultural evolution that provides building societies, being a pre-requisite of social reality formation.
Knowledge about shared intentionality has been developing since the last century's end. This psychological construct was introduced in the 1980s with a straightforward definition of sharing psychological states among participants without attributing to age when it begins.Gilbert, M. On Social Facts. London: Routledge; 1989Searle, J. R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. London: MIT Press; 1992.Tuomela, Raimo. The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions. Stanford University Press; 1995. The development of knowledge on mother-child interactions has revealed additional attributes about appearing shared intentionality; it showed this capacity enables one-year-olds to study environment.Tomasello, M.; Rakoczy, H. "What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality". Mind & Language, 2003; 18: 121–147. Later, Tomasello et al. specified that, even at birth, infants grasp shared intentionality with caregivers – this ability to share psychological states with others emerges immediately after birth.Tomasello, M.; Carpenter, M.; Call, J.; Behne, T.; Moll, H. "Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2005; 28: 675–691. Tomasello hypothesized that shared intentionality, from the very first emotional exchanges after birth, drives the gradual strengthening of social bonds between children and caregivers.Tomasello, M. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 2019.
In 2022, Michael Tomasello received the David Rumelhart Prize 2022 in the Cognitive Science Society as an award for his insights into cognition evolution and, specifically, the knowledge development about a contribution of shared intentionality to cognition and social reality formation.
The concept is slightly close to collective intentionality. The philosophical notion of collective intentionality defines the capability of collectives to form co-intentions when individuals become jointly directed at objects, matters of fact, states of affairs, goals, or values. This co-intention occurs when two or more individuals undertake an aware task together. It is thought that collective intentionality is the conscious ability of minds to be jointly directed at a goal. It only implies aware intentions–the causal antecedents of action. Only three or four-year-old children, after years of continuous interaction with others, can develop the ability for collective intentionality, which acts as the comprehension of cultural institutions based on collective beliefs and practices.Tomasello, M.; Rakoczy, H. "What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality". Mind & Language, Vol. 18, No. 2, April 2003, pp. 121–147. In contrast, the psychological construct of shared intentionality describes unaware processes during social learning at the onset of life, when organisms in the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not possess abstract thinking.Tomasello, M. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1999. This difference between the two concepts implies the possibility of two different neurophysiological processes underlying their appearance.
In recent years, the psychological construct of shared intentionality is being explored from different perspectives by studying: e.g., the cognitive processes involved in creating and sustaining cooperative group activity, collaborative neuronal activity in inter-brain neuroscience studies,Fishburn, F. A.; Murty, V. P.; Hlutkowsky, C. O.; MacGillivray, C. E.; Bemis, L. M.; Murphy, M. E.; Huppert, T. J.; Perlman, S. B. "Putting our heads together: Interpersonal neural synchronization as a biological mechanism for shared intentionality". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 2018 Aug; 13(8):841-9.Astolfi; L.; et al.: "Neuroelectrical hyperscanning measures simultaneous brain activity in humans". Brain Topography, 2010; 23:243–256.Szymanski, C.; et al. "Teams on the same wavelength perform better: Inter-brain phase synchronization constitutes a neural substrate for social facilitation". Neuroimage, 2017; 15:425–436.Hu, Y.; et al. "Inter-brain synchrony and cooperation context in interactive decision making". Biological Psychology, 2018; 133: 54–62, 2018. and group performance in psychophysiological studies.Atmaca, S.; Sebanz, N.; Prinz, W.; Knoblich, G. "Action co-representation: The joint SNARC effect". Social Neuroscience 2008; 3:3–4, 410–420.Shteynberg, G.; Galinsky, A. D. "Implicit coordination: Sharing goals with similar others intensifies goal pursuit". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011; 47: 1291–1294, ISSN 0022-1031.McClung, J. S.; Placì, S.; Bangerter, A.; Clément, F.; Bshary, R. "The language of cooperation: Shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences; 2017; 284:20171682. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682. However, the nature of the interaction in shared intentionality is unclear, since it occurs even in infants, organisms at the simple reflexes stage of development.
Definitions In classical thought, a definition is a statement of a thing's essence. Shared intentionality is a latent variable that can only be inferred indirectly. The definition of this psychological construct should be carefully considered because the translational impact of research relies on how we define this implicit phenomenon. The definition of shared intentionality should constitute further research directions, e.g., for understanding the neurophysiological processes underlying cooperative targeting in individuals. The study on shared intentionality began by understanding the phenomenon as the ability to enable coordinated, collaborative interactions made possible by a motivation to share mental states. However, because this mutual comprehension of a target succeeds in even newborns, the essence of the phenomenon is unclear. The definition should explain meanings of such a fundamental for this construct constituent as the mode of how this sharing of mental states may occur, considering the age of the organism exhibiting this ability. The initial definition left unclear how infants are able to perceive shared intentionality while they cannot provide communication through sensory cues at the beginning of social learning. Even the essence of a mental state at this developmental stage needs clarification.
Based on recent insights in neuroscience research, a hypothesis of neurophysiological grounds of shared intentionality specified that this collaborative interaction emerges in the mother-child pairs at birth for sharing the essential sensory stimulus of the actual cognitive problem.Val Danilov, I; Mihailova S. "Neuronal coherence agent for shared intentionality: A hypothesis of neurobiological processes occurring during social interaction". OBM Neurobiology 2021; 5(4): 26; DOI: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2104113 This social bond enables ecological training of immature organisms, starting at the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development.
Contributions Shared intentionality is a driver of environmental learning of organisms at the onset of cognition. The significance of this notion is that it defines pre-perceptual communication, which contributes to the assimilation of initial environmental knowledge in the period when organisms cannot communicate through sensory cues. In this stage, organisms are not even able to target; they can show goal-directed behavior in primitive reflexes only. Even a perception of objects cannot appear on its own independently in this developmental stage. The organisms should gain a holistic representation of the environment before beginning perception for then successfully processing the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information. This explanation of shared intentionality significance also yields an analytical reasoning of why it is defined as an unaware interaction in which the immature recipient organism experiences the ability to select the only stimulus that the mature contributor organism is targeting.Val Danilov, I. "Smartphone in Detecting Developmental Disability in Infancy: A Theoretical Approach to Shared Intentionality for Assessment Tool of Cognitive Decline and e-Learning." K. Arai (Ed.): Proceedings of the SAI 2022, LNNS 508, pp. 1–11, 2022. Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10467-1_19 . https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-10467-1_19
An explanation of neurophysiological processes during this initial interaction is intriguing as much as essential since it reveals perspectives for understanding perception and consciousness and even promotes advances in many fields of knowledge, from biomedicine to artificial intelligence. In medicine, evaluation of shared intentionality magnitude in mother-child dyad can contribute to assessing children's cognitive development. Progress in knowledge of underlying processes of shared intentionality can provide management of artificial neural networks of intelligent prosthetic limbs via a bond with the human sensorimotor network. The feasibility of integrating the human brain with a computer shows the way to a new stage in artificial intelligence design.
Neurophysiological hypothesis Nowadays, only one hypothesis tends to explain neurophysiological processes during shared intentionality in integrative complexity from cellular to interpersonal dynamics levels. According to Val Danilov, Shared intentionality emerges in the mother (contributor) and child (recipient) dyad under specific conditions that match the mother-fetus communication model. This model of interaction between closely related organisms is described by the following attributes: (i) social learning in a lack of meaningful sensory interaction between them; (ii) unintelligible stimuli (for the recipient) in a shared ecological context; (iii) a single low-frequency harmonic oscillator.
In the beginning, interpersonal dynamics in these relative organisms maintain the inherited mechanism of social entrainment of the recipient to the contributor's socio-biological rhythm, synchronizing physiological processes in these organisms. Therefore, at the cellular level, a coordination of gamma neuronal activity in each organism occurs in similar separate networks of different subsystems that are relevant to the interpersonal dynamics of these organisms in the specific ecological context.