Stern’s conclusion, in essence, is that joint visual attention illustrates

130)
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 257
Stern’s conclusion, in essence, is that joint visual attention illustrates that
the infant possesses what I have termed distinguishing psychological selfawareness
relative to the category of perceivers of the environment. Let
me reconstruct the reasoning that might lead to this conclusion. Recall
that we are operating under the constraints of inference to the best explanation,
with parsimony taken as a necessary condition upon the best explanation.
The explananda in one form of joint visual attention are, first,
the fact that the infant’s attention tracks the mother’s attention and, second,
the fact that the infant seeks feedback from the person pointing.
Both of these explananda seem to demand ascribing to the infant a recognition
that the mother (or the experimenter) perceives the world from a
perspective that is different from the infant’s own but that the infant can
learn about by adjusting the focus of his own attention. Unless the infants
do have this recognition, there will be no reason for them to extend their
gaze from the pointing finger to the object to which the finger is pointing
and certainly no reason for them to look back to the mother for feedback.
Built into this recognition on the part of the infant is an awareness of
himself as a perceiver, in particular, as a perceiver who is trying to perceive
what his mother perceives.
The explanatory requirement to assume that the infant is aware of himself
as a perceiver is even clearer in the second form of joint visual attention,
where the explanandum is the infant’s trying to direct another
individual’s gaze to an object in which they are interested. This is a meansend
activity. The infant is trying to bring about the desired end that his
mother look at the object or event in which he is interested. This, of
course, implicates a grasp that his mother is a perceiver. That the infant
also has a concomitant grasp that he himself is a perceiver emerges more
clearly in the means he chooses to bring this end about. In essence what
the infant tries to do is to make the mother recognize that he, as a perceiver,
is looking at a particular object, with the eventual aim that her
recognition that this is what he is trying to do will cause the mother to
look in the same direction.
It is interesting now, and will be helpful in the next chapter, to outline
some representative first-person contents that seem to be implicated in
the best description and explanation of what is going on in joint visual
attention. The first type of joint visual attention (where the infant attends
258 Chapter 9
to an object as a function of where he sees the other’s gaze directed) seems
to require attributing to the infant contents like the following:
(1) The infant recognizes, “Mother wants me to look where she is
looking.”
Or perhaps:
(2) The infant recognizes, “Mother is trying to get me to look where
she is looking.”
In the second type of joint visual attention the direction of fit is reversed:
infants are trying to direct the mother’s attention to an object they are
looking at. Here inference to the best explanation seems to push one toward
something like the following psychological attributions. First is a
desire:
(3) The infant desires, “Mother will look where I am looking.”
But the desire is efficacious in explaining behavior only when combined
with an instrumental protobelief along the following lines:
(4) The infant recognizes, “Mother will look where I am looking if I
look back and forth from her to it.”
Of course, particular explanations in particular contexts may well depart
from these paradigms. But it does seem that central cases of joint visual
attention will need to be explained through the attributions of intentions
and protobeliefs like these.
Joint visual attention is, of course, a form of collaborative activity, and
it is possible to argue that the infant’s efforts in bringing about a redirection
of the focus of the mother’s attention itself presupposes a degree of
distinguishing psychological self-awareness as an agent. The argument
might run, for example, like the following. The infant’s intention is that
the mother’s recognition that he is trying to bring it about that she look
where he is looking, cause her to look where he is looking. If, like many
philosophers of action (e.g., O’Shaughnessy [1980]), one takes the presence
of a trying to betoken the presence of an action, then the content of
the infant’s intention seems to include a recognition of his own agency. I
do not want to put too much weight on this argument, however, as there
is excellent evidence for ascribing to infants a more full-blooded sense
of agency at about the same age. This is evidence from the games and
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 259
collaborative activities that infants engage in with their caregivers (what
some workers in the area call coordinated joint engagement). As before,
I’ll start by briefly reviewing the data and then move on to explain their
implications.
Much of the most interesting work in this area has taken the form of
longitudinal studies that trace the development of a single infant over
time. The data that I want to focus on comes from Trevarthen and Hubley’s
(1978) work with an infant called Tracey. They placed Tracey and
her mother interacting and playing in a darkened and comfortably furnished
room and filmed them unobtrusively from an adjacent room. A
total of 32 visits during Tracey’s first year provided a detailed perspective
on Tracey’s development. The room was equipped with toys, and the experimenters
were particularly interested in the development of different
forms of play. They noted an important transition between 9 and 10
months:
At 40 weeks Tracey’s mother became an acknowledged participant in actions.
Tracy repeatedly looked up at her mother’s face when receiving an object, pausing
as if to acknowledge receipt. She also looked up to her mother at breaks in her
play, giving the indication of willingness to share experiences as she had never
done before. Tracey pulled the cart in by the string, watching it move remote
from her hand. She accepted many changes among coloured beads by her mother,
pausing in her manipulation to look at what was shown to her. She followed when
her mother pointed to a bead while speaking, and calmly accepted removal of an
object without loss of interest in the shared play. At one point she gently moved
her mother’s hand aside so she could get to beads beneath it. When her mother
showed her how to make the wheels of the inverted trolley turn and squeak, Tracey
watched closely and touched the wheels. When her mother eagerly said “Pull
it” Tracey made a move to draw the trolley towards her, but failed because the
string was not taut, at the same time, expecting success, she looked up and smiled
eagerly at her mother. This was clearly a learned anticipation of the pleasure they
usually shared when she did the trick of pulling in the trolley correctly. (Trevarthen
and Hubley 1978, 201–204)
This is a clear illustration of what was earlier termed a triadic interaction,
in which infants employ their interactions with people in their interactions
with objects, and vice versa. In the next few weeks the games Tracey
and her mother played became more sophisticated:
At both 45 and 47 weeks a large transformation in the balance of Tracey’s communications
with her mother was completed, and the effect on her mother was
very great. For the first time Tracey gave a play object happily to the mother when