They played with one of Tracey’s toys,

when
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asked to do so. They played with one of Tracey’s toys, a rattle with a clear plastic
globe, and a ball inside it. The globe could be unscrewed from the handle to take
out or put in the ball. When the ball was offered to Tracey she promptly put it in
the globe, and when her mother assembled the two parts she eagerly shook it. . . .
Then Tracey’s mother rolled a cloth ball to her saying, “Ready, steady, go!” Tracey
caught it in two hands and grinned delightedly banging the table with both hands
and the ball, and looking up at her mother’s face. As her mother held her hand
out palm up to receive the object saying, “Where’s the ball?”, Tracey hesitated a
moment and, distracted by the sound of someone entering the room to the side
away from her mother, turned to hold out the ball to the visitor. Her mother
continued, “No, here: over this side.” Tracey looked at her mother’s hand, quickly
reached to give her mother the ball, looked to her face and smiled. “Thank you!”
said the mother, and Tracey gave a triumphant vocalization and hit the table.
(Trevarthen and Hubley 1978, 204–205)
Other longitudinal studies (Bakeman and Adamson 1984) have found
similar patterns in infant development.
As Trevarthen and Hubley’s descriptions make clear, coordinated joint
engagement clearly involves (and indeed presupposes) joint visual attention.
Therefore, coordinated joint engagement requires distinguishing
psychological self-awareness relative to the category of perceivers. What
is distinctive about it, however, is that it also implicates distinguishing
psychological self-awareness relative to the category of agents. The pleasure
that Tracey takes in the various games is not just pleasure at her own
agency (in the way that, for example, many infants show pleasure in the
simple ability to bring about changes in the world like moving a mobile)
but pleasure at successfully carrying out an intention—a form of pleasure
possible only for creatures who are aware of themselves as agents. When
the intention that is successfully carried out is a joint intention (as it is in
several of the games described), the pleasure shared with the other participant
reflects an awareness that they too are agents.
As we did with joint visual attention, let us look at the details of some
of the contents that appear to be implicated in the best explanation of
coordinated joint engagement. If we are trying to explain why infants take
such pleasure when they succeed in various tasks or games, the natural
explanation would involve something like the following attribution:
(5) The infant recognizes, “I have succeeded in what I intended to do.”
Similarly, when the task or game is a cooperative one, the content of the
intention is first-person plural rather than first-person singular:
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 261
(6) The infant recognizes, “We have succeeded in what we are trying
to do.”
Of course, in cooperative games (like the game that Trevarthen reports
Tracey and her mother playing with the cloth ball) a vital part of what is
going on appears to be each party’s recognition of the other’s intentions.
Thus the Tracey manifests intentions with the following content:
(7) The infant recognizes, “Mother wants me to give her the ball.”
It is clear from these specimen contents (again, all first-personal) how
coordinated joint engagement implicates distinguishing self-awareness
relative to the category of agents. All three contents involve the infant’s
awareness of herself as an agent, and (6) and (7) combine this with an
awareness of the mother’s agency.
So the well-documented phenomena of joint visual attention and coordinated
joint engagement in infants during the last quarter of the first
year provide excellent examples of social interactions for which inference
to the best and most parsimonious explanation requires ascribing to the
infants in question distinguishing psychological self-awareness relative
to the psychological categories of perceiver and agent. Of the three
strands of distinguishing self-awareness identified earlier in the chapter,
this leaves only the third undiscussed: awareness of oneself as a bearer of
reactive attitudes relative to a contrast space of other bearers of reactive
attitudes. Once again, the crucial period of infant development that starts
at around 9 months of age presents a striking example of social interactions
for which the best explanation requires attributing to the infants
involved precisely this type of distinguishing self-awareness. The crucial
stage is the emergence of what developmental psychologists call social
referencing.
The essence of social referencing is the regulation of one’s own behavior
by investigating and being guided by the emotional reactions of others to
a particular situation. In its typical manifestation in infancy, the infant
will come across a puzzling or perhaps intimidating situation and will
look toward his mother for guidance. His subsequent behavior will be
influenced by his perception of her emotional reaction to the situation.
Like coordinated joint engagement, social referencing presupposes joint
visual attention: not only do both mother and infant have to be attending
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to the same features of the situation for social referencing to take place,
but the infant has to be confident that he has successfully captured his
mother’s attention if he is to trust her reactions. Social referencing, therefore,
clearly implicates distinguishing self-awareness as a perceiver. It is
richer than joint visual attention and coordinated joint engagement because
it opens up the emotional and reactive dimension of self-awareness.
Like joint attention and joint engagement, however, the self-awareness
emerges in the context of cooperative and interactive behavior into which
the infant enters to cope with a world of unfamiliar and often alarming
objects and people.
I will cite only one study to illustrate the phenomenon of social referencing:
Klinnert et al. 1983. It is particularly interesting because it employs
the experimental paradigm of the visual cliff cited in chapter 5 as
an important example of how infants are capable of picking up selfspecifying
visual information almost immediately after birth. Recall that
the visual cliff is a table made of clear glass and divided into two halves.
On one of the two halves a chequered pattern is placed immediately below
the surface of the glass to create an appearance of opacity, while a
similar chequered pattern is placed at a variable distance below the surface
of the other half to create the appearance of a sudden drop-off. What
Klinnert et al. discovered is that 12-month-old infants clearly employ
social referencing when they reach the drop-off point as they try to cross
the tabletop to their mother. They look down at the deep side and then
across to their mother. The mother was in each case instructed to adopt
a predetermined facial expression (either fear or happiness). The results
clearly showed that the infants registered and responded to the mother’s
emotional reaction to the situation. Of the 19 infants whose mothers
smiled, 14 crossed the deep side, while of the 17 infants whose mothers
showed fear, none crossed the deep side to the mother.
What conclusions can be drawn from social referencing? The explananda
are that the infants look towards their mothers for guidance when
they encounter a surprising or alarming event like the visual cliff and that
the mother’s facial expression is highly effective in determining their subsequent
behavior. Explaining the first of these clearly requires attributing
to the infant a comprehension that his mother reacts to things and events
in the same way that he does, that she also finds events surprising or