Extended cognition and the space of social interaction.

Social cognition may be partly constituted by physical interactions with the environment, not just neural processes. The extended mind thesis, which holds that cognitive processes can include manipulating environmental structures, is applied to social understanding. The author argues that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management—negotiating and managing "we-space"—and that expressive actions like gesture, touch, and facial expressions do genuine social-cognitive work. Drawing on gesture studies, developmental psychology, and Moebius Syndrome research, the paper challenges the Theory of Mind paradigm and suggests that social interaction is a kind of extended social cognition, driven by environmental scaffolding.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The extended mind thesis (EM) asserts that some cognitive processes are (partially) composed of actions consisting of the manipulation and exploitation of environmental structures. Might some processes at the root of social cognition have a similarly extended structure? In this paper, I argue that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management--the negotiation and management of "we-space"--and that some of the expressive actions involved in the negotiation and management of we-space (gesture, touch, facial and whole-body expressions) drive basic processes of interpersonal understanding and thus do genuine social-cognitive work. Social interaction is a kind of extended social cognition, driven and at least partially constituted by environmental (non-neural) scaffolding. Challenging the Theory of Mind paradigm, I draw upon research from gesture studies, developmental psychology, and work on Moebius Syndrome to support this thesis.