Beyond Single‐Mindedness: A Figure‐Ground Reversal for the Cognitive Sciences

Abstract

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that *See Author Notes for author affiliations.

The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds

“…Will the present generation of interaction science finally realize its promise as a generative research program? We believe that there are reasons for optimism this time around—a sentiment shared by an increasing number of researchers (e.g., Dingemanse et al, 2023; Higgins et al, 2021; Redcay & Schilbach, 2019; Shteynberg et al, 2023; Wheatley et al, 2019), who believe that this research will reshape our understanding of cognition “not as the province of singular minds but as an interactional achievement of embodied agents” (Dingemanse et al, 2023, p. 2).…”

Backchannels in conversations between autistic adults are less frequent and less diverse prosodically and lexically

“…Third, recent research suggests that many social difficulties experienced by people on the autism spectrum might, in fact, be due to neurotype mismatches (arising in interactions with non-autistic people) rather than any inherent cognitive 'deficits' or 'impairments' (Crompton et al, 2020;Morrison et al, 2020;Rifai et al, 2022). This perspective reflects a growing (and perhaps overdue) broader awareness that analyses of interaction, rather than of isolated minds, should be at the core of cognitive science, linguistics and related disciplines (Dingemanse et al, 2023).…”

A high-density diffuse optical tomography dataset of naturalistic viewing

“…Finally, fNIRS facilitates real-world applications including imaging during face-to-face interaction (Hirsch et al, 2020). These advantages make fNIRS well suited for studying cognition in context (Thomas, 2023) that includes social interaction (Dingemanse et al, 2023).…”