Infant Intentionality as Object Directedness: An Alternative to Representationalism

Mind Knowledge in the First Year: Understanding Attention and Intention

“…As has been shown, debates abound around these issues, with counterarguments positing, plausibly, that most of these cases of apparent infant inference of mentality could be explained by the infant's perception of observable differences in others' actions and either a reflexive or a complex associationist reaction to them (see, e.g., Perner, 1991, on explanations of social referencing and protodeclarative pointing, and Gomez, 1993, on the representational similarity of protodeclaratives and protoimperatives). Infants may indeed be perceiving the Mind Knowledge in the First Year 257 object directedness rather than inferring the goal of the adult's actions (see Vedeler, 1991, for a discussion of this distinction in infant intentionality following Merleau-Ponty). Similarly, they can indeed be anticipating and responding to perceived adult actions to targets of attention rather than inferring mental states.…”

Infant intentionality as object directedness: A method for observation*

“…The scorings of these two variables were made independently of each other (i.e., at different runs of the tapes), but they are certainly dependent upon each other in the sense that they focus to a large extent on the Same phenomenon. Instead of regarding them as two independent measures they should rather be seen as complementary, thus following Vedeler (1991) arguing that attention to the object and coherent motor behavior toward the object are the two primary aspects of object directedness.…”

“…As to the other measure of intentional infant behavior, Degree of Intentionality, reliability measures will be given for the two components of the measure, Intensity of Attention and Behavioral Coherence, as well as for the Degree of Intentionality as such (i.e., the sum of the two component scores). This measure is the most important part of the method developed here, and derives from the theoretical arguments presented by Vedeler (1987Vedeler ( , 1991. As a computational method, the intraclass correlation @' ) will be used, in order to check for observer bias (Suen & Ary, 1989, p. 120, 132).…”

“…Instead of relating the intentional action to a future state of affairs to be realized through the action, they relate it to a specific piece of environment, as an already existing goal, as it were. Vedeler (1987Vedeler ( , 1991 proposes that the point can be clarified by relating the concept of intentionality, as used in infant research, to the philosophical concept. In philosophy intentionality is generally considered as a property of mental phenomena, and of consciousness, namely to be about something.…”

“…Based on the views of Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty on the relationship between organism and environment, Vedeler (1987Vedeler ( , 1991 has proposed that infant intentionality be defined in terms of behuuiorul object directedness, rather than in terms of goal directedness. This view makes the fact that behavior normally is perceived as either intentional or not compatible with the idea that the basis for this perception is a quality of the behavior that varies along a continuous scale.…”