Joint Attention: Normativity and Sensory Modalities

Joint attention is typically conceptualized as a robust psychological phenomenon. In philosophy, this apparently innocuous assumption leads to the problem of accounting for the “openness” of joint attention. In psychology, it leads to the problem of justifying alternative operationalizations of joint attention, since there does not seem to be much which is psychologically uniform across different joint attentional engagements. Contrary to the received wisdom, I argue that joint attention is a social relationship which normatively regulates the attentional states of two or more individuals. This social account of joint attention leans on Bart Geurts’ view of communication as commitment sharing. Its promises are: (i) to explain the role of joint attention in wider joint activities, including communicative interactions; (ii) to account for how playing this role requires individuals to deploy different psychological resources on different occasions; and (iii) to identify the rationale behind alternative operationalizations of joint attention.