Abstract for Rosie Karin-D'Arcy

Just learning to pay attention to others yields a great deal of cognitive currency.  Learning to engage in joint attention may be the key to human social learning mechanisms such as teaching and imitation. I will present a model which links human socio-cognitive processes through the mechanism of attentional coordination.  Next I will present a methodological framework for the comparison of attentional interactions across situations and species.  Through this method, we may find that the emergence of the human socio-cognitive environment may be as simple as the level of attentional coordination attained by its constituents.