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G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)
From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com
processes, the more it is able to identify the present moment and its current tasks,
increasing its probability of surviving.
Finally, the role of “extended presence” is to verify the significance to the self of
experienced events in the external world (self relative to the present external world).
The more the self is present in significant experiences, the more it will be able to
reach its goals, increasing the possibility of surviving. Extended presence requires
emotionally or culturally significant content.
3.5.3 From Presence to Social Presence
The development of the self also leads to the recognition of the “other” as “another
intentional self”. This requires a specific neuropsychological process (social-
presence-as-process) tracking the behavior of the other to understand his intentions.
In fact, naked intentionality allows infants to detect intentionality - they recognize
that an intention is being enacted - but neither to detect the content of the other’s
intention - they do not recognize which specific intention, or set of intentions is being
enacted - nor to identify the motives of such content - they do not recognize why the
specific intention, or set of intentions is being enacted.
So, social presence is described here as a defining feature of self allowing the
detection of the content and motives of other’s intentions. Without the emergence of
the sense of social presence it is impossible for the self to develop a theory of mind
allowing the comprehension, explanation, and prediction of behavior and, in general,
the management of the social interactions.
As for Presence, we distinguish between social-presence-as-process and social-
presence-as-feeling. The social-presence-as-process is the continuous activity of the
brain in identifying intentions within the perceptual field. So, it can be described as a
sophisticated form of monitoring of the others’ actions transparent to the self but
critical for its social abilities. As we have seen previously, this process is based on
covert imitation: an automatic action emulator, tracking the behavior of other subjects
in real time to generate perceptual predictions [71, 83].
Social-presence-as-feeling is instead the non mediated perception of other’s
intentions. The concept of social-presence-as-feeling is similar to the concept of
“intentional attuning” suggested by Gallese [69, 108]: our capacity to prereflexively
identify with others. In fact the social-presence-as-feeling is not separated by the
experience of the subject but it is related to the quality of our social interactions. In
fact, a higher level of social-presence-as-feeling is experienced prereflexively as
empathy and communicative synchrony.
The self experiences reflexively the social-presence-as-feeling only when the
quality of his experience is modified during a social interaction. More in detail, the
self perceives directly only the variations of social-presence-as-feeling.
As underlined by Anolli [92] intention does not constitute by itself an "on-off"
process, but it is characterized by an articulated graduation and differentiation within
itself:
“First of all, in everyday life, intentionality is regulated by continuous variations of
intensity and precision. This intentional gradability allows communicators to
manage the focusing of different communicative acts during everyday
life... Moreover, a single communicative act can be governed by a plurality of
intentions, embedded in each other and hierarchically organized. Such a choice and