71
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
continuous gradation of communicative intentions make the communicative act
particularly complex, since, on the one hand, it needs a precise cognitive and
emotional direction; on the other, it can give rise to communicative uncertainties
and difficulties.” (pp. 36-37).
So according to the level of social presence experienced by the subjects, they will
experience intentional opacity on one side, and communicative attuning and
synchrony on the other side [109].
3.5.3.1 The layers of Social Presence
The study of infants and the analysis of their ability of understanding and interacting
with people suggest that social-presence-as-process includes three different
layers/subprocesses phylogenetically different, but mutually inclusive [110]:
- proto social presence (the intention of the other is toward the self);
- joint social presence (the self and the other have the same intentional focus).
- shared social presence (the self and the other share the same intention).
As we have seen, presence allows the identification of other intentional selves in the
phenomenological world (there is an other intentional self). From an evolutionary
viewpoint, the more the self is able to understand other selves, the more it is the
possibility of starting an interaction, thus increasing its probability of surviving.
Within this context “Proto Social Presence” can be described as the process
allowing the identification of an interactive intention in other selves (the intention of
the other is toward the self). The more the self is able to identify a communicative
intention in other selves, the more it is the possibility of starting an interaction, thus
increasing its probability of surviving.
As suggested by Reddy [110] infants are aware of the directedness of others’
attention in the first months of life:
“I will argue that mutual attention in the first months of life already involves an
awareness of the directedness of attention. The self is experienced as the first object
of this directedness followed by gradually more distal ‘objects’. This view explains
early infant affective self-consciousness within mutual attention as emotionally
meaningful, rather than as bearing only a spurious similarity to that in the second
and third years of life. Such engagements precede and must inform, rather than
derive from, conceptual representations of self and other, and can be better described
as self-other conscious affects. ” (p. 397).
The role of “joint social presence” is to allow the identification of a common
intentional focus in other selves (the self and the other have the same intentional
focus). The more the self is able to recognize a common intentional focus in other
selves, the more it is the possibility of having an interaction, thus increasing its
probability of surviving.
The first expression of joint social presence appears at the end of the first year of
age as infants are beginning to engage with caregivers in activities that are triadic in
the sense that they involve child, adult, and some outside entity - joint attention -
toward which they both direct their actions. By 12 to 14 months of age, then, the
triadic interactions of child and adult around external entities appear more