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Interaction theory

Interaction theory (IT), also known as the interaction theory of social cognition, is a theoretical framework in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that emphasizes how individuals understand others' intentions, emotions, and actions through direct, embodied, and interactive engagements rather than via inferential processes like theorizing about mental states or simulating others' perspectives.^[1] Developed primarily in the late 2000s as an alternative to dominant theory-of-mind approaches, IT draws on phenomenological and enactive traditions to argue that social cognition emerges from ongoing bodily interactions and perceptual coupling between individuals.^[1] Key proponents, including philosopher Shaun Gallagher and psychologist Shogo Tanaka, highlight that primary intersubjectivity—such as infants' early responsiveness to others' gestures and expressions—persists throughout life as the foundational mechanism for social understanding, without requiring higher-order cognitive precursors.^[1]^[2] Central to IT is the concept of intercorporeality, inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, which describes the mutual perceptual-action loops that allow direct access to others' embodied intentions through synchronized behaviors like mirroring or coordinated movements.^[2] For instance, phenomena such as contagious yawning or rhythmic entrainment in conversations exemplify how social cognition operates via non-conceptual, sensory-motor resonance rather than abstract mental representations.^[2] IT also incorporates Bin Kimura's notion of aida (betweenness), portraying social interactions as emergent systems where autonomy arises from the "in-between" space of relational dynamics, fostering shared meaning without reliance on individual internal states.^[2] This perspective challenges traditional models like theory-theory (TT), which views social cognition as applying folk psychological rules, and simulation theory (ST), which posits offline mental emulation of others, by asserting that such mechanisms only supplement direct interaction when cues are ambiguous or disrupted.^[1]^[2] In developmental terms, IT posits that early intersubjective capacities, evident in infancy through gaze-following and emotional contagion, form the continuous basis for adult social cognition, integrating insights from enactive and dynamical systems approaches.^[1] Applications extend to clinical contexts, such as autism spectrum disorders, where IT suggests impairments may stem from disrupted interactive processes rather than deficits in theory of mind.^[1] Furthermore, the theory has implications for mediated interactions, like virtual reality or touch technologies, by stressing the need to preserve embodied coupling for authentic social understanding.^[3] Overall, IT advocates a second-person perspective—focusing on the relational "we"—to reframe social cognition as inherently participatory and ecologically embedded.^[2]

Introduction and Foundations

Definition and Core Principles

Interaction Theory (IT), as proposed by philosopher Shaun Gallagher in 2001, posits that social understanding emerges primarily from direct, embodied interactions within environmental contexts, rather than through internal mental representations or inferential processes.^[4] This approach emphasizes the participatory nature of social cognition, where individuals engage others through bodily actions such as gestures, eye contact, and shared activities, enabling a direct grasp of others' intentions and emotions without recourse to abstract theorizing.^[1] At its core, IT views social cognition as enactive and participatory, meaning it arises dynamically from the ongoing interplay of agents in second-person interactions, fostering intersubjectivity as the foundational mechanism for understanding others.^[4] It rejects traditional "mindreading" paradigms, which assume that perceiving others requires inferring hidden mental states, in favor of direct social perception where intentions and affective states are apprehended through observable bodily behaviors like facial expressions, postures, and movements.^[1] Intersubjectivity, in this framework, builds on primary and secondary forms as essential building blocks for social understanding throughout life.^[4] IT distinguishes itself from cognitivist models, such as theory-theory and simulation theory, by arguing that social understanding is not dependent on pre-existing internal theories of mind or simulated mental processes but instead emerges from the interactive dynamics of embodied engagement.^[1] Cognitivist approaches prioritize detached, third-person inference, often modeled on solitary cognition, whereas IT highlights how interaction shapes perception in real-time, rendering mentalistic inference secondary or unnecessary for basic social comprehension.^[4] This shift underscores the irreducibly social and contextual origins of knowing others, grounded in phenomenological and developmental evidence.^[1]

Historical Origins

The origins of Interaction Theory lie in the empirical observations of developmental psychology during the 1970s, particularly Colwyn Trevarthen's pioneering research on infant-caregiver interactions. Trevarthen's studies revealed that infants exhibit innate capacities for emotional attunement and coordinated communication with caregivers from as early as two months of age, a phenomenon he termed primary intersubjectivity. This concept highlighted direct, non-inferential forms of social engagement, such as synchronized vocalizations and facial expressions, challenging views of social cognition as solely cognitive or learned later in development.^[5] These developmental insights were complemented by phenomenological influences that emphasized embodied and direct perception in social understanding. In his 1923 work Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (The Nature of Sympathy), Max Scheler argued for empathy as an immediate, intuitive apprehension of others' emotional states, distinct from inference or projection, rooted in the shared structure of human experience. Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 1945 Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception) underscored the body's role in perceiving others' intentions through intercorporeal resonance, where one's own embodied actions enable a pre-reflective grasp of foreign expressions and gestures. Interaction Theory was formally proposed by Shaun Gallagher in his 2001 article "The Practice of Mind: Theory, Simulation or Primary Interaction?", which synthesized these strands into a cohesive framework. Gallagher critiqued prevailing models like Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory for overemphasizing internal cognitive processes, instead advocating primary interaction—enactive and embodied engagements—as the foundational mechanism for intersubjectivity. This positioned IT as a paradigm emphasizing real-time social practices over representational inference.^[4] Subsequent developments expanded IT, integrating enactivist and dynamical systems perspectives. Early extensions connected it to neuroscience and clinical applications, notably in Gallagher's 2004 analysis of autism spectrum disorders, where he explored how disruptions in interactive processes, rather than deficits in mentalizing, account for interpersonal challenges in autism, integrating neuroscientific evidence of altered sensorimotor coupling with phenomenological and developmental perspectives.^[6] By 2020, Gallagher's book Action and Interaction further elaborated IT, emphasizing its implications for understanding agency and social cognition in interactive contexts, as of that year.^[7]

Developmental Aspects

Primary Intersubjectivity

Primary intersubjectivity refers to the innate, pre-verbal form of shared understanding that emerges between human infants and their caregivers from birth through approximately the first two to three months of life, characterized by immediate sensory-motor attunement through facial expressions, gestures, and vocalizations that create a mutual emotional field.^[8] This dyadic engagement allows infants to participate actively in social exchanges, synchronizing their behaviors with those of responsive adults to foster a sense of shared intentionality without reliance on language or symbolic representation.^[9] In interaction theory, this early attunement is viewed as the foundational layer of social cognition, where infants directly perceive and respond to others' affective states through embodied reciprocity.^[5] Central to primary intersubjectivity are key processes such as neonatal imitation, where newborns replicate specific adult gestures, including tongue protrusion and mouth opening, demonstrating an early capacity for cross-modal matching between observed actions and self-generated movements.^[10] However, the existence and reliability of neonatal imitation remain controversial, with meta-analyses finding evidence for the phenomenon but describing it as fragile due to heterogeneity across studies and potential publication bias.^[11] This imitation, observed as early as 12 to 21 days after birth, serves as an initial bridge for interpersonal connection, signaling the infant's recognition of the other's agency.^[12] Complementing imitation, turn-taking in proto-conversations involves rhythmic exchanges of vocalizations, gazes, and facial movements between infant and caregiver, mimicking the structure of dialogue and promoting temporal coordination.^[13] Additionally, emotional contagion arises through mimicry, as infants automatically synchronize their affective expressions—such as smiles or distress signals—with the caregiver's, facilitating rapid sharing of emotional states and reinforcing mutual regulation.^[14] The empirical foundation for these processes stems from Colwyn Trevarthen's 1979 observational studies of face-to-face interactions, which documented infants' heightened responsiveness to live maternal expressions compared to static or taped stimuli, revealing coordinated timing in smiles, coos, and head movements that peak around two months.^[15] These findings highlighted how infants detect and mirror basic intentionality in caregivers' actions, such as directed gazes or expressive intents, through direct perceptual coupling rather than cognitive inference.^[16] Trevarthen's micro-analytic video evidence showed that disruptions in maternal responsiveness led to infant distress, underscoring the role of these interactions in establishing a secure interpersonal foundation.^[5] Within interaction theory, primary intersubjectivity provides the embodied groundwork for later social understanding by enabling direct, non-inferential perception of others' emotions and intentions, thus bypassing the need for theoretical constructs or simulations in early relational dynamics.^[8] This pre-reflective attunement cultivates the infant's innate motivation for companionship, setting the stage for more complex forms of intersubjectivity that emerge around 9-12 months.^[17]

Secondary Intersubjectivity

Secondary intersubjectivity refers to the developmental stage in infancy where interactions become triadic, involving the infant, a caregiver, and an external object or event, centered on shared attention and mutual understanding of intentions. This emerges around 9 to 12 months of age, marking a progression from dyadic emotional exchanges to coordinated engagement with the environment.^[16] Key processes in secondary intersubjectivity include joint attention mechanisms such as following a caregiver's gaze, producing proto-declarative pointing to share interest in an object, and other referential gestures that establish common ground for collaboration. These behaviors enable infants to recognize shared intentions, allowing for cooperative activities like handing over objects or jointly exploring toys. Through these interactions, infants begin to anticipate others' responses to external referents, fostering a sense of mutual purpose.^[16] The empirical foundation for secondary intersubjectivity stems from observational studies by Trevarthen and Hubley (1978), who documented infants at 9-12 months initiating triadic engagements, such as pointing to objects to elicit caregiver commentary, transitioning from purely dyadic formats to those embedded in cultural contexts. These observations highlighted how such interactions support early learning, with follow-up work by Hubley and Trevarthen (1979) illustrating infants' active role in sharing tasks, which predicts later social and linguistic competencies.^[16]^[18] In the context of interaction theory, secondary intersubjectivity extends the sensory-emotional base of primary intersubjectivity by embedding social understanding within the shared environment, thereby laying the groundwork for narrative-like experiences through collaborative meaning-making. This stage is pivotal for cultural transmission, as it facilitates the infant's entry into conventional practices via joint intentionality.^[16] Direct social perception in interaction theory posits that individuals grasp others' intentions and emotions directly through the perception of bodily movements and expressions, without relying on inferential processes or mental representations. This mechanism draws from James J. Gibson's ecological theory of perception, where social affordances—action possibilities inherent in the observed behavior of others—become perceptible in the environmental layout, aligned with enactive approaches to cognition. For instance, the extension of a hand in a reaching gesture affords the intention to grasp an object, allowing the perceiver to attune to these relational properties in real-time interaction.^[19] The processes involved emphasize kinematic cues embedded in movements, such as variations in grip aperture, velocity, and trajectory, which specify underlying goals. Research demonstrates that observers can decode intentions like "grasp to use" versus "grasp to move" from these dynamic patterns in the actor's kinematics, integrating visual information about limb position with proprioceptive and tactile feedback from one's own body. This multisensory integration occurs non-inferentially, as the perceiver's embodied responsiveness to the other's actions enables immediate understanding, bypassing simulation or theory-based inference.^[20]^[21] Theoretically, direct social perception is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeity, which describes the primordial coupling of bodies in shared perceptual fields, where one body's intentional arc resonates with another's without mediation. Shaun Gallagher has defended this view against inference-based models like theory-theory and simulation theory, arguing that social understanding emerges from the direct pickup of expressive bodily forms in interactive contexts.^[22] In interaction theory, direct social perception underpins all intersubjective encounters, from infancy to adulthood, by providing a foundational, unmediated access to others' mental states that interaction processes can then elaborate. This perceptual attunement plays a key role in primary intersubjectivity, facilitating phenomena like neonatal imitation through embodied resonance.^[23]

Narrative Competence

Narrative competence in Interaction Theory refers to the ability to interpret others' actions by situating them within implicit embodied narratives or explicit linguistic stories, which are shaped by personal experiences and cultural contexts. This competency extends beyond immediate perceptual cues, enabling individuals to ascribe complex intentions, motivations, and identities to others in ongoing social interactions. It posits that understanding social behavior involves weaving actions into coherent narrative frameworks that provide temporal and cultural depth to interpersonal exchanges.^[24] The processes underlying narrative competence involve enactive storytelling during interactions, such as role-playing or joint activities, where participants co-construct narratives through embodied gestures and verbal exchanges. In ambiguous situations, narratives serve as scaffolds for attributing intentions, allowing individuals to anticipate long-term goals based on shared cultural scripts rather than isolated observations. For instance, interpreting a colleague's hesitation in a meeting might draw on a narrative of workplace rivalry informed by past experiences, integrating bodily cues like averted gaze with broader contextual stories. This enactive approach emphasizes that narrative understanding emerges dynamically from interactive practices, not from detached mental representations.^[25]^[26] Theoretically, narrative competence in Interaction Theory builds on secondary intersubjectivity, where infants around one year of age begin engaging in shared pragmatic contexts that lay the groundwork for narrative practices. Shaun Gallagher integrates Paul Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity, which views the self as a dynamic configuration achieved through emplotment of actions over time, with Interaction Theory's emphasis on embodied interaction. Ricoeur's framework, particularly in his exploration of how narratives reconcile discordance in human experience, supports IT's view that social understanding involves hermeneutic interpretation embedded in interactive and cultural narratives. This integration highlights how narrative competence develops from early intersubjective engagements into sophisticated tools for social cognition.^[24]^[27] The significance of narrative competence lies in its role as a bridge between direct perception of bodily cues in immediate interactions and the richer cultural contexts that inform long-term social understanding. By incorporating narratives, Interaction Theory accounts for how individuals grasp others' identities and enduring intentions, such as recognizing a friend's loyalty through stories of past support, thereby enhancing empathy and cooperation in diverse social settings. This mechanism underscores IT's enactive perspective, where social cognition is not merely perceptual but actively shaped by participatory storytelling.^[26]^[25]

Theoretical Comparisons

Relation to Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory

Interaction theory (IT) positions itself as a "third way" in the social cognition debates that intensified in the 1990s, offering an alternative to the prevailing theory-theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST) by emphasizing interactive and embodied processes over representational mechanisms.^[28] Theory-theory maintains that social understanding relies on an innate, domain-specific folk psychology module that enables individuals to infer others' mental states from observable behavior, much like applying a scientific theory.^[29] IT critiques this perspective for its overemphasis on theoretical inference and third-person observation, arguing that it neglects the primacy of embodied, interactive practices in everyday social understanding.^[29] Simulation theory, in turn, proposes that people comprehend others by internally simulating their mental processes, using their own cognitive architecture as a model to project and predict mental states.^[28] IT opposes this by asserting that direct perception within interactive contexts suffices for social cognition, rendering simulation an unnecessary and overly mentalistic step.^[29] The core distinctions between IT and the TT/ST frameworks center on IT's enactive orientation, which prioritizes dynamic bodily engagement and rejects the representationalist assumptions underpinning both TT's modular inferences and ST's simulative projections.^[1] Gallagher (2001) bolsters these arguments with evidence from autism, where impairments in primary intersubjectivity—such as difficulties in emotional reciprocity and imitation—account for social deficits more comprehensively than deficits in theoretical or simulative capacities alone.^[29]

Integration with Enactivism and Embodied Cognition

Interaction Theory (IT) aligns closely with enactivism by conceptualizing social cognition as an enacted process arising from dynamic interactions between agents and their environments, rather than internal representations. This perspective echoes the foundational enactivist view that cognition emerges through sensorimotor coupling and action-oriented engagement, as articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in their seminal work on the embodied mind. In IT, social understanding is similarly portrayed as participatory and co-constituted in real-time interactions, extending enactivism beyond individual cognition to intersubjective domains. A key integration occurs through the concept of participatory sense-making, which posits that social sense-making arises from the mutual modulation of autonomous agents during interaction, creating shared meanings that transcend individual contributions. De Jaegher and Di Paolo's framework complements IT by emphasizing how coordination in social encounters—such as rhythmic entrainment or joint attention—fosters emergent social realities, aligning with IT's emphasis on direct perceptual access to others' intentions via embodied practices. This enactive extension underscores IT's rejection of spectator-like theories of mind in favor of interaction as the primary site of social cognition. IT further incorporates embodied cognition by highlighting the inseparability of body, environment, and social perception, where understanding others involves sensorimotor contingencies and affordances shaped by bodily coupling. Gallagher expands this in his analysis of action, arguing that social agency emerges from embodied interactions embedded in normative contexts, integrating insights from phenomenology and cognitive science to show how bodily practices enable direct grasp of others' actions.^[30] This approach critiques disembodied models, positing that social norms and cultural practices are enacted through bodily-environmental loops, as seen in everyday gestural and linguistic exchanges. Recent developments from 2020 to 2025 have deepened IT's ties to 4E cognition—encompassing embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended dimensions—through interdisciplinary applications in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Reviews of Gallagher's 2020 monograph highlight its role in bridging IT with 4E frameworks, demonstrating how social cognition extends beyond the skin to include tools, institutions, and collective dynamics.^[31] Gallagher's subsequent work, including his 2023 contribution to embodied and enactive approaches and his 2024 book on the self and its disorders—which explores self-patterns with intersubjective elements in psychiatric contexts—further elaborates these connections, positioning IT as a unifying lens for understanding cognition as distributed across interactive ecologies, with implications for fields like robotics and developmental psychology.^[32]^[33] Looking ahead, IT offers transformative potential for rethinking agency and social justice by framing them as interactionally constituted, informed by critical theory's focus on power and recognition. Gallagher contends that autonomy and ethical responsibility arise not from isolated individuals but from participatory practices that negotiate norms and inequalities in social encounters, providing tools to address systemic injustices through embodied solidarity.^[30] This interactional lens encourages interventions that prioritize relational dynamics, such as in education or policy, to foster equitable agency in diverse contexts.

Empirical Evidence and Criticisms

Supporting Studies

Empirical studies since the early 2000s have provided substantial validation for Interaction Theory (IT) by demonstrating how social understanding emerges through direct, embodied interactions rather than solely through internal inference processes. Developmental research, in particular, highlights the foundational role of primary and secondary intersubjectivity in infants, supporting IT's emphasis on real-time perceptual coupling. In the domain of primary intersubjectivity, studies on infant imitation offer key evidence. Meltzoff's 2007 framework posits that newborns and young infants imitate facial gestures, such as tongue protrusion, because they perceive others as "like me" in body and intention, establishing an immediate intersubjective connection without requiring representational theory of mind.^[34] This imitation, observed as early as 42 minutes after birth and persisting into the first year, underscores direct bodily resonance as a mechanism for social cognition, aligning with IT's view of perception-action loops in early interactions.^[35] For secondary intersubjectivity, joint attention experiments reveal how infants coordinate attention with caregivers around 9-12 months, facilitating shared intentionality. Tomasello's 2008 analysis of developmental trajectories shows that human infants, unlike great apes, engage in triadic interactions—such as following a gaze to an object and then checking back with the adult—building cooperative communication through enacted joint goals.^[36] These behaviors, tested in controlled settings with pointing cues, demonstrate that social understanding arises from participatory sense-making in interaction, rather than solitary mental simulation, thus bolstering IT's interactional core.^[37] Neuroscientific evidence further corroborates IT by reinterpreting mirror neuron activity within interactive contexts. Gallagher's 2012 reconceptualization argues that mirror neurons, initially discovered in macaques and humans, support direct perception of intentions during ongoing interactions, not offline simulation.^[38] For instance, fMRI studies in the 2010s have shown activation in premotor and parietal regions when observers perceive intentions embedded in observed bodily actions, such as grasping with varying goals, indicating that intention understanding is coupled to the kinematics of movement.^[39] This aligns with IT's claim that neural resonance enables real-time social attunement, as evidenced by enhanced activity in social brain regions, including the inferior frontal gyrus, in dynamic, interactive scenarios compared to static observations.^[40] Interactional studies extend this support to mediated and clinical contexts. A 2022 investigation into haptic technologies for social touch demonstrates that mediated interactions, such as vibration patterns simulating embraces, foster affective coupling through reciprocal dynamics, where participants co-regulate touch meaning in real-time, outperforming inferential models in evoking emotional responses.^[3] In autism interventions during the 2020s, embodied approaches emphasizing sensory-motor engagement have shown efficacy; for example, a 2025 drawing therapy program grounded in embodied cognition improved emotional expression and social behaviors in autistic students by leveraging multisensory bodily actions to reconstruct cognitive-social links, with pre-post assessments revealing significant gains in social connectivity (implying aspects of joint attention) and self-concept.^[41] Recent evidence from 2020-2025 addresses gaps in enactive interactions within virtual settings, showing that immersive environments can replicate IT's principles. A 2024 systematic review of enactive virtual reality (VR) for creative learning found that interactive simulations promoting sensorimotor coupling—such as collaborative virtual tasks—enhance social understanding and empathy, with participants reporting heightened intersubjectivity comparable to face-to-face interactions.^[42] These findings indicate that VR's embodied affordances support direct social perception even in digital realms, bridging IT to contemporary technological applications.

Critiques and Limitations

One prominent critique of direct social perception within interaction theory (IT) posits that it underestimates the role of inferential processes in more complex social scenarios, where immediate perceptual cues alone may not suffice for understanding others' intentions. Raphael van Riel argues that while basic social perceptions can be direct, advanced intersubjective understanding often requires additional cognitive inference, challenging IT's emphasis on unmediated access.^[43] Furthermore, critics contend that IT's heavy reliance on embodiment risks overlooking abstract thought processes that operate independently of bodily or interactive contexts, potentially limiting its explanatory power for non-perceptual social cognition.^[44] Regarding scope limitations, IT has been faulted for struggling to account for solitary cognition, where social understanding occurs without real-time interaction, as the theory prioritizes enactive, embodied engagement over internalized or reflective processes. Proponents of simulation theory (ST), such as Alvin Goldman, have specifically criticized IT's capacity to handle scenarios involving false beliefs, arguing that ST's offline simulation mechanisms better explain attribution of mental states that diverge from observable actions. Additionally, cultural variances pose challenges, as IT's focus on universal perceptual interactions may not fully capture how diverse cultural norms shape social understanding, with evidence showing cross-cultural differences in attentional biases and relational inferences during social exchanges.^[45] Empirically, IT faces challenges from a relative scarcity of longitudinal studies prior to 2020 that track the developmental trajectory of interaction-based social cognition over time, hindering assessments of its long-term robustness. Recent reviews from 2021 to 2025 highlight the need for broader empirical validation beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples, noting that much supporting research relies on homogeneous populations, which may inflate generalizability issues in diverse global contexts.^[46] In response to these critiques, Shaun Gallagher has defended IT in his 2020 monograph by advocating for hybrid models that integrate direct perception with complementary inferential and narrative elements from other theories, allowing IT to address complex and abstract cases without abandoning its core enactive commitments. Gallagher further argues that such integrations enhance rather than undermine IT's emphasis on embodied interaction as foundational to social understanding.^[30]

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