Joint attention, joint action, and participatory sense making

Developmentally, joint attention is located at the intersection of a complex set of capacities that serve our cognitive, emotional and action-oriented relations with others. It forms a bridge between primary intersubjectivity and secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthan 1978, 1998; Trevarthan and Hubley 1979). Primary intersubjectivity consists in a set of sensory-motor abilities that allow us to understand the meaning of another person’s movements, gestures, facial expressions, eye direction,..