Glossary


Affect attunement: affective accompaniment in
tune with the other's activity, such as voiced
by mothers when watching the infant child
playing. Daniel Stern, who introduced this term,
asked mothers in an experiment to overplay or
underplay their accompaniment (which some of them
found difficult). When the mother made herself
get out of tune, the child would stop playing and
turn to look at the mother.




Allocentric map: term used by John O'Keefe to
distinguish place-oriented memory in animals such
as rats (involving hippocampus), determined by
where they had been in the landscape, and
independent of the direction of their gaze, i.e.
transcending the view-orientation linked to
egocentric body coordinates of the animal.




Altercentric: term introduced by Stein Bråten to
characterize the other-centered perception and
mirroring of movements which he has identified in
human infants in face-to-face situations, for
example when they reciprocate the spoon-feeding
to which they have been subjected, reflecting the
opposite of egocentric perception of the
caretaker's feeding.




Altercentric participation: ego's virtual
participation in Alter's act as if ego were a
co-author of the act or being hand-guided from
Alter's stance. This is sometimes unwittingly
manifested overtly, for example, when lifting
one's leg when watching a high jumper, or when
opening one's own mouth when putting a morsel
into another's mouth, and differs from
perspective-taking mediated by conceptual
representations of others.




Alteroception: term introduced by Colwyn
Trevarthen for infants' direct perception of
others' body orientation and movements
(corresponding to our innate capacity for
perceiving own body orientation and movements in
proprioception), and used by Stein Bråten to
define the mirror reversal entailed by
altercentric perception in face-to-face
situations as inverted alteroception.




Autopoiesis: term (composed of the Greek terms
for self (auto) and production (poiesis)),
introduced by Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela to characterize the self-productive
organization of a living system, such as the cell
or the individual organism, involving processes
interlaced in the specific network of production
of components which realizing the network that
produced them constitute the system as a unity.
In a modified sense the term is used by Niklas
Luhmann to characterize the social system, such a
social organization or a society, as
communicatively closed, reproducing itself and
the components that constitute it by internal
communication, maintaining its boundary in a
self-referential way.




Behavioural re-enactment design: developed and
used by Andrew Meltzoff in experimental studies
of intention reading in infants who upon watching
the model attempt a target action, such a pulling
a dumbbell-shaped object apart, re-enact by
pulling it apart.




Baldwin effect: stressing mechanisms of learning
by imitation, supplementary to the process of
natural selection of which they are a genetic
product, Baldwin (1895) proposed that such
mechanisms reflect back on genetic evolution and
speed it up by producing an even more favourable
population distribution.




Chirality: term (from the Greek word for
'handedness') for the (a)symmetry found in
nature in structural pairs of semblant forms in
which one is a mirror image of the other. This is
illustrated by the relation between the left and
the right hand (only if one of them is reflected
by a mirror do they become identical in form),
and believed by Bråten to apply to the
structural relation between the brain systems
that support the bodily self and virtual other,
enabling mirroring of actual others.




Circular reaction: term introduced by J. M.
Baldwin to characterize circular self-imitation
in the infant who takes pleasure in repeating
activities found pleasurable.




Circular re-enactment: imitation involving the
other -- actual or virtual. While the infant's
virtual other is involved in self-imitative
circular reaction, the same operational format is
posited to apply when imitating others, i.e. what
the infants has experienced doing with an actual
other, the infant will attempt doing with the
infant's virtual other.




Companion space: term used by Bråten,
Kugiumutzakis, and others to denote the
intersubjective phenomenological space of mutual
awareness between two participants, in which the
bodily self perspective is complemented by a
companion perspective -- actual or virtual --,
enabling transformation in the same operationally
closed format in these two cycles:


(i) engagements with actual others who fill the
companion space;


(ii) self-engagement (with one's virtual other)
re-enacting the format of (i)..




Double video(replay) technique: experiment
designed by Lynne Murray to test the adult and
infant reactions when each unwittingly is faced
with a replay of the partner from a previous live
sequence of happy protoconversation, when
interlinked by monitors and loudspeakers.




Emotional memory: term used by Joseph LeDoux for
emotional processing and "storing" in brain
systems and pathways bypassing the neocortex,
based inter alia on his studies of fear
conditioning in rats. Maintained by subcortical
circuits, emotional memories may be indelible.


E-motional memory: composite term (combining the
folk sense of being 'moved by' and the root
sense 'out-of-motion') proposed by Stein
Bråten for the procedural memory of having
co-enacted -- virtually or actually -- the
goal-directed movements of others, evoking in the
learner shared vitality affect contours and
inviting circular re-enactment in similar
situations.




Evoked companion: term used by Daniel Stern for
an internal other-representation, evoked in the
child's self-dialogue and in engagements with
actual companions.




Felt immediacy: the mode of directly perceiving
own or others' body movements and orientation
in presentational immediacy, as in proprioception
and alteroception, differing from perception in
re-presentational mediacy that is mediated by
symbolic and conceptual distinctions.




Intersubjective communion: mutual engagement
between subjects who consensually attend and
attune to one another's emotive states,
expressions and gestures in a prereflective and
nonverbal mode of felt immediacy. Discovering
such reciprocal and motivated occurrences in
early infant-adult interplay, Colwyn Trevarthen
terms this primary intersubjectivity,
distinguished from the stage of secondary
intersubjectivity when objects of joint attention
are brought into play (at around nine months of
age), precursory to verbal communication.




Learning by altercentric participation:
imitational learning by Ego's virtual
participation in Alter's act from Alter's
stance as if Ego had been facing the same
direction or been hand-guided, and which in
face-to-face learning situations entails
perceptual mirror reversal of Alter's
enactment, giving rise to shared temporal
vitality (affects) contours, reflecting the
manner in which the enactment is felt to be
virtually co-enacted and the feeling that directs
the co-enactment, enabling circular re-enactment
from e-motional memory of such virtual
co-enactments.




Mimetic culture: term proposed by Merlin Donald
to characterize the patterns of imitational
transfer and creative re-enactment that may have
distinguished the Homo erectus culture from the
previous stage of primate patterns relying on
episodic memory.




Mirror neurons: neurons that fire at the sight of
another individual's performing an act, for
example of grasping a morsel, discovered in the
macaque monkey brain by Giacomo Rizzolatti and
his group, and suggested by other studies to be
operative in a 'mirror system' also in the
human brain, involving the Broca's area which
not only support speech but is also involved in
hand rotation and imagination of hand rotation
(cf. Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998).




Model power theorem: the conjunction of the
simulation version of theory of mind and the
Conant-Ashby theorem (every good regulator of a
system must be a model of that system) implies in
certain conditions the following: if you regard
the other as the source of the only valid model
of a domain D and try to overcome your
subordination, in a closed interaction situation
of decision-making on D, by adopting the
other's model, you thereby enhance the
other's control by giving him the power to
simulate even your simulations (Bråten 1973c).




Presentational immediacy: term introduced by A.N.
Whitehead to distinguish such a primary mode from
cartesian modes of representational mediacy (cf.
also felt immediacy).




Protoconversation: term introduced by Mary C.
Bateson on the basis of her analyses of filmed
infant-mother interplay to denote the way in
which such interplay already in the second month
of life had some of the characteristics,
including turn-taking, of a verbal conversation.




Secondary intersubjectivity: term introduced by
Trevarthen and Hubley to distinguish the stage
(around nine months of age), when the infant is
motivated to join the other in a shared
object-recognition inviting co-operation in
object-oriented task performance, from the stage
of primary intersubjectivity (in the first months
of life) in which there is mutual
subject-to-subject orientation, with little or no
shared object-orientation..




Theory of mind: the social-cognitive ability to
imagine or simulate others' minds and emotions
(the simulation version) or to draw inferences
from a theory of other minds (the theory
version), attributed by to children by 3 or 4
years of age (see for example contributions in
Astington, Harris and Olson (eds. 1988) and in
Whiten (ed. 1991)).




Thomas theorem: proposed by W.I. Thomas to this
effect: if one defines a situation as real, then
it becomes real(ized) as a result.




Virtual Other (Virtual Alter): an innate
non-specific companion perspective postulated by
Stein Bråten to complement the bodily self
perspective with the operational efficiency
(virtus) of an actual companion perspective, and
inferred to enable alteroception and altercentric
mirroring.




Vitality Affects: term introduced by Daniel Stern
to distinguish from categorical and discrete
emotions (such as surprise, anger, etc.) the more
subtle and continuous life feeling flow
accompanying activities, including shared
activities.




Vitality Contour: term introduced by Daniel Stern
for the temporal contour of feeling flow patterns
with a characteristic intensity time-course of
vitality affects reflecting the manner in which
an activity has been enacted and the feeling that
directs the enactment.




1 See also pertinent definitions in the glossary
in Children with Autism (Second edition) by
Trevarthen, Aitken, Papodi & Robarts (Jessica
Kingsley 1998:313-330), and in The Present Moment
in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life by Daniel N.
Stern (Norton 2004:241-247). Scandinavian readers
may also be referred to the glossary in Stein
Bråten: Kommunikasjon og samspill fra fødsel
til alderdom (Tano Achehoug 1998:272-284; Dafolo
Forlag: 272-282; Universitetsforlaget
2004:304-318), og Dialogens speil i barnets og
språkets utvikling (Abstrakt Forlag
2007:313-323).