Glossary

  • Gaze following
    Directing one’s own attention to the direction of another’s gaze (overtly, through eye movements or head turns, or covertly through a shift of spatial attention).
  • Intentional stance
    Predicting or explaining others’ behaviour with reference to their mental states such as beliefs, desires and intentions.
  • Joint attention
    The triadic coordination between at least two individuals and their focus of attention, wherein the individuals attend to each other and also to the content of their attentional focus, thus sharing attention. It is an essential component of the ability to infer mental states of others, and helps establishing a common social context.
  • Joint action
    Social interaction whereby two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the environment (Sebanz, Bekkering and Knoblich, 2006).
  • Mentalising
    Explaining a particular behaviour with reference to a specific mental state.
  • Spatial perspective taking
    Adopting the spatial perspective of another person observed in the scene.
  • Turing test
    Test to evaluate the ability of an intelligent system to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme by the European Research Council (ERC) grant [No. ERC-2016-STG 715058] InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement awarded to Prof. Agnieszka Wykowska. Additionally, some studies closely related to InStance are supported by internal funds from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT).
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