This made me think of a theme in my own line of work, where we are interested in investigating the principles and ‘units’ of our perceptual representation of the world and our ability to share this with others. Our perceptual apparatus represents the world in terms of separable categories, some of which are ‘innate’, such as the dimensions of color, motion, etc., while others are acquired through sharing them with others.

While a shared language is clearly important for the latter (learning to classify the world and the objects it contains in terms of semantic categories), the sharing would not work without our being able to share attention. In my view, the capacity to take into account the other and his/her perspective (to develop what is referred to as a ‘Theory of Mind’) and to establish ‘joint attention’ sets us apart from non-human primates (though some of these have evolved it to some degree). Just like language, this capacity, while innate, must be developed in childhood, for which the mother-child interaction – e.g., pointing to and looking at objects of common interest – is most important (failure to develop it leads to autistic behavior). And it is elemental, in that it even underpins communication by means of language, which allows us to refer to objects symbolically. In this sense, it is an essential ingredient of the ‘amniotic fluid’ in which linguistic communication – and ultimately also works of literature (novels, poems, etc.) – can take on shape.

While some of these themes have been explored in disparate strands of research (ranging from psychoanalytically inspired investigations of child development to psycho-linguistics), our understanding of these issues may be advanced by a more integrated approach that draws on recent advances in the social-cognitive neuroscience of attention.