Interaction and social cognition: A comment on Auvray et al.'s perceptual crossing paradigm

The past few years have seen the emergence of interaction as a central topic within social cognition research. This has involved an increasing interest in the development of ecological, interactive contexts for the empirical study of social cognition, and also in theoretical reflection upon the relationship between interaction and social cognition. One particularly prominent contribution to this trend has been Auvray, Lenay, & Stewart's (2006, 2009) minimalist perceptual crossing experiment (as well as follow-up studies conducted by Di Paolo, Ezequiel, Rohde and Iizuka (2008) and Froese and Di Paolo (2010, 2011a). The experiment provides an elegant illustration of the complexity of the relationship between social cognition and the interactive settings in which it usually occurs, and has proven to be a fruitful basis for the articulation of theoretical options for conceptualizing that relationship. In this contribution, we criticize one particular theoretical option that has recently been advanced by theorists working within the enactivist tradition (e.g. De Jaegher, Di Paolo, & Gallagher, 2010; Froese & Di Paolo, 2010), who maintain that the results of the experiment corroborate the claim that interaction can play a constitutive role in social cognition. We disagree that the results of the experiment support this claim, and defend the more moderate interpretation that the role of interaction in this experiment is best conceived as that of providing scaffolding for social judgments and thereby simplifying the tasks performed by the individual participants.