The purpose of this workshop is to bring together a small group of researchers who work on the prospective, forward-looking nature of interactional organization: units and constructions that 'prepare the next moment' by enabling and contextualizing particular next actions by self or other. Among conversation analysts, such units are known as 'pre's' (as in pre-face, pre-enactment, etc.), and grammatical constructions, as well as the incremental process of utterance construction itself, have been analyzed for how they facilitate participation in interaction.
The workshop which is part of the research year Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines will be entirely focused on 'forward-looking' features of several bodily modalities: gaze, gesture, prosody, syntax; on general features of human action-design; and on the ways in which embodied behavior, artifact structure (e.g., grammar), and brain processes interact in producing 'projectable' units of embodied action.
Phenomena such as movement synchrony, shared rhythm, collaborative completion, and turn-taking have been explained by reference to neural resonance mechanisms, 'emulators', and 'forward models', or by propensities and capacities for the perception of other human bodies. But the same or similar phenomena have also been explained by reference to the design features of the 'media' and symbolic forms with which we interact: the syntax of natural languages, for example, enables anticipation of trajectories early on during the production of complex, expandable units. Similarly, prosodic patterns can be shaped so as to pre-figure next tones (for example, when pen-ultimate stress pre-figures unit completion). Simply by using the generic resources of the language we provide one another with co-participation and entrainment opportunities; these are opportunities built into the language and used by default, not by virtue of innate abilities at resonance or mind-reading.
To overcome the dichotomy of the two approaches our aim is to understand
(a) innate human 'anticipatory interaction planning' or social intelligence (Goody, 1995);
(b) scaffolding, facilitative, 'forward-looking' aspects of human-made interactional units/forms and practice formats;
and (c) how they are coupled, i.e. how biological adaptations and cultural adaptations work together in the production of 'forward-looking', intelligible embodied human action, i.e. of actions with which others can entrain 'on the fly' and moment by moment?
The participants will
(1) discuss observations and ideas based on concrete, specific examples of forward-looking, next-moment preparing, co-participation-facilitating behavior (or behavioral organization);
(2) use these observations as points of departure for reflections on lessons we might be able to draw about the interplay of biological and cultural history in the arts and crafts of embodied human communication.
