Joint attention, joint action, and participatory sense making

Developmentally, joint attention is located at the intersection of a complex set of capacities that serve our cognitive, emotional and action-oriented relations with others. It forms a bridge between primary intersubjectivity and secondary intersubjectivity consists in a set of sensory-motor abilities that allow us to understand the meaning of another person's movements, gestures, facial expressions, eye direction, and intentional actions, in the context of face-to-face interactions. These are the abilities that we first require in order to enter into joint-attentional situations. Once we are in situations of joint attention we are then able to further enhance our understanding of others, in secondary intersubjectivity, by seeing how they use things and how our shared world forms a context for their actions.