Integrated Cognitive Development Theory

Background

My undergraduate degree was in Linguistics. I studied Relevance Theory under Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston at University College London. I’ve since been trying to apply my knowledge of pragmatics (or at least to keep it in mind) in my work as a children’s speech and language therapist. About half of my 15 years as a SALT has been spent working with children with autism. This work is dedicated to them, and to Relevance Theory, as it is born out of my attempts to reconcile my understanding of the two.

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Introduction

The Integrated Cognitive Development Theory (ICDT) provides a framework for understanding how child cognitive development unfolds. It identifies two short periods of highly accelerated growth in cognition and consciousness in early childhood, and shows how these are the result of the integration of specific types of information in the brain.

Both of these integrations are focused on what the theory calls the social domain. The social domain is a proposed single structure in the brain that exists in response to anthropogenic sensory stimuli. It comes to compose our understanding in relation to people, and the things people do. It is also the linguistic and semantic hub of the brain.

Integration

To understand our world, we must operate with grand representations that hold information about huge numbers of interdependent goal-directed actions. Integration is our response to the level of informational complexity in the representations that we need to manipulate to succeed in the world.  

The more complex the system of information in the environment that we find ourselves unable to action, the bigger the scale of the integrative effort it will inspire.

Forms are not directly ‘stitched’ to one another in the brain. The ICDT proposes that integration in the brain is ‘sandboxed’ within the executive resource. Derivative scans of knowledge structures are related to one another here, and the functionality of a combined understanding can be simulated.

A highly complex system of information in the environment will bring about an enormous disparity in functionality and complexity between a developing ‘sandboxed’ knowledge structure and the base structure itself. This gives the brain a kind of undo functionality, up until the moment of ‘publication’.  

The executive resource

The executive resource, under the ICDT, is formed of a recursive scanning process of knowledge structures.

A structural scan affords a ‘three-dimensional’ understanding of that structure. It is an internal semantic map that shows where certain aspects of meaning are concentrated, and how aspects of meaning connect and coactivate. It is a history of all the ways that a structure has ever activated, as well as a semantically condensed copy of that knowledge structure.

Picture the executive resource as a super-librarian that not only knows where every book is located, but who understands the content of each book and how it relates to all others in the library.

Because of the semantic ‘density’ of the executive resource, executive engagement brings the activity of a knowledge structure into the core of our consciousness.

The child can apply this second-order form of knowledge during processing, using it as a kind of ‘zoom tool’ for integrative loci, and as a catalyst for the integrative process.

Semantic overload

If information in the environmental stimulus cannot be handled directly by a knowledge structure, the executive resource records second-order information about the manner in which that knowledge structure, and all other relevant knowledge structures, were activating at the time.

In the analogy, the librarian keeps a record of the difficult questions asked by lenders, as well as the books that those lenders were checking out as they asked their question.

In this way, the executive resource comes to host a system of knowledge about semantic overload – a repository for instances where a knowledge structure fell short of meeting the informational complexity in the environmental stimulus, alongside the contextual and emotional metadata associated with these instances. This is termed the ‘internal relational concept’ in the integrative process.

Relational concepts

The informational challenge inherent in the internal relational concept is then met in two ways. Within the internal relational concept, new connections and understandings are trialled. If these usefully handle complex forms of information (and in the case of the scanned social domain, if they increase the predictive ability of the scanned structure) they are adopted and further developed.

Meanwhile, other knowledge structures in the brain (including scanned knowledge structures) are expressing representations that constitute responses to the informational challenge. These are systematised as the ‘external relational concept’. In the case of the integrations affecting the social domain, this comes in the form of personal conceptual insights, along with the outcomes of a process of self-monitoring and self-referencing.

These relational concepts grow in complexity and explanatory power as they are compiled together in the executive resource, which acts as a kind of ‘sandbox’ for the integrative process.

Sandboxing

Putative consolidations of knowledge structures are trialled executively before being pushed to the knowledge structures themselves. Where an integrative effort is a response to a highly complex form of information in the environmental stimulus, the ‘development time’ can be surprisingly long, and the update, when it comes, can be generational.

As the two relational concepts commune during the integrative process, the executive resource records the manner in which the parent concepts will need to be reformatted to achieve the level of integrated function it has been simulating.

Publishing

When an optimal level of integrated function has been simulated executively, and the proposed structure is found to be adequately explanatory of the system of information that inspired it, the updates are pushed to the parent concepts. This is what is meant by ‘integration’ in the ICDT.

By respecting the perceived level of complexity of a system of information in the environmental stimulus in this way, the child mitigates the risk of inadequate knowledge structures themselves being integrated with other knowledge structures.

‘Direct’ integration – experience becoming knowledge

Under the ICDT, when a knowledge structure activates in response to a signal in the environment, it expresses a phenomenological representation. Forms of information in the environmental stimulus that are coherent with the system of knowledge in the structure that they activate are integrated into that knowledge structure before the executive role can meaningfully be engaged.

As such, the entire process of resolving experience (‘phenomenal consciousness’, as per Block) into formal objects of thought (Block’s ‘access consciousness’) is an integrative one

Executive resource – further observations

Subconcepts

As the executive resource interrogates knowledge structures, it resonates their activation across all relevant semantic axes and planes. It works out which semantic  perspectives present an interesting or useful ‘take’ on what the structure can represent, and it duly takes them. Under this view, a subconcept is simply the effect of a concept being activated, in the same general manner, quite a lot.

Recursive scanning

Since structural scans are also semantic structures, they can themselves be structurally scanned. These scans synthesise into a kind of narrative of how integration has shaped knowledge structures over time. Recursive scans afford increasingly more abstract forms of knowledge.  

All of these higher-order forms of knowledge are accessible alongside the actual or basic semantic expression of a structure, during thought, in a manner that enriches and enhances the conclusions we draw and the decisions we make.

It is through this process of continual self-structural analysis that the executive resource shifts from being the cartographer of the brain, to the navigator of the brain.

Cognitive development as consciousness development

Integration is one of two drivers of cognitive development in the brain, which the ICDT understands as different types of growth in a child’s consciousness.

1. Broadening – channelling out into the reaches of what it is possible to process through a logical development of a single knowledge structure.
2. Centring –  achieving an optimum level of integration in how information is processed across multiple knowledge structures.
   
   

Integrative timeline: 0-12 months

Motor-sensory integration

At first, all the baby has is her sensory impression. This she must organise if she is to form a useful understanding of her world. As a part of this, she must work out which stimuli she herself has a role in producing, via her movements, which stimuli are externally agentive, and which are happening inside her body.

Through personal forms of activity, the baby’s sensory impression and her motor competence come to be integrated into a coherent motor-sensory process. This delineates her role in the physical world and speaks to her consciousness with a strong, single voice. Now, as she explores, her experience of the world and her experience of acting within the world are ‘as one’ to her.

Encapsulation of anthropogenic sensory stimuli

Certain types of sensory stimuli are not included in this early integration of sensory and motor processes. Aspects of sensory information that relate to an anthropogenic (or animate) source are experienced and processed by the social domain, which will compose an understanding of goal-directed action and the people and objects involved in it.

Neurobiological research has noted this division of sensory data, in respect of the visual sense, in its distinction between the ‘ventral’ and ‘dorsal’ streams that project from the visual cortex.

The ventral stream connects with the parietal lobes, where the information allows the child grasp the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of an object. Under the ICDT, it is this information that is integrated with the child’s motor competence to bring about the motor-sensory process.

The dorsal stream projects from the visual cortex to the temporal lobes, where it is understood to enable the child to grasp the ‘what’ of an object. Under the ICDT, the dorsal stream of visual information is systematised at the temporal parietal junction, where it resolves, alongside the other ‘dorsal’ sensory streams, into the baby’s social domain.

During co-regulation, the activity in the social domain is central to a baby’s consciousness. At other times, it delivers a somewhat disconnected sense of ‘who’s doing what’ to the baby. During familiar activities (e.g., bathtime or meal times) the social domain co-activates with the baby’s ‘first person’ motor-sensory understanding of these activities. These dual activations are analogous to one another in a way that isn’t yet apparent to the child.

The ‘mirror neuron’

Babies copy observed movements (of the hands, arms, legs and articulators) via relays that connect the social domain with their motor centres. Movements of others, as represented in the social domain, correspond closely enough with the format of the baby’s own motor plans to enable the former to come to inform the latter. This enables the baby to build motor competence by mirroring motor forms found in the social representation. The baby’s higher cognitive functions (i.e., the conceptual understanding that the baby applies alongside her own actions, as well as her understanding of the goal-oriented behaviour of others) do not have a part in it.    

Under the ICDT then, the ‘mirror neuron’ effect is explained as being the result of the early integration of the motor component of the social representation with her motor centres. The relays start out fuzzy and faint, giving the earliest socially-incited movements a jerky quality. This abates as the pathways to motor enrolment become more firmly established.

As the child’s conceptual understanding firms up, they make use of a more sophisticated form of this relay to self-reference during the observed activity of others, in a way that is elucidative of the intentions and feelings of the people the child is observing.

Conceptual integration with the motor-sensory representation

Having achieved motor-sensory integration, the baby has been starting to apply and develop her conceptual understanding during her explorations, further enriching her ‘first-person’ understanding of the world.  

As her first year comes to an end, and her understandings, desires and expectations insinuate themselves more and more into her movements, the baby’s actions become more goal-oriented.

Conceptual-motor-sensory representations that relate to goal-oriented behaviour mirror the argument structure around intention and action inherent in the representation of the social domain. Additionally, both representations are framed within a context of action. The representations are equivalent enough that the child can start to systematically relate them to one another, one context of action at a time.

Two caveats

This timeline will go onto foreground the integration of social knowledge with the child’s personal understanding of intention and action in a way that suggests no overlap between this and a prior integration of the child’s conceptual insights with their motor-sensory process. On the contrary, in the sandbox, relatively enriched social knowledge interacts with relatively enriched personal conceptual knowledge, compared with the base knowledge structures themselves.

The child does not ‘wait’ for all of her conceptual insights to be applied to the motor-sensory process before engaging her social processing. Integrations are simply published as soon a system of knowledge is sufficiently actionable in respect of the informational challenge that inspired it.

Incorporating a full understanding of these overlapping integrations is conveniently outside of the scope of the ICDT, which focuses on the way the social domain responds to information in the environment.

Secondly, it must be noted that the integrative timeline laid out in the ICDT is an exercise in generalisation. Individual children can significantly vary from these averages due to genetic, environmental, and individual factors.

Integrative timeline: 12-24 months

The 12 month-old baby is becoming aware of informational interactions between the conceptual-motor-sensory representation, framed within a context of action, and her background understanding (from the social domain) of ‘what people generally do at this point, in this context of action, and why’.

As the baby relates the representations, an informational function is identified: aspects of her reflections (on personal motivations and on how intentions are realised into actions) interact usefully with the knowledge she has been building around the instances of semantic overload within her social domain.

This leads the child to begin to self-monitor for such during personal activity. Additionally, through her conceptual-motor-sensory relay, she self-references while observing other people’s experiences. The insight that she derives from these introspections gradually coalesces as the external relational concept in the primary integration of the social domain.

The internal relational concept in this effort (‘internal’ in that it relates only to the knowledge structure that is dealing with information it cannot process) is her scan of the social domain, laden as it is with pockets of semantic overload, and the tentative connections she is beginning to propose to balance things out. 

What she is effectively doing is constructing a workable theory of personal motivation in action – an understanding of agency, intention and outcome within contexts of action, as well as a deep understanding of those contexts of action themselves, and how they relate to one another. This is summarised below as a ‘theory of action’.

Example

A 12-month old baby is watching her mum write a letter at the dining room table. Her mum makes a mistake towards the end. She exclaims in frustration, tears off the sheet of paper, screws it up and throws it in the bin. She settles herself, and starts to write the letter again.

The baby observes that her mother’s focus of activity is on the stick she is holding. She observes her mum’s sudden mood shift, and the way she screws something up and throws it in a container. She then observes her mum return to the original task, with a new version of the original materials. 

A mature understanding of her mum’s actions would include an understanding of:

• The overall context of action. This is a network of enmeshed understandings about pens, paper, envelopes, addresses, stamps, the postal service, her mum, written communication, communicative actions, and possibly the person she is writing to and the message she wants to impart.
• Mum’s feelings and intentions that led to the primary activity.
• Mum’s feelings and intentions that led to the secondary activity (i.e., destroying the thing she was working on).
• The nature of the thing she threw, and the container she threw it into.
• How the secondary activity related to the primary activity.

Consider the aspects of this experience that the baby is able to make sense of (i.e., integrate with existing knowledge), and the aspects that she cannot.

Probably, all the baby understands is something like:

• Mum is engaged in some form of focused activity that involves the materials in front of her.
• The thing she is holding seems to be similar to a crayon, and she is using paper.
• She has a desired outcome in respect of these materials.
• Her feelings during the activity are usually neutral – she is absorbed in the task.

The outburst elucidates things to a certain degree.

• This focused activity went wrong. When it went wrong, it upset mum.
• It is possible to have multiple tries at achieving an outcome.

These observations may be very real to the baby, but they are isolated observations that are not part of a coherent and predictive theory of action, and as such the experience cannot be integrated directly with the social domain.  

What the baby doesn’t integrate into her social domain goes into her repository of semantic overload in respect of the social domain. This contribution is systematised, alongside all of the other mysteries of human behaviour that she has observed, as the internal relational concept. Together, it presents an informational challenge that everything external to the social domain will come together to meet.

When the baby next finds herself failing to achieve a desired outcome in respect of a set of materials, or just when she is using her crayons, she will note the harmony between the contexts of action, and begin to supply and systematise some answers to this network of puzzles and questions that has arisen out of the interaction of complex forms of information about goal-directed activity in the environmental stimulus with her social domain.

These specific new answers include information about how people feel, and what they do, when plans go awry, and conceptual insights into the nature of writing and writing implements. They will suggest to the child a deeper understanding of her mother’s context of action, including a deeper and more composed understanding of objects such as ‘rubbish’ and ‘bin’. Thanks to the new answers, the two sides of the relational concept are functionally harmonised, to a degree, and the simulated social domain finds itself a little more aligned towards the informational complexity in the environmental stimulus.

Publishing

With enough of this kind of experience, the two relational concepts come to operate together as a predictive model of goal-directed action. The complexity of the simulated social domain is a match for the informational complexity in the environmental stimulus. This optimally workable theory of action is then pushed through to the social domain.

It is this cognitive evolution that led Piaget to begin his preoperational stage at 24 months, although the ICDT plots this moment at somewhere between 18 and 24 months. The impact is sudden and dramatic.

The social domain is enriched with the child’s personally-derived insights into why they (and people in general) act in the way they do – what they are feeling and thinking before, during and after goal-directed action. Their understanding of all contexts of action, and how they relate to one another, is similarly enhanced.

New skills

Applied in respect of an individual contact (i.e., a particular personal subconcept), this knowledge gives the child enhanced ‘people processing powers’.

Now, by querying her social domain, in respect of a given person, in respect of a particular moment within a specific context of action, the child is able to produce a snapshot of what that individual might be thinking, feeling or planning. She finds that she is free to associate these ‘second-order representations’ with her own first-order representations (or thoughts). This opens the child up to socially mediated learning, and to forms of co-operative activity where semantic content is framed and developed within a shared context of action (the manner in which the first order representations of collaborators cohere).

It also enables her to understand (and eventually to plan) how her actions and words impact the mental environment of other people.

The self-subconcept

The primary integration of the social domain leads to the formation of the self-subconcept ME within the social domain. Here, an understanding of ‘how I operate within the world and how I feel while doing it’ is filtered out of the content of the relational concepts. It is given the same characteristics as the other personal subconcepts, boiled down and simplified a little in the process, giving rise to an understanding of ‘who I am’, and ‘what I do’ within the social realm.

This avatar is woven in with the tapestry of the social domain, entwining with the narratives of action that deeply connect the child to her cherished relations. This enriches her engagements with those who are significant to her, fostering kinship as it confirms a deep understanding of ‘how things are’ and ‘who we are’.

Just as she can with other personal subconcepts, the child can use ME to predict how she might approach, and how well she might perform in, a context of action that she has not acted in before. She can compare this with a background understanding of how people might approach this context of action. In this way, it helps her prepare and prime herself for new experiences.

As will be discussed later in this document, the child uses ME to gauge her place in the world, and to drive herself on towards new achievements and understandings. Additionally, she is sensitive to any perceived growth or diminishment in other people’s personal subconcepts that share a referent with ME.

Integrative timeline: after the primary integration of the social domain

The relational concepts that came together during the primary integration of the social domain continue to have a separate character and role. The internal relational concept continues to document semantic overload affecting the social domain. The external relational concept continues to look for answers through introspection. When small mysteries are solved, small updates are made to the social domain.

After the primary integration, the child comes to consciously recognise that her communicative actions – in both their intent and execution – can influence the mental states of others. She observes other people actively doing so as well.

She does not have a system of understanding around communicative action that is sophisticated enough to optimally meet this complex system of information, and so a new network of mysteries starts to build up with the resultant accumulating semantic overload. This prompts the child to adopt a reflective stance during (and subsequent to) her interactions, and while mirroring the feelings of others in interaction.

Through this introspective process, she puts together an understanding of the operational role within communicative contexts – her reflections on the motivations behind communicative actions, and the manner in which a speaker can modify the interpretive frame of an interlocutor. The ICDT calls this a ‘theory of communicative action’.

This she weaves in with the relational concepts. Confrontational communicative actions become semantically linked with aggressive and shocking forms of action. Supportive communicative actions become semantically linked with gentle and generous forms of action.

Examples

In interaction, a five-year-old will be making a wide range of seemingly disconnected observations about communicative actions. These she must systematise, develop and then elucidate, through a process of introspection and experimentation. Several examples of semantic overload are described here, so as to show the enormous scope of the theory she must build.

Unexpected emotional reactions

The child observes her mum receiving bad news over the phone. Her mum tries to maintain composure and puts on a brave face, forcing a smile, but the child notices a quiver in her voice and a brief furrowing of the brow – subtle signs of distress.  

This challenges the child’s expectation of congruency between felt and expressed emotions. It leads the child to consider the manner in which communicative contexts contain one another (i.e., the context of the phone call is embedded within a broader context of maintaining composure, e.g., in front of a child).

Irony / sarcasm

Mum, returning from work, makes a sarcastic comment about a mess in the kitchen, saying “Oh, I just love coming home to a disaster zone.” The child notices her older siblings laughing. Her mum’s words seem to express an unlikely satisfaction with the situation, her tone of voice is weird, and her siblings’ relaxed responses don’t seem to relate to the encoded message either.

Here the child is grappling with irony and sarcasm. This is where the belief that underlies an utterance cannot authentically be attributed to the person who is expressing it. The listener conjures up a character who might feasibly hold such a belief, as part of the utterance interpretation process, and then attributes the belief and utterance to them.

The child cannot fit an interpretation of her mum’s expression around her expectation of her mum’s beliefs about the kitchen, so she finds herself abstractedly wondering ‘who is saying these words?’ She notes that her siblings found humour in her mum’s expression, and she senses that the situation has been diffused a little.

She will need more evidence before she can develop a workable understanding of the kind of communicative artifice that allows someone to say something they don’t mean, and for others to see humour in such a form of expression.

Nonverbal communication in conflict resolution

The child observes her dad, who is driving her home from school. He pulls out into a road that is busy with slow-moving traffic. He edges in front of a car that hasn’t actively given way to him. The driver of that car beeps his horn and keeps edging forward. Her dad bows his head and holds up an arm, with a somewhat pained expression on his face. The child sees the other driver relax and stop inching forward, making room for their car.

This scenario highlights the role of nonverbal cues in communicative actions for the child, who understands that her dad has successfully defused the situation by communicating his regret to the other driver. She notes the exaggerated nature of her dad’s gestures, and wonders whether this is a function of the entirely nonverbal nature of the interaction.

Indirect requests

Dad walks into the lounge and says “It’s getting pretty chilly in here, isn’t it?”. The child’s older sibling gets up and closes the window that he had opened earlier.

Here, the sibling who opened the window infers an expression of displeasure and a request to fix things from his dad’s statement about the environmental condition of the room.

To see how these inferences can be drawn, the child must understand the full nature of the intention of her dad’s communicative action within the fullest understanding of the context of communication.

The effect of the social context

At a large family function, the child observes her older brother behaving differently than he does usually – he is speaking more clearly and formally than he does at home, he is engaging in somewhat exaggerated active listening behaviours, and he is talking about things that she wouldn’t usually find him talking about.

With this information about how our communicative actions must be tailored to the social context, the child is filling in her social rulebook, deriving an understanding of different forms of communication and how these are required in different communicative contexts.

Republishing

When this new system of knowledge is optimally workable, it is reintegrated into social domain. This takes place at the age of around 7 or 8.

Five years seems a long time for a child to be building a theory of communicative action, when it took her less than two years to build a theory of action from a standing start. This reflects several factors.

• The environmental stimuli (social cues) that help us understand and predict people’s communicative actions are subtler and more ephemeral than the environmental stimuli that help us understand and predict people’s actions.
• The system of knowledge is a great deal more complex. For example, communicative contexts are more nuanced and less stable than contexts of action, and the child’s theory must incorporate an understanding of how these contexts modulate during interaction.
• In wealthy societies, it may be that the relaxed character of the social environment around the child permits them to defer the secondary integration of the social domain, while they engage in extended spells of theorising and hypothesis testing. The simulated theory of communicative action that they are developing, while semantically ‘fuzzy’, is adequate for their purposes. In other societies, where children may be involved in more critical interactions (e.g., negotiations) at a younger age, the call in the environmental stimulus for a workable theory of communicative action is greater, meaning that a less complete update is pushed through earlier.
  
  

New skills

Upon the secondary integration of the social domain, the personal subconcepts are enriched in respect of this implicit system of language awareness.

The child’s insight into communicative forms of action, filtered through to a specific personal subconcept, helps her reconstruct the communicative intentions of that individual as they express themselves. In effect, it enables her to recognise the third-order representation within the second-order representation. Now the child is ready to adopt an anticipatory modelling approach to utterance interpretation.

The social domain

Scope

The social domain records and synthesizes the following:

• The child’s emotional and sensory impression of interaction with their various contacts – what they look like / smell like / sound like to the child, how it feels when they touch the child, and how it feels when they connect with the child.
  • With this, the child comes to understand the identity of their contacts, and what those people mean to them.
  • Since the social stimulus includes words, the social domain becomes home to the child’s lexical, phonological and speech-motor knowledge.
• The child’s observation and understanding of the goal-directed actions of others. For this, they are looking for and linking together the following:
  • The earliest ‘tells’ of an intention (e.g., going quiet, looking away, looking at a person, looking at an object, reaching for an object, raising an eyebrow, changes in facial expressions, changes in tone of voice, and so on).
  • Any subsequent action taken by that individual, and the ‘meaning’ or function of any objects within that course of action.
  • Any outcome (and how the individual experiences the outcome).

This means that our understanding of people is embedded in a system of meaning about goal-directed action. This system of meaning provides the backdrop for our lexicon.

People aren’t actions. This much is evident. However, we define people and their actions using the same semantic object. The only thing that changes is the scope the executive resource applies as it inspects the social domain.

Personal subconcepts

To grasp the essence of someone involves unravelling how our experiences and emotional bonds with that person have sculpted our social understanding. Like any understanding, the encoded information in the social domain is enriched by derivative forms of knowledge in the executive resource.

The social domain is the seat of the baby’s emotional and hormonal experience of others. People with whom the baby has extensive experience of co-regulation will have personal subconcepts that glow with the nurturing warmth of the oxytocin their actions stimulated.

People who have acted in a way that the baby has found surprising, confrontational or threatening will have personal subconcepts that echo with the effects of the cortisol their actions stimulated.

Just as an individual subconcept has a certain emotional valence for the child, their entire social domain has an overall emotional valence.

During the significant integrative phases at 18-24 months and again at 7-8 years, the format of the child’s social representations is crystallised, to a degree. It is during these critical junctures that the emotional flavour of their social representations and personal subconcepts is most strongly imbued. These periods are pivotal in determining the level of coherence between different types of representations in the brain.

If these major integrations are disrupted, or when emotional experiences leading up to these periods are predominantly negative, it can lead to the child’s socially-mediated cognition (being founded on instability, fear, or misunderstanding) having a character that sets it aside from the rest of the child’s cognition.

This type of ‘two-tone consciousness’ hinders a child’s ability to process and integrate new social information effectively, and impacts their social functioning and emotional well-being.

Flexibility of personal subconcepts

When we encounter situations that challenge our preconceived notions about someone, something of the structure of their personal subconcept, at that moment at least, is revealed to us.

For example, a child’s perception of their teacher is typically confined to the school environment. When this teacher is encountered in a context outside of school, like a local shop, the child is forced to reconcile this new information with their existing subconcept of the teacher. This unexpected situation triggers a reassessment process, as the child grapples with the realization that their teacher’s life extends beyond the classroom. Such moments underscore the flexibility and the sometimes rigid boundaries of our social understanding, revealing the depth of the social domain’s influence on our perception.

In time, we come to apply general notions and understandings to our contacts, but they can often still find ways to surprise us.

How personal subconcepts relate to one another structurally

Personal subconcepts related to individuals with similar behaviours or belonging to similar social categories (e.g., school friends, parents’ friends, younger children) are semantically linked. The shared emotional textures underlying these representations help us consolidate them.

Individuals who hold more significance in our lives occupy a more central position in our cognitive map of social relations. The manner in which people relate to one another must also be represented somehow.

People who induce stress responses and those who provide warmth and connection occupy opposite ends of the cognitive-social spectrum, with this almost certainly having a physical correlate in the arrangement of the social domain.

The social domain’s evolution after its primary integration

With the formation of self-concept, the social domain expands its functional reach. It transitions from mostly passively providing an essence of ‘who is doing what’ to become an active framework that children use to navigate their social environment. The child who projects her understanding of personal motivation in action onto others can engage more deeply with the social world. The child’s enriched social domain informs her about the probable future actions and reactions of others, and empowers her to plan her own actions with an anticipatory understanding of social dynamics.

The social domain is not static. It evolves with us, shaping and being shaped by our interactions, emotions, and overall cognitive development. It is both a record of our social journey and a tool we use to navigate forms of action and interaction.

Executive calls on the social domain (personal scope)

The social domain serves as a cognitive framework allowing individuals to consider, compare, and update their understanding of themselves and others within their social environment.

In respect of a particular personal subconcept (X, Y and ME are referenced below), the executive resource can inspect the social domain in such ways as to derive multivarious representations, including the following:

• General Capacity Evaluation (X^G): This represents a broad assessment of an individual (X’s) ability to function in the world, based on their actions and interactions as perceived and understood by the observer. It provides a baseline understanding of a person’s competencies and limitations.
• Context-Specific Capacity Evaluation (X^C): An evaluation of an individual’s capacity to operate within a specific context of action.
• Capacity Update (X^C to X^C1): Observing a new or improved approach by an individual leads to an update in the context-specific capacity evaluation (X^C), becoming X^C1. It will prompt a re-evaluation of the individual’s capabilities within that context, and if the update reflects either a witnessed innovation or a new exposure to an approach, the update can potentially be adopted by the person observing that update.
• Comparative Analysis: The social domain allows for ad-hoc generation of personal subconcepts for comparative analysis, which can include:
  • Comparing an individual’s general capacity (X^G) against an average capacity benchmark (AH^G) based on age, gender, experience, or social background.
  • Making comparisons between two individuals’ capacities within a given context (X^C vs. Y^C) or comparing someone else’s capacity with one’s own (X^C vs. ME^C).
• Mental Environment Snapshots (X^SC): This involves capturing time-bound mental snapshots of an individual’s mental state during goal-directed activities, offering insight into their intentions, actions, and outcomes.
  
  

Action subconcepts

The comprehension of goal-directed actions comes out of the executive resource taking a contextual scope in its engagement with the social domain.

For the executive resource, the social domain is a dynamic semantic hub that integrates our encounters and observations into a web of understanding. It is physically closer to the executive resource than any other large semantic store in the brain, it covers a huge semantic scope (essentially ‘everything that matters to humans’) and it does so in an exceptionally neuronally dense manner.

It is here that a child’s encounter with a multitude of cups transforms into a deep, layered understanding of “cupness” informed both by direct interaction and observed use within social contexts. It is this understanding of a cup that allows us to see it as a potential hat, or as a means to bail water out of a sinking boat.

While the variety among people’s interactional histories lends a certain amorphous quality to the social domain along the personal axis, its structure is decidedly more ordered along the contextual axis. This axis delineates a progression from the inception of an intention (Point A) to the culmination in an outcome (Point B), embodying a universal structure shared among all individuals.

The social domain, being a predictor of future actions and mental states, allows us to preactivate and prime potential personal actions within a given context. This context-sensitive anticipatory activation helps us respond quickly, efficiently and appropriately to environmental stimuli.

How complex actions are experienced by the social domain

Complex actions unravel as sequences of passes across the contextual axis of the social domain, each step laden with intention and leading to iterative outcomes that mark progress towards the complete expression of the phenomenological representation within its full context of action.

Consider the actions of a dad who is retrieving a toy from a taped up box. His child is clamouring for the toy. We will observe how the context of action modulates as the actions unfold.

• The full context of action (the child wants a specific toy, dad intends to retrieve the toy for the child, the toy may be in a cardboard box, the cardboard box is tightly sealed with tape, tools are available to support the action of opening the box) will reveal itself to the dad as he acts within his perception of this context of action.  
• The dad shakes the box, listening for the sound of the object inside. This action narrows the context away from the desires of the child to the dad’s specific interaction with the box, as he focuses on achieving auditory confirmation of the toy’s presence.
• Having confirmed that the toy is probably inside the box, the dad acts within an adjacent narrow context of action, focusing his activity onto the tape sealing the box, attempting to pick it off with his fingernails. Unsuccessful in this endeavour, he will have to convolute the context of action.
• A journey to the kitchen to fetch a pair of scissors introduces an adjunct, ancillary context of action, which incorporates the environment (tools available in the kitchen) in a way that the dad anticipates could facilitate success within the previous context of action (opening the box).
• Scissors in hand, their functional profile complements the previous context of action (dad’s struggle with the tape) in exactly the way the dad had anticipated it would.
• With the box opened, the dad acts within a wider context of action as he gives his child the toy. The full phenomenological representation that is framed by overall context of action has been expressed in his social domain.  
• While the retrieval of the toy achieves the initial objective, it also loops back round to become an intention within a new context of action (e.g., the dad supporting the child to use the toy).

Each step in this sequence represents at least one pass through the social domain, from intention (A) to outcome (B). The context of action continually modulates – narrowing during focused interactions, broadening as certain outcomes are realised,  and becoming more convoluted as new elements or challenges are incorporated.

If the toyless child’s 12 month-old sibling were sitting back and observing the activity, they might initially be unable to resolve the connection between the trip to the kitchen and the matter at hand. The sibling observer is engaged in a dynamic process of cognitive mapping and re-evaluation. Each step taken by the adult serves as a piece of the puzzle that the sibling is trying to solve: Are these actions connected? If so, how, and how do they lead to the ultimate understood goal of retrieving the toy?

The observed trip to the kitchen prompts the sibling to consider broader contexts that could link this behaviour to the goal of opening the box. As their dad returns with the scissors, the sibling reassesses the situation, recognising the tool’s place in the overall context of action.  

Through this process, the sibling not only learns about the specific steps involved in retrieving a toy from a taped box but also begins to abstract the underlying principles of tool use, problem-solving, and the modulation of action contexts. These principles enrich their understanding of how actions are connected within and across contexts.

The phenomenological representation of this extended sequence – a coil of interconnected actions and contexts – enriches the individual’s action knowledge within the social domain. This complex representation, though specific in its details, is semantically equivalent to simpler acts of retrieving objects from containers.

Encounters with analogous challenges in the future will trigger the activation of these snippets of enriched action knowledge, allowing for a richer understanding. Still, until they are part of a coherent theory of action that fully accounts for the perceived informational challenge in the environment, the enhanced processing they afford will be sandboxed.

The structure of the social domain across the contextual axis laid bare in certain forms of behaviour and experience

As all intentions happen before their linked outcomes, stimulation of the social domain across the contextual axis is akin to the tick of an internal clock.

It could be that certain types of ‘stimming’ behaviour, exhibited by people with ASD (and by people who are not autistic, at times) is a form of self-stimulatory generalised activation of the social domain, from cause to effect, from A to B, across the contextual axis.

The ASMR response seems as though it could be related to the achievement and enjoyment of a slow, generalised wave of activation, from A to B.

People who have OCD seem to be giving the waves of activation across the contextual axis of the social domain an unhelpful level of significance (e.g., developing in themselves a requirement to repeat an action exactly four times).

Perfectionists place an unhelpful level of significance on the exact, visualised details of the outcome that they anticipate will come at the end of series of linked actions.

The magician’s craft of defying our expectations of goal-directed action demonstrates the social domain’s influence on our perception of reality. By manipulating the contextual axis, magicians disrupt the anticipated flow from intention to outcome, bending our action knowledge beyond its breaking point.

The social domain, along the contextual axis, is the cognitive basis for the personal meaning that rhythm and musical phraseology imparts.

ME promotes personal achievements, cognitive achievements, and socially-mediated cognitive development

Personal achievements (e.g., completing a puzzle, alone) and cognitive achievements (e.g., becoming more efficient or proficient in a given action, or linking two distantly-related concepts together in a fruitful manner) are presented to ME, which is updated to reflect the child’s enhanced ability to act within the world. Updates to ME which reflect personal growth and achievement are rewarded hormonally with a feeling of joy.

Where the quality of a child’s actions or thought does not compare favourably with their generative sense of how they expect to operate within that that context of action, ME experiences a downgrade, with this being marked hormonally with a feeling that we could describe as sadness, or loss.

At some point after integration, maybe immediately, the child starts to recognise when other people are downgrading or upgrading their assessment of the child’s ability to operate within the world.

Imagine two children in shared activity – child X (male) and child Y (female). X indicates or performs a course of understanding or action which he believes to be novel or progressive, in respect of the context of action. X feels personal satisfaction. X then searches Y for validation of his innovation. He is looking for confirmation that Y’s X^C (and therefore X^G) have expanded. (Perhaps Y will look impressed, or she might adopt the course of action or understanding herself). If X gets this confirmation, his opinion of his own capacity to operate within the world has been validated by his perception of Y’s opinion of his capacity to operate within the world. If the social context permits it, a hormonal reward will be delivered to X, who experiences it as pride.

Conversely, if X acts or speaks in a way that he comes to understand has led to a downgrade in Y’s X^C, a feeling of shame may follow. If X compares his ability to operate within a given context with Y’s, and finds his ME^C to be weaker than his Y^C, a similar feeling may follow. If children U, V and W also note the contrast, then the feeling will be all the stronger.

As such, the hormonal response that reinforces activity that leads the child towards moments of social closeness and warmth (i.e., oxytocin) and the hormonal response that affords speedy reappraisal in moments of socially mediated danger (i.e., cortisol), can be leveraged by cognitive events in our own brains and by inferred cognitive events in the brains of others.

I refer obliquely above to the idea of the ‘social context’ having a deciding say in whether a hormonal response is delivered. To be a little more specific, it seems that we (executively) assess the context of action and interaction, noting how important it is, how ‘real’ it is, how personally valuable we find it to be, its risk/reward balance, and its social risk/reward balance. The outcome of this assessment then filters the level of hormonal response. This is where I gesture weakly towards the amygdalae.

For example, in the case of shame, where social threat is not detected (e.g., the child demonstrated a misapprehension, but did so in a classroom full of other learners who have demonstrated similar misapprehensions in the past), the hormonal response that we interpret as shame will not follow.

Language

Early language

Before the integration of the social domain, a baby’s linguistic abilities occupy a space at the periphery of her core consciousness.

She absorbs speech-motor information from the utterances of her activity partners and associates it with the current semantic focus within her social domain. In this manner, the baby’s lexicon begins to take shape.

Her expressive efforts are facilitated by the relay that connects the speech-motor forms within the representation of the social domain with her developing speech-motor competence. This connection allows the baby to replicate the words she hears, developing articulatory ease, until she is able to intentionally and independently produce these words when there is a strong level of activation in their semantic vicinity.

Prior to its primary integration, the social domain is a semantic enclave that does not accord with the baby’s ‘first person’ experience. The baby’s knowledge of a ‘cup’, within the social domain, comes out of her experience observing people using cups. When she explores a cup by herself, anthropomorphic sensory stimuli (and the activity of the social domain) are backgrounded, along with any cup-related semantic knowledge that the baby might have there.

Despite the ‘otherness’ of the social domain for the baby, it is this structure that will become her semantic hub and lexicon. The primary integration of the social domain introduces personal significance and experiential depth to these semantic forms.

Expressive language is essentially mature after the primary integration of the social domain

Ostensive acts of communication involve a speaking child (X) motivating and spotlighting a desired mental environment for their conversation partner (Y), as it relates to the current context of interpretation. The executive query can be termed as Y^DSC, i.e. an output from X’s personal subconcept Y which is a desired mental snapshot for Y within the current context of action and interpretation.

Child X stages this desired mental environment alongside his actual current (assumed) mental environment for Y (Y^SC). He then navigates the semantic journey between the two representations. This results in the activation, within the social domain, of lexical items and their associated speech motor representations. Another piece of apparatus, external to the social domain, and with a sense of scope for the utterance at hand, apprehends these activated lexical items and builds a phrase out of them.

This function is available to the child immediately after the integration of the social domain with wider cognitive functioning at around 18-24 months, but they will continue to refine the way they employ it for the rest of their lives.

Language processing between the primary and secondary integrations of the social domain

At the point of primary integration, the child is approaching the language used by others in a rigid and literal manner.

Speakers do not just communicate the words they speak. Their words are accompanied by an intention to alter the mental environment of their listener.

What this means is that the speaker and the listener are both aware of the myriad ways in which a speaker can put an idea into a listener’s head. They are aware of the myriad ways that a speaker can successfully go about shifting the context of interpretation. Once the shared nature of this knowledge is known to both parties, it accompanies the words we say and hear, turning language into a dynamic tool.

This implicit language awareness amounts to a communicative pact between speaker and listener. It frees a speaker up to be as smart with their choice of words as they ever have before with that communicative partner. It frees the listener up to pick back through all of the other word choices that the speaker has made in their as they reconstruct the current desired mental environment that the speaker has in mind for them.

As the child builds a theory of communicative action, between the age of 2 and 7, their use of language, and their interpretations, do not remain completely rigid and inflexible, as they are actively developing their theory in their simulated social domain and applying it in their interactions and observations.

They use and build these tentative connections as they:

• Marvel at the indirect forms of expression that speakers successfully use to communicate their messages to a listener.
• Experiment with their own indirect forms of expression.
• Rewind through the contexts of interpretation that a group of interlocutors have visited during a conversation
• Take liberties themselves with the understood current context of interpretation.
• Observe how people’s communicative register shifts with the communicative context.
• Attempt to adapt their own form of expression to match the expectations in the environment.

This process of observing, self-monitoring, self-referencing, theorising and hypothesis testing affects a semantically fuzzy social domain rather than the base knowledge structure itself. Still, adults will observe that the child’s language processing and use of language matures significantly during this period.

The secondary integration of the social domain

Language differs from other forms of action only in that it is always ostensive. (Other forms of action can be ostensive too, but mature expressive language always is). Under the ICDT, our utterances are motivated by a need or a desire to alter our conversation partner’s mental state. When a full understanding of this need or desire in a communicator is conveyed to a listener, alongside the linguistic and extralinguistic content of their utterance, their predictive abilities expand. When their predictive abilities expand, their utterance interpretation improves dramatically, and the speaker can take account of this.

As has been described in the integrative timeline, the ICDT posits an implicit form of language awareness that we use to enhance our social cognition. This awareness goes way beyond any understanding of language that me might hope to achieve via ‘conscious’ thought.

This information is organised and systematised within the relational concepts that came out of the primary integration of the social domain. Once this system of knowledge about communicative actions is successfully handing the complex web of information in the environment about communicative actions, the theory is pushed through to the social domain. This is another ‘one-and-done’ integration, and the second big step up in the child’s cognition, which happens at the age of 7 or 8.

Suddenly the child is taking snapshots of their action / interaction partner’s mental environment that include higher aspects of their thinking. They way they perceive the communicative actions of others now benefits from a personally-derived system of understanding that deals in ‘why people motivate desired mental states for others in interaction’, and ‘how they go about doing so’. With this insight, the child can more accurately anticipate the intended mental states that their activity / interaction partner is motivating for them, and they also become a great deal more canny in how they go about shaping the mental environments of others.

Language processing after the secondary integration of the social domain

After the secondary integration of the social domain, listening child Y is able to snapshot speaking child X’s mental environment at a high enough resolution to enable her to inspect the desired mental snapshots for her that X is ‘working towards’, or ‘getting at’. She is now ready to use her understanding of a speaker’s informative intention to guide her interpretation.

• While listening to X speaking, Y anticipates what X wants her to understand from his utterance (i.e., Y’s X^SC contains X’s Y^DSC).
  • Y’s theorising about X’s informational intentions for her is informed by the new system of knowledge about communicative actions which has been filtered down through her understanding of X (i.e., Y asks herself ‘How do people like X go about expressing themselves?’)
  • She also needs to attribute to X an anticipation of her (Y’s) knowledge and use of a theory of communicative action, and to include this in the process of utterance interpretation (i.e., Y asks herself ‘How smart does X think I can be in how I understand utterances?’)
• This process allows Y to posit an array of presumed mental states that she can imagine X motivating and intending for her.
• Y ‘competes’ these against one another, basing this assessment on how productively they relate with the context of action and interpretation. Integrative hotspots are noted, and those representations (and parts of representations) that look promising are brought into the executive spotlight, where their integration with the representation of the context of action and interpretation is seen through as far as it can go.
  • This process is analogous to the assessment of cognitive effects against processing cost which is at the heart of Relevance Theory.
• One interpretation comes out victorious. Y attributes this representation to X. It is X’s representation of Y’s mental environment after X’s words (and any extralinguistic information) have had their effect.
• Then Y uses this double-attributed mental state to guide her unfolding response to X’s communicative action, updating her thoughts and understandings accordingly.
• In other words, Y gives the third order representation (Y’s understanding of X’s anticipation of Y’s interpretation) sway over her overall mental environment.

This iterative process results in interpretations whose referents are fully defined and identified, and where all possible inferences are noted and tested. By knowing that a listener operates in this manner, a speaker is free to work within the zone of ‘what it is possible for a listener to anticipate’.

Utterance interpretation is not about ‘listening to words’. Instead, under the ICDT it is seen as a recursive process of attributing and assessing mental states, where we understand each other by constructing and evaluating layered mental representations of each other’s anticipated responses. This recursive mental modelling enables nuanced, efficient communication.

With this upgrade to an anticipatory modelling approach to utterance interpretation, the child’s interpretations shift from the mechanical to the dynamic. She is now operating on the same discourse level as the adults around her.

This ‘recursive mental modelling’ explanation of utterance interpretation takes many cues from the second communicative principle of relevance. The ICDT does not need to make reference to the ‘communicator’s abilities and preferences’ though, since both the listener’s estimation of the communicator’s abilities and preferences, and the listener’s judgement of the communicator’s estimation of the listener’s abilities and preferences, are natural constraints that derive from the manner in which these people’s mental environments are being metarepresented (i.e., by fallible, quirky humans) and attributed (i.e., to fallible, quirky humans).

Mastery over context and voice

Initially, after the primary integration of the social domain at 18-24 months, context is just something that arises during mental and physical activity. As far as the child is concerned, it cannot be directed or focused. The fixed nature of the context of interpretation leads to the child’s personal interpretations being mechanical and literal.

In time, they find themselves modulating the context of interpretation to one degree or another. As they experiment, they monitor how they went about shifting the context, and whether or not their listeners came along for the ride. They incorporate this into the theory of communicative action that they are simulating within the executive resource. .

At the age of 7 or 8, when the secondary integration of the social domain takes place, the child gains a deep understanding, in respect of someone who is speaking to them, that that individual is, like them, able to choose their words in such a manner as to direct her understanding down any avenue that exists within the shared context of interpretation (the manner in which our second order representations cohere).

Now that both communicative parties are attributing to each other a full and deep understanding of ostensive action, they enter a communicative pact that results in anything that they both know to exist within the shared context of interpretation being potentially invoked alongside the shifting interpretation.

With this, the child has progressed from a personal ‘at-hand context’ constraint, to a collaborative ‘at-will context’ approach.

In the same way as they can invoke a shift in the context, the child can invoke a shift in voice, by choosing a form of expression that cannot reasonably be attributed to them. They may also provide extralinguistic cues that reinforce the interpretational conflict. In these cases, the listener responds by invoking a particular character, alongside the context, to whom they attribute the representation. The listener is then free to imagine how it must be to go about ones day in such a way.

A whole world of contextual deftness and attributional nuance awaits the child.

Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD)

The ICDT proposes that what makes children with ASD different is the way they approach consciousness growth, with a tendency to broaden their consciousness, and a tendency not to centre their consciousness.

Considering the description of the integrative process in the ICDT, this could come about in a number of ways for a child with ASD:

• Their executive resource is composed of scans of knowledge structures that do not operate well as semantically condensed copies of these knowledge structures.
• They have difficulty systematising semantic overflow within the executive resource, meaning that the integrations they carry out do not respect the true level of complexity of the system of information in the environmental stimulus.
• They have difficulty co-ordinating an ‘external’ response to networks of semantic overflow.
• They have difficulty operating with fuzzy semantic information during the integrative process.
• They do not want to lose a parent knowledge structure to the integrative process – they prefer the ‘feeling’ of a broad consciousness over the ‘feeling’ of a centred consciousness.

The ICDT assumes that a combination of all of these is at play.

Whatever the deep problem affecting informational integration is in ASD, the effect is that the rate and depth of integration is affected, and that more complex structures that can accept more complex forms of information are not formed. In respect of the primary integration of the social domain, the theory of action that is applied to the social domain is either inadequate to the child’s task of making optimal sense of the actions of themselves and others, or it is non-existent.

How the autistic child’s approach to integration affects the functioning of their social domain

Without the application of workable theory of action to the social domain, it will not operate optimally as a predictor of human behaviour. The child’s semantic knowledge (i.e., about people, actions and objects) will be limited in its depth.

The snapshots that a child with ASD can draw of an activity partner at a certain point within a certain context of action will be low in resolution, as they have tended to be informed by the most salient surface-level connections rather than by a deep inquiry into intentionality. This reduces the utility of the second-order representation, which in turn impacts social learning and co-operative activity.

Without the application of a workable theory of communicative action to the social domain, the child with ASD will struggle to ‘read the course’ of interaction. As their peers develop and apply an implicit sense of intentionality of communicative actions, the child with ASD has limited insight to apply, making real-time navigation of social situations extremely challenging. The resolution of their second-order representations is low, so they find it difficult to discern the third-order representations that facilitate the process of anticipatory modelling that underlies mature language processing.

Coda

At this point I choose to publish what I have. I intend to develop all sections from here, especially the discussion of ASD. There are then a multitude of extra sections that need to be written, including a look at other developmental language disorders and acquired language disorders, a comparison with existing theories, a discussion of ways that the theory can be validated and falsified, an extended look at some practical applications of the theory, and of course some kind of conclusion.

In the meantime, here is one disconnected aphorism that I couldn’t work into the rest of the document.

An experience is a path taken by one individual through the woods. Knowledge is the interconnected network of desire paths through the woods that arises after a huge number of such journeys.