Takanashi’s CCI Plan

From “Attention” to “Moral Judgment”

Katsuya Takanashi
(Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies, Kyoto University)

Abstract

In everyday conversation, we not only exchange purely objective information, but also express both explicitly and implicitly our own attitudes or opinions (assessments) toward things or events we encounter, and pursue agreements with each other. One of my research foci is on when and how these assessments are to be expressed naturally in conversation and what the effects on both each participant and their relationship are.

When infants and children encounter a new person, objects, or event, they will sometimes look toward a parent and subsequently respond to the novel circumstance in accord with the affect displayed by the parent. This phenomenon is called “Social Referencing”, and is not limited to infants or children but adults also rely on the similar technique in the more sophisticated manner. In the CCI project, I would like to observe this phenomenon occurred in the ordinary setting of co-presence of an infant or a child and his/her caregiver. Social referencing is very important for the development of moral judgment in that it requires children to search for the “values” of the things in caregivers’ affective expressions and take in them for their future actions.