HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 275As Patricia Zukow- Goldring noted, ordinary experience involves
a multitude of signals from a multitude of variables, through vari ous
senses, constituting what might be a multitude of objects (animate or
inanimate) undergoing rapid spatiotemporal transformations. But in
social cooperation, these inputs need to be coordinated between indi-
viduals so that “perceiving and acting of one continuously and refl ex-
ively aff ects the perceiving and acting of the other.”^20
CULTURAL TOOLS BECOME COGNITIVE TOOLSWhat such demands imply for human intelligence has been much ne-
glected in psychological theories. Most of the evidence for it has come
from the two giants of developmental psy chol ogy Jean Piaget and Lev
Vygotsky. Th eir interpretations were diff er ent in some ways but also
complementary.
Piaget viewed social engagement as a potent source of perturbation or
disequlilibration in the developing mind. For example, by telling stories
about toddler’s misdemeanors and then asking who was “naughtiest,” he
learned how children’s thinking changed over time. He agreed that coor-
dination of viewpoint in the social world was more demanding than any
prob lem in the physical environment. In that way, he said, cognition
unavoidably develops from interrelations with others. As he put it, “Th e
individual can achieve his inventions and intellectual constructions only
to the extent that he is the set of collective interactions,” and “ there are
neither individuals as such nor society as such. Th ere are just inter-
individual relations.”^21
Piaget concentrated on what changes emerge in the individual cogni-
tive system during development. In contrast, Vygotsky focused on what
goes on in the dialectics between collective and individuals, and the in-
tertwining of changes in both. Th ese seem to follow the dynamical mod-
els described above.
Th us, joint perceptions and joint actions create rapidly changing feed-
forward and feedback loops that emerge as agreed-on regulations—or
attractor states. Examples include conventions like turn taking, queuing,
agreed-on signals and gestures for demanding joint attention, pointing
(to focus joint attention), means for indicating the goal of an action and
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