ABSTRACT
When and how does collective intentionality develop? This question has come into the focus of research in cognitive development in recent years with the establishment of collective intentionality as a phenomenon to be studied empirically by the cognitive sciences. In the last two decades, cognitive science has been investigating, from an ontogenetic point of view, how collective intentionality emerges and develops in humans and how it relates to other forms of intentionality, and from a comparative point of view, whether or to which degree it might mark one of the cognitive foundations of human uniqueness. The present chapter will give an overview of this research on the emergence and early development of different forms of collective intentionality in human ontogeny, with an eye to the comparative question of which of these kinds of collective intentionality might be shared with other species and which might be uniquely human.
