Microgenesis

The intention of this paper is to open up a dialogue on the wider implications of microgenesis, particularly as it applies to the process-relational view of intersubjectivity.

The term microgenesis has been proposed for the continuous formative activity which underlies cognition.

Goldberg (1985) has proposed that the SMA is part of a medial system which is crucial in the programming and fluent execution of movements on the basis of internal models of reality. He hypothesized that there are two stages in the microgenesis of movement, each stage being a loop consisting of a number of cortical and subcortical structures. The first stage involves the selection of a context-appropriate behavioral strategy, and the second involves the specification of the details required to execute the action.

[...] the gesture is highly conventionalized, a formal linguistic sign in and of itself requiring no verbal representation to be understood (for example, when a young child is told to 'wave bye bye'). McNeill (1992) believes that there are different qualities that accompany this continuum in relation to the microgenesis of an utterance, stating that at the beginning there is a 'spontaneous' use of gestures which is connected with the germination of a thought, while the use of conventionalized gestures corresponds to the final stages of the thought process.

Like in action where one should execute the movements or responses one at a time (and it is physically impossible to do it otherwise, circus practices notwithstanding), microgenesis tends to solve one or another subtask at different stages of its unfolding. In high-level activity, particular efferent operations often unfold as more or less arbitrary segments in a continuous flow of actions. [...] Can you tell the exact moment when a ball-toss ends and the strike for the serve begins in tennis? Not so easily. Similarly, in microgensis, stages unfold as somewhat arbitrarily isolable epochs in a continuous flow of percept genesis.