The social construction of the cultural mind

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
György Gergely ◽  
Gergely Csibra
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Imitative Learning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
Human Specific ◽  
Efficient Transfer

How does cultural knowledge shape the development of human minds and, conversely, what kind of species-specific social-cognitive mechanisms have evolved to support the intergenerational reproduction of cultural knowledge? We critically examine current theories proposing a human-specific drive to identify with and imitate conspecifics as the evolutionary mechanism underlying cultural learning. We summarize new data demonstrating the selective interpretive nature of imitative learning in 14-month-olds and argue that the predictive scope of existing imitative learning models is either too broad or too narrow to account for these findings. We outline our alternative theory of a human-specific adaptation for ‘pedagogy’, a communicative system of mutual design specialized for the fast and efficient transfer of new and relevant cultural knowledge from knowledgeable to ignorant conspecifics. We show the central role that innately specified ostensive-communicative triggering cues and learner-directed manner of knowledge manifestations play in constraining and guiding selective imitation of relevant cultural knowledge that is both new and cognitively opaque to the naive learner.

The social-cognitive mechanisms regulating adolescents' use of doping substances

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Lucidi ◽  
A. Zelli ◽  
L. Mallia ◽  
C. Grano ◽  
C. Violani
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
The Social

The role of communication in acquisition, curation, and transmission of culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyowon Gweon
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Communicative Behaviors ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computational Cognitive Science

Abstract Veissière et al.'s proposal aims to explain how cognition enables cultural learning, but fails to acknowledge a distinctively human behavior critical to this process: communication. Recent advances in developmental and computational cognitive science suggest that the social-cognitive capacities central to TTOM also support sophisticated yet remarkably early-emerging inferences and communicative behaviors that allow us to learn and share abstract knowledge.

The social-cognitive mechanisms regulating adolescents' use of doping substances

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 447-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Lucidi ◽  
Arnaldo Zelli ◽  
Luca Mallia ◽  
Caterina Grano ◽  
Paolo M. Russo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1567) ◽  
pp. 1149-1157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gergely Csibra ◽  
György Gergely
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Evolutionary Adaptation ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Technological Culture ◽  
Natural Pedagogy ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Human Specific

We propose that the cognitive mechanisms that enable the transmission of cultural knowledge by communication between individuals constitute a system of ‘natural pedagogy’ in humans, and represent an evolutionary adaptation along the hominin lineage. We discuss three kinds of arguments that support this hypothesis. First, natural pedagogy is likely to be human-specific: while social learning and communication are both widespread in non-human animals, we know of no example of social learning by communication in any other species apart from humans. Second, natural pedagogy is universal: despite the huge variability in child-rearing practices, all human cultures rely on communication to transmit to novices a variety of different types of cultural knowledge, including information about artefact kinds, conventional behaviours, arbitrary referential symbols, cognitively opaque skills and know-how embedded in means-end actions. Third, the data available on early hominin technological culture are more compatible with the assumption that natural pedagogy was an independently selected adaptive cognitive system than considering it as a by-product of some other human-specific adaptation, such as language. By providing a qualitatively new type of social learning mechanism, natural pedagogy is not only the product but also one of the sources of the rich cultural heritage of our species.

The social-pragmatic theory of word learning

Pragmatics ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomasello
Keyword(s):  
Word Learning ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
New Words ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Special Case

Some researchers have tried to explain early word learning via garden-variety learning processes and others by invoking linguistically specific “constraints” that help children to narrow down the referential possibilities. The social-pragmatic approach to word learning argues that children do not need specifically linguistic constraints to learn words, but rather what they need are flexible and powerful social-cognitive skills that allow them to understand the communicative intentions of others in a wide variety of interactive situations. A series of seven word learning studies demonstrate something of the range of communicative situations in which children can learn new words. These situations include many non-ostensive contexts in which no one is intentionally teaching the child a new word and the intended referent is not perceptually present at the time of the new word’s introduction. Language acquisition in general, and word learning in particular, is best seen as a special case of cultural learning in which children attempt to discern adults’ intentions toward their intentions toward things in the world.

Reference

1998 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 229-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomasello
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Gestures ◽  
Child Gesture

My approach to reference focuses on naturally occuring processes of communication, and in particular on children's earliest referential activities. I begin by describing three different kinds of child gesture — ritualizations, deictics, and symbolic gestures — and then proceed to examine young children's early word learning. The account focuses on the joint attentional situations in which young children learn their earliest gestures and linguistic symbols and on the social-cognitive and cultural learning processes involved in the different cases.

Cultural learning

1993 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomasello ◽  
Ann Cale Kruger ◽  
Hilary Horn Ratner
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Original Learning ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Normal Children ◽  
Imitative Learning

AbstractThis target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. Imitative learning relies on a concept of intentional agent and involves simple perspective-taking. Instructed learning relies on a concept of mental agent and involves alternating/coordinated perspective-taking (intersubjectivity). Collaborative learning relies on a concept of reflective agent and involves integrated perspective-taking (reflective intersubjectivity). A comparison of normal children, autistic children and wild and enculturated chimpanzees provides further evidence for these correlations between social cognition and cultural learning. Cultural learning is a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transmission of behaviors and information among conspecifics not possible in other forms of social learning, thereby providing the psychological basis for cultural evolution.

So how do they do it?

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. I. M. Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Shared Meaning ◽  
The Social

While the evidence that cetaceans exhibit behaviours that are every bit as cultural as those recognised in chimpanzees is unequivocal, I argue that it is unlikely that either taxon has the social cognitive mechanisms required to underpin the more advanced forms of culture characteristic of humans (namely those that depend on shared meaning).

scholarly journals Unravelling competitors’ brain-andbody correlates. The two-persons social neuroscience approach to study competition

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-104
Author(s):  
Michela Balconi ◽  
Laura Angioletti
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Social Neuroscience ◽  
Competitive Behavior ◽  
Body System ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Single Person ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Brain

Competition refers to a condition for which an individual or a group strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others. It follows that, unlike cooperation, the gain of one foresees the loss of the other. Most accounts have focused on the individual and social cognitive mechanisms featuring cooperative/competitive behavior, however, a fascinating question regards the neurophysiological correlates of competitive social phenomenon. What happens at a neural and peripheral level in the brain-and-body system of two people engaged in a competitive dynamic? The combination of multiple neuroscientific techniques adopted to unveil the individual and social complexity of competition leads us discussing a more recent and promising paradigm in neuroscience, the hyperscanning. In the social neuroscience field, hyperscanning allowed shifting from a single-person to a two-persons perspective and can open new opportunities to study interpersonal brain-and-body connectivity during competitive social interactions in increasingly ecological contexts.

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