Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 675-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomasello ◽  
Malinda Carpenter ◽  
Josep Call ◽  
Tanya Behne ◽  
Henrike Moll
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Cultural Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Shared Intentionality ◽  
Crucial Difference ◽  
Intentional Agents ◽  
Collaborative Activities

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.

scholarly journals Extended parenting and the evolution of cognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 375 (1803) ◽  
pp. 20190495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Uomini ◽  
Joanna Fairlie ◽  
Russell D. Gray ◽  
Michael Griesser
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Brain Size ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cultural Learning

Traditional attempts to understand the evolution of human cognition compare humans with other primates. This research showed that relative brain size covaries with cognitive skills, while adaptations that buffer the developmental and energetic costs of large brains (e.g. allomaternal care), and ecological or social benefits of cognitive abilities, are critical for their evolution. To understand the drivers of cognitive adaptations, it is profitable to consider distant lineages with convergently evolved cognitions. Here, we examine the facilitators of cognitive evolution in corvid birds, where some species display cultural learning, with an emphasis on family life. We propose that extended parenting (protracted parent–offspring association) is pivotal in the evolution of cognition: it combines critical life-history, social and ecological conditions allowing for the development and maintenance of cognitive skillsets that confer fitness benefits to individuals. This novel hypothesis complements the extended childhood idea by considering the parents' role in juvenile development. Using phylogenetic comparative analyses, we show that corvids have larger body sizes, longer development times, extended parenting and larger relative brain sizes than other passerines. Case studies from two corvid species with different ecologies and social systems highlight the critical role of life-history features on juveniles’ cognitive development: extended parenting provides a safe haven, access to tolerant role models, reliable learning opportunities and food, resulting in higher survival. The benefits of extended juvenile learning periods, over evolutionary time, lead to selection for expanded cognitive skillsets. Similarly, in our ancestors, cooperative breeding and increased group sizes facilitated learning and teaching. Our analyses highlight the critical role of life-history, ecological and social factors that underlie both extended parenting and expanded cognitive skillsets. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.

Models of Self-Replicators

2010 ◽  
pp. 282-314
Author(s):  
Eleonora Bilotta ◽  
Pietro Pantano
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
External World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Christopher Alexander ◽  
On Line ◽  
Instinctive Behavior ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
The Way

Structural models and patterns are vitally important for human beings. From birth, we base our emotional and cognitive representations of the external world on species-specific signals (the human face) and exploit these signals to structure our instinctive behavior. The creation of cognitive patterns to represent the world lies at the very heart of human cognition. It is this process that underlies our efficient use of signs, our ability to communicate with natural languages and to build cognitive artifacts, the way we organize the external world, and the way we organize external events in our memories and our flow of consciousness. Patterns are sometimes called schemas, or models, and discussed in terms of a gestalt (Piaget, 1960; 1970; Koelher, 1974). In the middle ages a pattern meant “the.original.proposed.to.imitation;.the. archetype;.that.which.is.to.be.copied;.an.exemplar” (from the On Line Etymology Dictionary). Modern use dates back to the XVIII century. In 1977 Christopher Alexander introduced a new way of using the term in architecture. For Alexander, a pattern was a model used to encode and organize existing knowledge, avoiding the need to reinvent the knowledge every time it was needed. For Alexander a pattern was “a three part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution” (Alexander et al., 1977).

A few reasons why we don't share Tomasello et al.'s intuitions about sharing

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 701-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
György Gergely ◽  
Gergely Csibra
Keyword(s):  
Specific Capacity ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
Human Specific

Tomasello et al.'s two prerequisites, we argue, are not sufficient to explain the emergence of Joint Collaboration. An adequate account must include the human-specific capacity to communicate relevant information (that may have initially evolved to ensure efficient cultural learning). This, together with understanding intentional actions, does provide sufficient preconditions for Joint Collaboration without the need to postulate a primary human motive to share others' psychological states.

Culture and Cognitive Development

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomasello
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Human Adaptation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Learning Skills ◽  
Symbolic Representations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Intentional Agents ◽  
Human Ontogeny

Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not. The difference can be clearly seen when the social learning skills of humans and their nearest primate relatives are systematically compared. The human adaptation for culture begins to make itself manifest in human ontogeny at around 1 year of age as human infants come to understand other persons as intentional agents like the self and so engage in joint attentional interactions with them. This understanding then enables young children (a) to employ some uniquely powerful forms of cultural learning to acquire the accumulated wisdom of their cultures, especially as embodied in language, and also (b) to comprehend their worlds in some uniquely powerful ways involving perspectivally based symbolic representations.

Causal curiosity and the conventionality of culture

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 709-709
Author(s):  
Lori Markson ◽  
Gil Diesendruck
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Cognition ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Underlying Causes

Tomasello et al. argue that cultural cognition derives from humans' unique motivation to share psychological states. We suggest that what underlies this motivation is children's propensity to seek out the underlying causes of behavior. This propensity, combined with children's competence at it, makes them especially skillful at acquiring the intentional, conventional, and reliable forms that constitute culture.

scholarly journals Tension in the Natural History of Human Thinking

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrike Moll
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Evolutionary Time ◽  
Shared Intentionality ◽  
Instrumental Reasoning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Thinking ◽  
Evolutionary Story

AbstractMichael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking, I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens’ cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt the idea that what changed first over evolutionary time was hominin behavior, which then in turn brought about changes in cognition. In the second half of the commentary I aim to show that the author oscillates between an additive and a transformative account of human shared intentionality. I argue that shared intentionality shapes cognition in its entirety and therefore precludes the possibility that humans have the same, individual intentionality (as shown in, e.g. their instrumental reasoning) as other apes.

scholarly journals Shared intentionality, reason-giving and the evolution of human culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 377 (1843) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathal O'Madagain ◽  
Michael Tomasello
Keyword(s):  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Shared Intentionality ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution ◽  
Collaborative Activities ◽  
Different Levels

The biological approach to culture focuses almost exclusively on processes of social learning, to the neglect of processes of cultural coordination including joint action and shared intentionality. In this paper, we argue that the distinctive features of human culture derive from humans' unique skills and motivations for coordinating with one another around different types of action and information. As different levels of these skills of ‘shared intentionality’ emerged over the last several hundred thousand years, human culture became characterized first by such things as collaborative activities and pedagogy based on cooperative communication, and then by such things as collaborative innovations and normatively structured pedagogy. As a kind of capstone of this trajectory, humans began to coordinate not just on joint actions and shared beliefs, but on the reasons for what we believe or how we act. Coordinating on reasons powered the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution especially characteristic of the human species in the last several tens of thousands of years. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

Triadic bodily mimesis is the difference

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 720-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Zlatev ◽  
Tomas Persson ◽  
Peter Gärdenfors
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Shared Intentionality ◽  
Motor Experience ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
The Difference

We find that the nature and origin of the proposed “dialogical cognitive representations” in the target article is not sufficiently clear. Our proposal is that (triadic) bodily mimesis and in particular mimetic schemas – prelinguistic representational, intersubjective structures, emerging through imitation but subsequently interiorized – can provide the necessary link between private sensory-motor experience and public language. In particular, we argue that shared intentionality requires triadic mimesis.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document