The Cultural Origins Of Human Cognition

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The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

Michael TOMASELLO
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition Book PDF

Author : Michael TOMASELLO
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2009-07-01
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780674660328

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The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael TOMASELLO Pdf

Bridging the gap between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology, Michael Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities. These include capacities for understanding that others have intentions of their own, and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. Tomasello further describes with authority and ingenuity how these capacities work over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops.

Origins of Human Communication

Michael Tomasello
Origins of Human Communication Book PDF

Author : Michael Tomasello
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2010-08-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780262261203

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Origins of Human Communication by Michael Tomasello Pdf

A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.

A Natural History of Human Thinking

Michael Tomasello
A Natural History of Human Thinking Book PDF

Author : Michael Tomasello
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2018-04-09
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780674986831

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A Natural History of Human Thinking by Michael Tomasello Pdf

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

Primate Cognition

Michael Tomasello,Josep Call
Primate Cognition Book PDF

Author : Michael Tomasello,Josep Call
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 546 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0195106245

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Primate Cognition by Michael Tomasello,Josep Call Pdf

This book reviews all that is scientifically known about the cognitive skills of non-human primates and assesses the current state of our knowledge.

Cognitive Gadgets

Cecilia Heyes
Cognitive Gadgets Book PDF

Author : Cecilia Heyes
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2018-04-16
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780674985131

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Cognitive Gadgets by Cecilia Heyes Pdf

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language. Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us. As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.

Becoming Human

Michael Tomasello
Becoming Human Book PDF

Author : Michael Tomasello
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-01-07
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780674980853

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Becoming Human by Michael Tomasello Pdf

Winner of the William James Book Award “Magisterial...Makes an impressive argument that most distinctly human traits are established early in childhood and that the general chronology in which these traits appear can at least—and at last—be identified.” —Wall Street Journal “Theoretically daring and experimentally ingenious, Becoming Human squarely tackles the abiding question of what makes us human.” —Susan Gelman, University of Michigan Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, it explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child’s life. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality.

Origins of the Modern Mind

Merlin Donald
Origins of the Modern Mind Book PDF

Author : Merlin Donald
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1993-03-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780674253704

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Origins of the Modern Mind by Merlin Donald Pdf

This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to artificial intelligence, presenting an enterprising and original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form.

A Natural History of Human Morality

Michael Tomasello
A Natural History of Human Morality Book PDF

Author : Michael Tomasello
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2016-01-04
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780674915879

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A Natural History of Human Morality by Michael Tomasello Pdf

Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on experimental data comparing great apes and human children, he reconstructs two key evolutionary steps whereby early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species capable of acting as a plural agent “we”.

Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind

Mark Schaller,Ara Norenzayan,Steven J. Heine,Toshio Yamagishi,Tatsuya Kameda
Evolution Culture and the Human Mind Book PDF

Author : Mark Schaller,Ara Norenzayan,Steven J. Heine,Toshio Yamagishi,Tatsuya Kameda
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2011-03-17
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781136950490

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Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind by Mark Schaller,Ara Norenzayan,Steven J. Heine,Toshio Yamagishi,Tatsuya Kameda Pdf

An enormous amount of scientific research compels two fundamental conclusions about the human mind: The mind is the product of evolution; and the mind is shaped by culture. These two perspectives on the human mind are not incompatible, but, until recently, their compatibility has resisted rigorous scholarly inquiry. Evolutionary psychology documents many ways in which genetic adaptations govern the operations of the human mind. But evolutionary inquiries only occasionally grapple seriously with questions about human culture and cross-cultural differences. By contrast, cultural psychology documents many ways in which thought and behavior are shaped by different cultural experiences. But cultural inquires rarely consider evolutionary processes. Even after decades of intensive research, these two perspectives on human psychology have remained largely divorced from each other. But that is now changing - and that is what this book is about. Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind is the first scholarly book to integrate evolutionary and cultural perspectives on human psychology. The contributors include world-renowned evolutionary, cultural, social, and cognitive psychologists. These chapters reveal many novel insights linking human evolution to both human cognition and human culture – including the evolutionary origins of cross-cultural differences. The result is a stimulating introduction to an emerging integrative perspective on human nature.

Complex Life

Alan Dean
Complex Life Book PDF

Author : Alan Dean
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2019-07-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351792233

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Complex Life by Alan Dean Pdf

This title was first published in 2000: Complex Life argues for the importance of the new perspective of non modern social theory in understanding human agency. Darwinian natural selection theory and complexity theory are used to provide new insights into human origins, mind and culture. Through bringing these ideas together it is argued that nature and culture are inseparably linked within human agency and that in consequence it is time to transcend the limitations of both modern and postmodern social science. This book argues that nature has never been controlled or transcended. Humankind is instead an emerged outcome of the historical interweaving of the environment, morphology, mind and culture. This wide-ranging analysis offers new insights into human nature for anthropologists and sociologists interested in human evolution, social theory or human agency.

Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture

Armin W. Geertz
Origins of Religion Cognition and Culture Book PDF

Author : Armin W. Geertz
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2014-09-11
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781317544555

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Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture by Armin W. Geertz Pdf

Attempts to understand the origins of humanity have raised fundamental questions about the complex relationship between cognition and culture. Central to the debates on origins is the role of religion, religious ritual and religious experience. What came first: individual religious (ecstatic) experiences, collective observances of transition situations, fear of death, ritual competence, magical coercion; mirror neurons or temporal lobe religiosity? Cognitive scientists are now providing us with important insights on phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes. Together with insights from the humanities and social sciences on the origins, development and maintenance of complex semiotic, social and cultural systems, a general picture of what is particularly human about humans could emerge. Reflections on the preconditions for symbolic and linguistic competence and practice are now within our grasp. Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture puts culture centre stage in the cognitive science of religion.

Cognitive History

David Dunér,Christer Ahlberger
Cognitive History Book PDF

Author : David Dunér,Christer Ahlberger
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2019-03-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9783110579840

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Cognitive History by David Dunér,Christer Ahlberger Pdf

This book is the first introduction to the new field called cognitive history. The last decades have seen a noticeable increase in cognitive science studies that have changed the understanding of human thinking. Its relevance for historical research cannot be overlooked any more. Cognitive history could be explained as the study of how humans in history used their cognitive abilities in order to understand the world around them and to orient themselves in it, but also how the world outside their bodies affected their way of thinking. In focus for this book is the relationship between history and cognition, the human mind’s interaction with the environment in time and space. It especially discusses certain cognitive abilities in interaction with the environment, which can be studied in historical sources, namely: evolution, language, rationality, spatiality, and materiality. Cognitive history can give us a deeper understanding of how – and not only what – people thought, and about the interaction between the human mind and the surrounding world.

Why We Cooperate

Michael Tomasello
Why We Cooperate Book PDF

Author : Michael Tomasello
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2009-08-28
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780262013598

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Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello Pdf

Understanding cooperation as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior. Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she's likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to. As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior. In Why We Cooperate, Tomasello's studies of young children and great apes help identify the underlying psychological processes that very likely supported humans' earliest forms of complex collaboration and, ultimately, our unique forms of cultural organization, from the evolution of tolerance and trust to the creation of such group-level structures as cultural norms and institutions. Scholars Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke respond to Tomasello's findings and explore the implications.

Historical Development of Human Cognition

Alfredo Ardila
Historical Development of Human Cognition Book PDF

Author : Alfredo Ardila
Publisher : Springer
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2017-11-20
Category : Education
ISBN : 9789811068874

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Historical Development of Human Cognition by Alfredo Ardila Pdf

This book addresses a central question: how did cognition emerge in human history? It approaches the question from a cultural-historical, neuropsychological perspective and analyses evidence on the historical origins of cognitive activity; integrates information regarding cross-cultural differences in neuropsychological performance; and discusses how adopting a historical and cultural perspective in the behavioural neurosciences can help to arrive at a better understanding of cognition. Lastly, it proposes general guidelines for future research in the area.

Constructing a Language

Michael TOMASELLO
Constructing a Language Book PDF

Author : Michael TOMASELLO
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780674044395

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Constructing a Language by Michael TOMASELLO Pdf

In this groundbreaking book, Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Tomasello demonstrates that we don't need a self-contained "language instinct" to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.