Shared Symbolic Storage

Animal Cognition & Consciousness (II): Metacognition & Mentalizing

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:30:00 +0000

As I wrote in my last post, three kinds of behaviours are most often discussed in debates about animal consciousness and cognition:

“1. Mirror self-recognition
2. Tests of metacognition;
3. Metacognition of others’ mental states” (Gómez 2009: 45)

After having discussed the first capacitiy in my previous post, I will discuss the latter two in this post, starting with metacognition, that is being aware of one’s own knowledge states, and then turn to being aware of other’s mental states.

Metacognition.

Being aware of one’s own mental states, i.e., reflective consciousness, surely seems to be one of the most crucial components of self-awareness. In one paradigm used to test for metacognitive awareness, monkeys were trained to select, out of a number of two or more images, the one that is identical to an image they have been shown earlier. As is to expected, the monkeys’ performance progressively deteriorated the longer the delay was between the sample image and the selection task.

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After they had learned how the task worked, the monkeys were then given a choice between performing the task or not. If they chose to perform the task, they had the chance of getting a preferred reward when right or nothing when wrong. If they chose not to do the task they simply got a low quality reward.

Interestingly, when they chose to perform the test their success rate was significantly higher than when they opted for not doing it but were forced to perform the test nevertheless.

These results have been taken as evidence that monkeys are aware of their own knowledge states and base their decision on whether to take the test or not on some form of reflexive consciousness or metacognition. One significant problem of this setup, however, is that in principle there could be a wealth of different possible explanations for these behaviours. For example, the monkey’s decision could be a result of a low-level uncertainty monitoring mechanism that regulates its behaviours without the animal necessary having a conscious, second-order awareness of its own mental states (Gómez 2009: 46f.).

Similar experiments have also been conducted with dolphins, who were presented with different sounds and had to push one of three levers (one for ‘high’ tones, one for ‘low’ tones, and one if they were ‘uncertain’) in response. The dolphins tested performed similar to humans tested on the same task, and given what we know about dolphin cognition and encephalization in general it seems feasible to interpret these results as evincing self-awareness (Herman 2009: 44).

Metacognition of Others’ Mental States/ Mentalizing

The question whether chimpanzees have a ‘theory of mind’, that is, whether they are conscious of the mental states of others, has been a controversial topic for more than thirty years (Blackmore 2010: 214f., Hare 2011: 294ff.). Until quite recently, there was a broad consensus that theory-of-mind abilities and the ability for mentalizing, defined as the

“implicit or explicit attribution of mental states to others and self (desires, beliefs) in order to explain and predict what they will do” Frith & Frith 2012)

were uniquely human. There was an overall consensus that there was a

“vast qualitative gap […] between the social cognition of human and non-human apes” (Hare 2011: 296).

This view is echoed for example in the statements by Penn et al. (2008) mentioned in my first post and also by Susan Blackmore (2010: 215), who reports on experiments which showed that when begging for food, chimpanzees did not discriminate between an experimenter who could see them and one who could not (e.g. because s/he had a bucket over her/his head) but randomly gestured to both of them. The conclusion from this experiment was that chimpanzees had no concept of seeing, something which human children develop as early as in their second year of life.

However, this view has changed dramatically over the last ten years, when researchers started to test chimpanzees in competitive, as opposed to cooperative contexts, which are much more natural and ecologically valid for them. In competitive paradigms, chimpanzees do indeed show an understanding of seeing, e.g. by taking the piece of food that is hidden from the view of a dominant competitor instead of the piece of food seen by both (Hare 2011: 298f.).

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What is more, chimpanzees even know that others make inferences. For example, in the context of searching for a single piece of food, chimpanzees were presented with two opaque boards on a table, one lying flat, and one slanted. Chimpanzees normally chose the one that is slanted because there could be food lying under it. However, when there was another chimpanzee there before them, they tend to avoid the slanted board, because they assume that their competitor has already looked under it guided by the same inference they themselves would make (Schmelz et al. 2011).

This, taken together with a wealth of other recent results on the sophisticated sociocognitive abilities of chimpanzees, suggests that chimpanzees are conscious of at least some psychological states in others, although not to the same degree as humans, who from early age on outperform all other animals in every regard (Hare 2011: 300f.; Carpenter 2011, see also this post). It should be noted here that these conclusions not only extend to great apes, but that similar capacities have also been demonstrated, for example, in ravens (Blackmore 2010: 215). As Hannah wrote last month (see here), they even point declaratively to conspecifics with their beaks in order to show them something (Pika & Bugnyar 2011), a behaviour made even more remarkable by the fact that it is not found in great apes at all (Tomasello 2006, although this conclusion is hotly debated see, e.g. here).

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As my two posts should have illustrated, it is far from clear that Darwin really made a mistake when speaking of the difference between human and nonhumans as “one of degree, not of kind.” This does not only hold for cognition. Instead, the experiments I’ve written about here, taken from the domains of mirror self-recognition, metacognition of one’s own mental states and metacognition of the mental states of others, suggest “that animals other than humans are conscious and have subjective experiences that rely on some degree of consciousness” (Burkhard & Bekoff 2009: 42).

References:

Blackmore, Susan (2010): Consciousness: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Burkhardt, Gordon M. and Marc Bekoff (2009): "Animal Consciousness." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 39-43.

Carpenter, Malinda (2011): "Social Cognition and Social Motivation in Infancy." In: Usha Goswami (ed.): The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development. 2_nd Edition. Malden, MA [et al.]: Blackwell, 106-128.

Frith, Chris D. and Uta Frith (2012): "Mechanisms of Social Cognition." In: Annual Review of Psychology 63: 287-313.

Gómez, Juan-Carlos (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Great Apes." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 45-48.

Hare, Brian (2011) "From Hominoid to Hominid Mind: What Changed and Why?" In: Annual Review of Anthropology 40(1): 293-309.

Herman, Louis M. (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Dolphins." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 43-45.

Penn, Derek C, Keith J. Holyoak and Daniel J. Povinelli (2008): “Darwin's Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity between Human and Nonhuman Minds.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31.2: 109-130.

Pika, Simone and Thomas Bugnyar (2011): "The Use of Referential Gestures in Ravens (Corvus Corax) in the Wild." In: Nature Communications 2: 560.

Schmelz, Martin, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello "Chimpanzees know that Others Make Inferences." In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108: 17284-17289.

Tomasello, Michael (2006): "Why Don't Apes Point?" In: Nick. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.): Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford: Berg, 506-524.

[cross-posted at Replicated Typo]

Animal Cognition & Consciousness (I): Mirror Self-Recognition

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Darwin made a mistake. At least that is what Derek Penn and his colleagues (2008) claim in a recent and controversial paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Darwin (1871) famously argued that the difference between humans and animals was “one of degree, not of kind.”

This, according to Penn et al. is of course true from an evolutionary perspective, but in their view,

“the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds” (Penn et al. 2008: 109).

They hold that humans are not simply smarter, but human cognition differs fundamentally and qualitatively from that of other animals.

One pervasive proposal is that we do not simply possess a unique set of cognitive capacities, but that it might be consciousness itself that is uniquely human as well, a view that goes back at least to Descartes (Burkhardt & Bekoff 2009: 41). However, there are also many scholars and researchers who agree that there is evidence for higher-order cognition in nonhuman animals ( ‘animals’ after this) and that they might possess at least some degree of consciousness (Burkhard & Bekoff 2009: 40f.).

In this and my next post, I will write about three kinds of phenomena that are most often discussed in debates on whether animals have some form of higher-order cognition and consciousness or not: self-awareness, awareness of one’s own cognitive states, and awareness of others’ cognitive states and intentions.

Animal Cognition & Consciousness

In the article by Penn and colleagues (2008) mentioned above, it is argued that it is our evolved capacity for relational, role- and rule-governed analogical thought that fundamentally transforms human cognition (see also Deacon 1997: 435-438).

Apart from this proposal and the idea that consciousness might be the rubicon separating humans and animals, there are, of course, countless other proposals for what it is that makes humans unique. These include, for example, language (Bickerton 2009), symbolic thought (Deacon 1997), unique social cognitive capacities and motivations (Carpenter 2011), the capacity for mental time travel and autobiographic memory (Suddendorf & Corballis 2007) or conscious, higher-order, domain-general intelligence (Evans 2003) (see also these posts, i, ii, iii, iv).

As these examples amply demonstrate, the debate on human uniqueness and animal consciousness are hot and controversial topics in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science more generally. One seemingly insurmountable problem that immediately arises is of course what we mean by the term ‘consciousness’ in the first place (e.g. Blackmore 2010: 8ff.; Burkhardt & Bekoff 2009: 40f.).

However, it is widely acknowledged that there are at least some behavioural and physical criteria that can be taken as indicators for at least some form of consciousness (Blackmore 2010: 208f.).

Three behaviours that have been highlighted repeatedly in debates of this kind. :

“1. Mirror self-recognition

2. Tests of metacognition;

3. Metacognition of others’ mental states” (Gómez 2009: 45).

In this posts I will deal with mirror self-recognition. I’ll discuss the other two in my next post. These capacities are most often mentioned in discussions of the mentality of primates, especially great apes, but there are also relevant results from other ‘clever’ species outside the primate lineage such as, for example, dolphins (e.g. Herman 2009), ravens, and elephants (Blackmore 2010: 208ff.).

Mirror self-recognition

When they are about 18 months of age, children begin to recognize themselves in the mirror. This is tested by applying a spot of rouge somewhere the child cannot see it by herself, e.g. her forehead, without the child noticing. By about 18 months of age, children begin to notice and touch the spot on their forehead when they stand in front of a mirror. Around the same age, children also start using personal pronouns to refer to themselves, such as ‘me’, ‘mine’, and ‘I.’ Together with some other indicative behaviours at this age this has been taken as evidence for the emergence of a concept of self and of consciousness of one’s own self around that age (Lewis 2005: 363).

Similar methods have demonstrated mirror self-recognition (MSR) in a number of other species, including the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas), but also elephants, dolphins and magpies (Blackmore 2010: 210-214). Although there were also some claims that some monkey species (e.g. macaques and cotton-top tamarins) could recognize themselves in a mirror, these results could either not be replicated or were flawed methodologically (Anderson & Gallup 2011).

If we take MSR to be evidence for a concept of self, self-awareness, and consciousness, than this would mean that the species mentioned above who pass this test have some form of consciousness. However, there is a lively debate revolving around this contentious issue and it is possible that MSR only requires some form of complex body-concept. This means that MSR might not imply self-consciousness but just the ability to represent “body schemas, rather than cognitive schemas: i.e., awareness of oneself as a physical entity rather than awareness of oneself as a psychological entity” (Gómez 2009: 46).

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The results of the following experiment do indeed suggest that MSR is not equivalent to conscious self-awareness: In a scenario similar to that of MSR, three- and five-year old children were filmed while playing with an experimenter, in the course of which the experimenter surreptitiously attached a sticker to the child’s forehead. When the children were shown a video of what just happened immediately afterwards, only the five-year-olds touched their foreheads when they saw what happened in the video. Three-year-olds, on the other hand, seemed not to be able to integrate information about their past self into a coherent, conscious present self and did not realize that the sticker was still on their forehead (Gopnik 2009:146).

Consequently, it is not clear whether animals passing the MSR test possess this important aspect of self-awareness, i.e. whether they are capable of perceiving themselves as a continuous, conscious entity, and have an autobiographic memory (Burkhard & Bekoff 2009: 40f.; Suddendorf & Corballis 2007).

In my next post I will deal with the two other markers for some kind of higher-order cognition in animals: kowing what and that you know (metacognition) and knowing about others’ mental states (mentalizing/theory of mind/metacognition of other’s mental states)

References:

Anderson, James R. and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. (2011) "Which Primates Recognize Themselves in Mirrors?" In: PLoS Biol 9(3): e1001024.

Blackmore, Susan (2010): Consciousness: An Introduction. 2nd Edition.Oxford:Oxford University Press

Herman, Louis M. (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Dolphins." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 43-45.

Bickerton, Derek (2009): Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language. How Language Made Humans.New York: Hill and Wang.

Deacon, Terrence William (1997): The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Evans, Jonathan St B. T. (2003): "In Two Minds: Dual-Process Accounts of Reasoning." In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(10): 454-459.

Gómez, Juan-Carlos (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Great Apes." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 45-48.

Gopnik, Alison (2010): The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life.London: Bodley Head.

Lewis, Michael (2005): "Selfhood." In: Brian Hopkins (ed.): The Cambridge Encyclopedia of´Child Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 361-365.

Suddendorf, Thomas and Michael C. Corballis (2007): "The Evolution of Foresight: What is Mental Time Travel, and is it Unique to Humans?" In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30.3, 219-313.

[cross-posted at replicated typo]

Annual Review of Psychology 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:11:00 +0000

The Annual Review of Psychology for the year 2012 is now available. From a language evolution/evolution of human cognition point of view, there are two articles that look particularly interesting:

"Mechanisms of Social Cognition by Chris D. Frith and Uta Frith"

"Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct."

The Evolutionary Origins of Friendship by Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney

Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct.

Accent Forecasts in the UK and Germany

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I watched the second episode of Stephen Fry's four-part documentary series Planet Word which dealt with Identity and also had a short tidbit about Linguistic Relativity featuring an interview with Lera Boroditsky (although I must say that as a native speaker of German I'm still quite puzzled that I apparently tend to associate feminine attributes with bridges because they have feminine gender in German ("Die Brücke" ), whereas Spanish speakers associate male attributes with bridges because they have male gender in Spanish (el puente).

I also liked Stephen Fry's "Accent Forecast" for the UK

However, I wonder whether he was inspired by this German sketch

Update: Two (again quite negative) reviews of this episode, one by linguist Pauline Foster and one by syntactican Manuela Rocchi can be found here and here

4th Birthday!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:18:00 +0000

Today marks the 4th Birthday of this Blog, and although I haven't managed to post anything in quite a while, I thought I'd use this happy occasion to point out some interesting links:

First, James Hurford's sequel to his 2007 "The Origins of Meaning" has finally been published:

With, 808 pages "The Origins of Grammar"is twice as long as his 2007 volume and consists of three parts. To quote from the book description:

"The book is divided into three parts. In the first the author surveys the syntactic structures evident in the communicative behaviour of animals, such as birds and whales, and discusses how vocabularies of learned symbols could have evolved and the effects this had on human thought. In the second he considers how far the evolution of grammar depended on biological or cultural factors. In the third and final part he describes the probable route by which the human language faculty and languages evolved from simple beginnings to their present complex state."

An almost 100-page-long sample chapter, dealing with the question whether non-human animals have syntax, can be found here. In this chapter, Hurford analyses the structure of whale song, bird song, and primate calls, and comes to the conclusion that:

"No non-human has any semantically compositional syntax, where the form of the syntactic combination determines how the meanings of the parts combine to make the meaning of the whole."

Second, in the first part of a 5-part documentary series on language, Stephen Fry explores the evolution of language. Although there are some minor quibbles (e.g. Stephen Fry stating that language arose from primates grunts about 50,000 years ago, and him speculating that "it really is" language that makes us different from other primates without anyone to back him up), it's a thoroughly enjoyable documentary featuring interviews with people like Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello and Wolfgang Enard (of FOXP2-fame) at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Hat tip: */ˈdɪːkæf/

Update: Sean of Replicated Typo points to a pretty detailed (and pretty harsh) critique over at badlinguistics

Communication in Bonobos, Chimpanzees, and the Evolution of Language

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:53:00 +0000

The current issue of First Language features some interesting articles on the evolution of language:

It includes a book review of Michael Tomasello's "Origins of Human Communication" by Evan Kidd as well as a review of an edited volume titled "The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives" by Thomas Scott-Phillips, who rightly argues that the term Biolinguistics - which is mainly used by people from the Generative Grammar camp - is "not a theory-neutral term for the study of language origins."

Last but not least, there's also an interesting article by Heidi Lyn, Patricia Greenfield and E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh about "Semiotic combinations in Pan: A comparison of communication in a chimpanzee and two bonobos."

Here's the abstract:

Communicative combinations of two bonobos (Pan paniscus) and a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) are compared. All three apes utilized ordering strategies for combining symbols (lexigrams) or a lexigram with a gesture to express semantic relations such as agent of action or object of action. Combinatorial strategies used by all three apes revealed commonalities with child language, spoken and signed, at the two-year-old level. However, many differences were also observed: e.g., combinations made up a much smaller proportion and single symbols a much larger proportion of ape production compared with child production at a similar age; and ape combinations rarely exceeded three semiotic elements. The commonalties and differences among three sibling species highlight candidate combinatorial capacities that may underlie the evolution of human language.

Power and Perspective Taking

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:13:00 +0000

From Perlman & Miller (2009):

Powerful people are not very good at comprehending other people's point of view and taking their perspective: "If you ask powerful people to quickly drawn an "E" on their foreheads, they are much more likely than people of low power to draw the letter as if they were reading it, which makes it backward and illegible for anyone else - like this:"∃ " (Galinsky et al. 2006)"

On The Human: Terrence Deacon - Rethinking The Natural Selection Of Human Language

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:47:00 +0000

I just stumbled across this interesting website called "On The Human." Its

"an online community of humanists and scientists dedicated to improving our understanding of persons and the quasi-persons who surround us. As persons are biological, psychological, historical, moral, and autobiographical beings, we employ modes of inquiry from the sciences and humanities. Contributors explore issues in metaphysics and biology, ethics and neuroscience, experimental philosophy and evolutionary psychology."

Anyway, there are some interesting articles at the interface of Cognitive Science, Evolution, and Language on the site, written by quite well-known researchers, and what's even more interesting is that there are often comments by other researchers. For example, there's an article by Terrence Deacon called Rethinking The Natural Selection Of Human Language which features a lively discussion including, among others, Mark Turner, Talmy Givón, Derek Bickerton, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Salikoko Mufwene.

There's also an article by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh called "Human Language - Human Consciousness", which focuses on her work with enculturated bonobos like Kanzi, Panzi and Panbanisha and also includes a very heated discussion of her claims.

Review of FOXP2 and its role in brain development, speech, and the evolution of language

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Mon, 30 May 2011 07:05:00 +0000

Edmund Blair Bolles over at Babel's Dawn discusses a very interesting review of "FOXP2 and the role of cortico-basal ganglia circuits in speech and language evolution" by Wolfgang Enard. Be sure to check it out!

Below you can find the abstract of the review:

"Purpose of the review
A reduced dosage of the transcription factor FOXP2 leads to speech and language impairments probably owing to deficits in cortical and subcortical neural circuits. Based on evolutionary sequence analysis it has been proposed that the two amino acid substitutions that occurred on the human lineage have been positively selected. Here I review recent studies investigating the functional consequences of these two substitutions and discuss how these first endeavors to study human brain evolution can be interpreted in the context of speech and language evolution.
Recent findings
Mice carrying the two substitutions in their endogenous Foxp2 gene show specific alterations in dopamine levels, striatal synaptic plasticity and neuronal morphology. Mice carrying only one functional Foxp2, show additional and partly opposite effects suggesting that FOXP2 has contributed to tuning cortico-basal ganglia circuits during human evolution. Evidence from human and songbird studies suggest that this could have been relevant during language acquisition or vocal learning, respectively.
Summary
FOXP2 could have contributed to the evolution of human speech and language by adapting cortico-basal ganglia circuits. More generally the recent studies allow careful optimism that aspects of human brain evolution can be investigated in model systems such as the mouse.
Highlights
► First functional studies investigate human FOXP2 evolution in a mouse. ► Human-specific properties of FOXP2 are specific to cortico-basal ganglia circuits. ► These properties might be relevant for language acquisition and/or vocal learning."

Terrence Deacon - Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:17:00 +0000

It looks like Terrence Deacon, famed author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997), the second most cited text in the Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography has a new book out in November this year called "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter". I don't know to what extent this book will have anything interesting to say about the evolution of language per se, but as it seems to focus on the evolution of cognition, it certainly looks like its well worth a read.

Here's the book description:

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.

Leading biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon, whose acclaimed book The Symbolic Species explained how the human brain evolved its capacity for language, now offers a radical new approach to the riddle of consciousness. The fact that minds emerged from life and life emerged from inanimate matter leads Deacon to reexamine this mystery from the bottom up. While the same kinds of atoms make up rivers, bacteria, and human brains, Deacon shows how their dynamical relationships produce their different properties. In Incomplete Nature he reveals a missing link: emergent processes that are neither fully mental nor merely material, which provide a bridge connecting the two. He demonstrates how functions, intentions, representations, and values-despite their apparent nonmaterial character-can nevertheless produce physical consequences. Origins of life, information, sentience, meaning, and free will all fall into place in a fully integrated scientific account of the relationship between mind and matter.

Does Language Shape Thought? Different Manifestations of the Idea of Linguistic Relativity (I)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sat, 07 May 2011 14:13:00 +0000

Does the language we speak influence or even shape the way we think? Last December, there was an interesting debate over at The Economist website with Lera Boroditsky defending the motion, and Language Log’s Mark Liberman against the motion (who IMO, both did a very good job).

The result of the online poll was very clear: 78% agreed with the motion, while 22% disagreed.

There are, however, three main problems with this way of framing the question: First, it’s not really clear what ‘language’ really is, second, the same goes for “thought”, and third, there are many many ways of “influencing” and “shaping” something an bee conceptualized.

In this post I want to focus on the third problem and present a very useful classification system for hypotheses about linguistic relativity outlined in an article by Phillip Wolff and Kevin J. Holmes, which was published in the current issue Wiley Interdisciplinary Review: Cognitive Science.

Different manifestations of the idea of linguistic relativity

Language as Language-of-Thought

In its most extreme form, thought is simply equated with language. But this view, in which the units of thought are simply words from natural language, clearly can’t be right. For example, we can have thoughts that are difficult to express, we can understand ambiguous expressions (like “Kids make nutritious snacks”), and we are able to coin new words that express new meanings. All this would not be possible if we didn’t have a more fine-grained mental representation that that is encoded in words. In addition, research on non-human primates and human infants suggests that they are capable of some sophisticated forms of thought even in the absence of language.

This line of reasoning points to a representational format for concepts, categorization, memory, and reasoning that is separate from language.

On a very general level, then, we can all agree that thought is separate from language. But what about the many different ways language can affect thought?

Here, we can first make a distinction between views that hold that language determines thought (linguistic determinism), and those that hold that there are structural differences between language and thought, but that, nevertheless, language influences the way we think.

Linguistic Determinism

Linguistic determinism, a position most often connected to the name of Benjamin Lee Whorf, separates language from the conceptual system, but holds that the language we speak determines the basic categories of thought. This influence is seen as so strong that it can even overwrite pre-existing perceptual and categories in a way analogous to the way infants lose the ability to notice phonetic distinctions that do not exist in their native language. For example, at 6 months, infants growing up in English-speaking households are able to discriminate sounds that in Hindi are seen as different but in English are not, but at 12 months they have lost this ability and only pay attention to sound distinctions relevant to English (e.g. Dirven et al. 2007).

The linguistic determinism-hypothesis poses that this process also holds for many other areas of perception and, critically, cognition. To quote Whorf:

“The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which have to be organized largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.”
“We cut up nature—organize it into concepts—and ascribe significances as we do, largely because of absolutely obligatory patterns of our own language.”

(Please note that in most of his writings, Whorf actually argues for a position that is much more sophisticated and subtle than the one expressed in these popular quotes)

If language is given the role of organizing “the kaleidoscopic flux of impressions” presented to us by the world, this means that on this view, there is a very tight connection between what we can call the conceptual system/thought, and language, one the one hand, and a very loose connection between the conceptual system/thought and the world on the other.

A lot of research in the cognitive sciences, however, indicates that the relationship between thought and the world is much tighter than is assumed in linguistic determinism. For example, languages differ in the way they talk about motion events, especially in the way they encode the direction or path of a motion, on the one hand, and the manner of motion on the other:

"Manner languages (e.g.,English, German, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese) typically code manner in the verb(cf. English skip, run, hop, jog), and path in a variety of other devices such as particles (out), adpositions (into the room), verb prefixes (e.g.,German raus- ‘out’; cf. raus-rennen ‘run out’), etc. Path languages(e.g.,Modern Greek, Romance, Turkish, Japanese, and Hebrew) typically code path in the verb (cf. Greek vjeno ‘exit’, beno ‘enter’, ftano ‘arrive/reach’,aneveno ‘ascend’, diashizo ‘cross’), and manner in adverbials(trehontas‘running’, me ta podia ‘on foot’, grigora ‘quickly’)." (Papafragou & Selimis 2010: 227)

However, studies by Anna Papafragou and others suggest that although, say, English and Spanish speakers talk differently about the same motion event, the still remember it similarly:

"both manner and path seem to be available to an equal extent to speakers of different languages for purposes of (non-linguistic) categorisation and memory, regardless of whether these components are prominently and systematically encoded in the language." (Papafragou & Selimis 2010: 229)

These results and other experiments suggesting that in some respects 'thought and language' are less well aligned than 'thought and world' of course pose a serious problem for linguistic determinism.

Other Ways Language Might Have an Effect on Thought

In sum, this means that two versions of the Sapir-Whorf-Thesis – the Language-as-Thought and Linguistic Determinism hypotheses – can be rejected. But this still leaves us with the many ways language can have an effect on thought.

As Wolff & Holmes note it is precisely because" language and the conceptual system differ that we might expect a tension between them, driving each system to exert an inﬂuence on the other."

Wolff & Holmes use 5 different metaphors to classify the ways this can happen.

Thinking for speaking: Language influences thinking when we think about how to express something in language immediately prior to speaking
Language as meddler: linguistic representations/language and non-linguistic representations/thought can conflict and compete with each other
Language as augmenter: Language enables or extends certain kinds of thought
Language as spotlight: Language directs attention to /makes certain aspects very salient in thinking
Language as inducer: Language can be seen as a primining mechanisms that induces certain ways of thinking about something

In my next post, I’ll elaborate on these 5 subclasses of how language might affect thought.

[Cross posted at Replicated Typo]

References:

Dirven, René, Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen (2007): "Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Studies." In: Dirk Geeraerts und Hubert Cuyckens (Hrsg.): The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1203-1221.

Papafragou, Anna and Stathis Selimis (2010): "Event categorisation and language: A cross-linguistic study of motion." In: Language and Cognitive Processes 25: 224-260.

Wolff, P., & Holmes, K. (2011). Linguistic relativity Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2 (3), 253-265

How do children learn the difference between 'laying' and 'standing' a bottle on a table in Tamil, Dutch (and other languages)?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 20:27:00 +0000

From the current issue of the Journal of Child Language: "The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch" by Bhuvana Narasimhan and Marianne Gullberg
Here's the abstract:

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs (‘lay/stand a bottle on a table’) to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii ‘make stand’; paDka veyyii ‘make lie’), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent: they are monomorphemic (zetten ‘set/stand’; leggen ‘lay’), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in Tamil input corpora; in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately whereas Dutch children use high-frequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children's verb meaning acquisition.

The relation between pointing and language development

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:27:00 +0000

The December 2010 issue of 'Developmental Review' features a nice meta-analysis of of studies on pointing and language development by Cristina Colonnesia, Geert Jan J.M. Stamsa, Irene Kostera, and Marc J. Noomb. Here's their abstract and their 'research highlights'

Abstract

The use of the pointing gesture is one of the first ways to communicate with the world. This gesture emerges before the second year of life and it is assumed to be the first form of intentional communication. This meta-analysis examined the concurrent and longitudinal relation between pointing and the emergence of language. Twenty-five studies were included into the meta-analysis, including 734 children. The role of several moderators was examined: pointing modality, pointing motive, age at which the pointing was measured, the assessment method of the pointing gesture and language development, the modality of language, SES, and country. The results showed both a concurrent (r = .52) and a longitudinal (r = .35) relation between pointing and language development.

The relation between pointing and language development became stronger with age, and was found for pointing with a declarative and general motive, but not for pointing with an imperative motive. It is concluded that the pointing gesture is a key joint-attention behavior involved in the acquisition of language.

Research highlights

► Pointing gesture is concurrently (r = .52) and longitudinally (r = .35) related to language development. ► The relation between pointing gesture and language becomes stronger with age, in particular during the end of the second year of life. ► Both the production (r = .33) and the comprehension (r = .38) of pointing gesture are related to language development. ► Pointing with a declarative (r = .39) and with a general motive (r = .39), rather than with an imperative motive (r = .04), are related to language.

The need for multimodality in primate communication research

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:31:00 +0000

Barbara King points to a very interesting article in press at Animal Behaviour. In their essay "The language void: the need for multimodality in primate communication research" Katie Slocombe, Bridget Waller and Katja Liebal analyse more than 550 studies on primate communication from 1960 to 2008 and argue that research in one modality (e.g. gesture) often differs so strongly in its methodology from research on another modality (e.g. alarm calls) that the results can hardly be reliably compared. Here's their abstract:

Theories of language evolution often draw heavily on comparative evidence of the communicative abilities of extant nonhuman primates (primates). Many theories have argued exclusively for a unimodal origin of language, usually gestural or vocal. Theories are often strengthened by research on primates that indicates the absence of certain linguistic precursors in the opposing communicative modality. However, a systematic review of the primate communication literature reveals that vocal, gestural and facial signals have attracted differing theoretical and methodological approaches, rendering cross-modal comparisons problematic. The validity of the theories based on such comparisons can therefore be questioned. We propose that these a priori biases, inherent in unimodal research, highlight the need for integrated multimodal research. By examining communicative signals in concert we can both avoid methodological discontinuities as well as better understand the phylogenetic precursors to human language as part of a multimodal system.

Barbara King's discussion of the article is also very illuminating.

John Hawks: How language eats brains, and why it matters to language evolution.

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:07:00 +0000

John Hawks has posted a fascinating discussion of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (here) by Bedny et al. that shows that in congenitally blind adults, "brain regions that are thought to have evolved for vision can take on language processing as a result of early experience." (to quote from the abstract) (see also John Lehrer's discussion, here)

These results show the brain's immense plasticity, especially in early development. Crucially, the fact that "brain regions that did not evolve for language can nevertheless participate in language processing" (Bedny et al.) poses the questions whether language-specific processing functions need to have evolved at all.

To quote from John Hawk's discussion at lenght:

"The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.
I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all"

To me, these results also seem compatible with arguments made by Morten Christiansen, Nick Chater, and others, who argue that language was shaped by the human brain and its learning and processing mechanisms, instead of there being a language-specific biological endowment. On this view, then "language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms" (Chater & Christiansen 2010).

UPDATE [21/03/11]: John Hawks has written another highly interesting post that is also relevant to this topic and the question of the evolution of language and cognition more generally: The development of sharing and cooperation from infancy to school-age and (here).

The Linguistics of Birdsong - Review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:58:00 +0000

In the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences there is an interesting (and free!) review of the linguistics of birdsong and its similarities and differences to human language:

Unlike our primate cousins, many species of bird share with humans a capacity for vocal learning, a crucial factor in speech acquisition. There are striking behavioural, neural and genetic similarities between auditory-vocal learning in birds and human infants. Recently, the linguistic parallels between birdsong and spoken language have begun to be investigated. Although both birdsong and human language are hierarchically organized according to particular syntactic constraints, birdsong structure is best characterized as ‘phonological syntax’, resembling aspects of human sound structure. Crucially, birdsong lacks semantics and words. Formal language and linguistic analysis remains essential for the proper characterization of birdsong as a model system for human speech and language, and for the study of the brain and cognition evolution.

Robert C. Berwick, Kazuo Okanoya, Gabriel J.L. Beckers and Johan J. Bolhuis (2011) "Songs to syntax: the linguistics of birdsong." In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences." Volume 15, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 113-121

Update: Edmund Blair Bolles of Babel's Dawn has also just published a very short article about human speech, birdsong and convergent evolution in the journal Bioscience (here)

Four Stone Hearth 112, Chimpanzees, Hosts, and Goats

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:03:00 +0000

The latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth #112 is out over at Anthropology in Practice and contains a number of very interesting links.

For example, they link to a very interesting post by Barbara J. King in which she discusses work by David Leavens, Timothy P. Racine, and William D. Hopkins about pointing behaviour in chimpanzees. These authors question claims made by people like Michael Tomasello and others that only humans point declaratively to provide information and share attention (something which I blogged about previously, e.g. here; see also this post and a very interesting post about a new article by Hopkins and colleagues at Babel's Dawn)

Also, Four Stone Hearth is in dire need of hosts so please check out its announcement page if you might be interested in hosting it.

Hat tip: Daniel Lende

P.S. on a lighter note Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | Video on TED.com

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:37:00 +0000

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | Video on TED.com

"At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world."

Can children learn abstract syntactic principles by using general cognitive capacities?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:50:00 +0000

One of the most hotly debated issues in the study of language acquisition is whether the abstract syntactic principles of a language can be learned by children

1. by using domain-general capacities (such as pattern finding, analogy, statistical learning, categorization and generalization, etc.)

or whether they need

2. innately specified knowledge of language that enables them to form the right abstract syntactic categories that cannot be infered from the surface level of linguistic utterances (Chomsky's Poverty of Stimulus Argument)

In a new paper in the journal Cognition, Perfors et al. (2011) argue that domain-general capacities are sufficient for children to be able to learn abstract syntactic principles inherent in the linguistic input.

Here's the abstract:

Children acquiring language infer the correct form of syntactic constructions for which they appear to have little or no direct evidence, avoiding simple but incorrect generalizations that would be consistent with the data they receive. These generalizations must be guided by some inductive bias – some abstract knowledge – that leads them to prefer the correct hypotheses even in the absence of directly supporting evidence. What form do these inductive constraints take? It is often argued or assumed that they reflect innately specified knowledge of language. A classic example of such an argument moves from the phenomenon of auxiliary fronting in English interrogatives to the conclusion that children must innately know that syntactic rules are defined over hierarchical phrase structures rather than linear sequences of words (e.g., [Chomsky, 1965], [Chomsky, 1971],[Chomsky, 1980] and [Crain and Nakayama, 1987]). Here we use a Bayesian framework for grammar induction to address a version of this argument and show that, given typical child-directed speech and certain innate domain-general capacities, an ideal learner could recognize the hierarchical phrase structure of language without having this knowledge innately specified as part of the language faculty. We discuss the implications of this analysis for accounts of human language acquisition.

'Evolution and Human Behavioural Diversity'

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:01:00 +0000

The February issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences looks very interesting: It is a theme issue called 'Evolution and human behavioural diversity' and was compiled and edited by Gillian R. Brown, Thomas E. Dickins, Rebecca Sear and Kevin N. Laland. It consists of 13 articles and an introduction, which are all available for free.

Here's the abstract of the introduction:

Human beings persist in an extraordinary range of ecological settings, in the process exhibiting enormous behavioural diversity, both within and between populations. People vary in their social, mating and parental behaviour and have diverse and elaborate beliefs, traditions, norms and institutions. The aim of this theme issue is to ask whether, and how, evolutionary theory can help us to understand this diversity. In this introductory article, we provide a background to the debate surrounding how best to understand behavioural diversity using evolutionary models of human behaviour. In particular, we examine how diversity has been viewed by the main subdisciplines within the human evolutionary behavioural sciences, focusing in particular on the human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution approaches. In addition to differences in focus and methodology, these subdisciplines have traditionally varied in the emphasis placed on human universals, ecological factors and socially learned behaviour, and on how they have addressed the issue of genetic variation. We reaffirm that evolutionary theory provides an essential framework for understanding behavioural diversity within and between human populations, but argue that greater integration between the subfields is critical to developing a satisfactory understanding of diversity.

The article that looks most interesting to me is a paper by W. Tecmuseh Fitch called "Unity and diversity in human language":

Human language is both highly diverse—different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals—and easily learnable. Any language allows its users to express virtually any thought they can conceptualize. These traits render human language unique in the biological world. Understanding the biological basis of language is thus both extremely challenging and fundamentally interesting. I review the literature on linguistic diversity and language universals, suggesting that an adequate notion of ‘formal universals’ provides a promising way to understand the facts of language acquisition, offering order in the face of the diversity of human languages. Formal universals are cross-linguistic generalizations, often of an abstract or implicational nature. They derive from cognitive capacities to perceive and process particular types of structures and biological constraints upon integration of the multiple systems involved in language. Such formal universals can be understood on the model of a general solution to a set of differential equations; each language is one particular solution. An explicit formal conception of human language that embraces both considerable diversity and underlying biological unity is possible, and fully compatible with modern evolutionary theory.

N-gram/ngram

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:13:00 +0000

Chris over at the Lousy Linguist has a very nice roundup of quotes about the new Google Ngram Viewer. The overall consensus as of now seems to be that although the are a majority of problems with the program,

"Whatever misgivings scholars may have about the larger enterprise, the data will be a lot of fun to play around with. And for some—especially students, I imagine—it will be a kind of gateway drug that leads to more-serious involvement in quantitative research."(Geoffrey Nunberg)

Here's what I searched for (obviously):

Cooperative Interaction in an Infant Gorilla

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:17:00 +0000

There seems to be a very interestig article in a Special Issue of Interaction Studies with a focus on Human-Animal Interaction, which challenges some of the assumptions underlying Michael Tomasello's claim that the ability for shared intentionality and cooperation (see e.g. here) is what makes us uniquely human.

The article is by Juan Carlos Gómez of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland and is titled
"The ontogeny of triadic cooperative interactions with humans in an infant gorilla." Unofortunately I don't have access to the paper but here's the abstract:

This paper reports a longitudinal study on the ontogeny of triadic cooperative interactions (involving coordinations of objects and people) in a hand-reared lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) from 6 months to 36 months of age. Using the behavioural categories developed by Hubley and Trevarthen (1979) to characterize the origins of “secondary intersubjectivity” in human babies between 8–12 months of age, I chart the emergence of comparable coordinations of gestures and actions with objects and acts of dyadic communication. The findings show that the categories and concepts of secondary intersubjectivity are applicable to the gorilla, who engages with people in cooperative actions with objects. The ontogeny of triadic interaction in the gorilla was very similar to that described in human infants, but more extended in time and with some peculiarities, such as the absence of pointing and showing gestures, some of whose functions might be taken over by contact gestures which in human infants may appear later in development. The results do not support claims of human uniqueness in the development of cooperative action, but suggest a heterochrony in some aspects of the ontogeny of triadic interactions leading to a divergence between gorilla and human infants within secondary intersubjectivity.

picture via

Theory of Mind and Perspective Taking

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:30:00 +0000

There's a wealth of new and very interesting articles in the November Issue of Developmental Psychology relating to theory of mind and perspective taking:

in their article "True or false: Do 5-year-olds understand belief?" William V. Fabricius and his colleagues argue that conventional theory of mind tests don't really show a capacity for false belief understanding but instead
"young children may only appreciate that people will know certain things and remain ignorant of certain other things as a function of perceptual accessibility. The argument goes on to suggest that in instances in which an individual does not know something, young children make a logical leap and judge that this individual is bound to be mistaken and that he or she will choose an incorrect option when given a choice between correct and incorrect alternatives."
This has been called perceptual access reasoning in which children follow two principles:
"(a) seeing and other forms of perceptual access lead to knowing, and lacking perceptual access leads to not knowing and (b) knowing leads to acting correctly, and not knowing leads to acting incorrectly."
In a standard false belief task the child can only choose between two options (e.g. the toy is either in the red or the blue box). This makes their responses ambiguous because it is not clear whether children pass this task because they understand that the other person will act on a false belief/mental representation or simpy because they reason that the person will make the wrong choice as he or she didn't have perceptual access to the situation.
The experiments reported in this article indicate that children only really start reasoning about beliefs at age six. Favicus et al conclude that:
"because most prior studies have failed to detect young children's use of perceptual access reasoning, they have overestimated their understanding of false beliefs."
In an article called "Forgetting common ground: Six- to seven-year-olds have an overinterpretive theory of mind." Kristin Hansen Lagattuta report a study in which
Four- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 256) viewed a series of pictures that were covered with occluders to reveal nondescript or identifiable parts. Participants predicted how 3 characters, 1 who had previously viewed the full picture and 2 who had not, would interpret the obstructed drawings. Results showed significant development between 4 and 9 years and between 9 years and adulthood in understanding thought diversity as well as situations in which people should think alike. There was also evidence for aU-shaped developmental curve, with 6- to 7-year-olds most often overextending the rule that people will think differently, particularly on the initial testing trials. Performance on the different interpretive theory-of-mind measures was differentially related to individual differences in inhibitory control and verbal working memory.
Monica Tsethlikai reports on "The Influence of a Friend's Perspective on American Indian Children's Recall of Previously Misconstrued Events":
The ability of American Indian children (N = 99; 7–12 years of age) to reframe a memory of a friend's seemingly mean-spirited actions (Story 1) after hearing the friend's perspective detailing her/his good intentions (Story 2) was explored. Children in a control group heard an unrelated Story 2 and did not alter their retelling of Story 1. Good verbal skills facilitated the integration of the friend's perspective in memory for the children who heard the friend's explanation. Higher scores on the working memory and inhibition tasks were associated with higher verbal ability scores. Older children had better working memory and inhibitory skills than younger children. Cultural engagement predicted better social competence ratings but not higher memory reframing scores as predicted.
Finally, there's an interesting article by Christina M. Atance et al. on perspective taking and "Preschoolers' Understanding of Others' Desires: Fulfilling Mine Enhances My Understanding of Yours." Here's the abstract:
We developed a gift-giving task requiring children to identify their mother's desire, when her desire differed from theirs. We found a developmental change: 3- and 4-year-olds performed more poorly than 5-year-olds (Experiment 1). A modified version of this task (Experiment 2) revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds whose desires had been fulfilled chose an appropriate gift for their mothers significantly more often than children whose desires were unfulfilled. Children who merely anticipated desire fulfillment also outperformed children whose desires were unfulfilled. Analysis of children's verbal explanations provides converging evidence that desire fulfillment enhanced children's tendency to adopt the perspective of their mother and justify their choices by referencing her desires. Discussion focuses on why desire fulfillment enhances children's ability to consider the desires of others.

Michael Tomasello - Why We Cooperate

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:07:00 +0000

cross-posted at Replicated Typo

In this post I will offer a short overview of some aspects of Michael

Tomasello’s latest book „Why We Cooperate,” which is based on his 2008 Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

Tomasello deals with the question howcooperative behaviour and itssocio-cognitive foundations arise both in development and during theevolution of the human species. His short text is accompanied by four short commentaries by leading scholars who contributed in important ways to the theory of the evolution and ontogenetic development Tomasello espouses here. These are: psychologist Carol S. Dweck, anthropologist Joan B. Silk, philosopher Brian Skyrms and developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke.

In this post I only want to briefly summarize some of the key tenets of Tomasello’s book to offer an introduction to his work on cooperation, whose main impetus it is to have a closer look at the relatively simple and primal cooperative and interactive social behaviour that builds the foundation of human culture.

The Uniqueness of Human Culture

Tomasello points out that a lot of social animals can be said to have a culture insofar as the same animal species can live in slighty different habitats and show different behaviours (e.g. chimpanzees of different regions have different pant-hoots, many species have regionally differing techniques for obtaining food).
In this regard, human culture is only quantitatively different from that of, say, the other great apes. The difference here is that humans simply have to learn about more culture-specific behaviours and artefacts. The principle however, is the same.
But according to Tomasello, there are two aspects that also make human culture also qualitatively different from all others:

human culture is cumulative. That is, artefacts and behavioural practices often become more complex over time. Every improvement or accepted changed will be transferred to the next generation and so forth.
human culture is unique in that there are social institutions, which create and enforce culture norms and practices.

What underlies these two features “are a set of species-unique skills and motivations for cooperation.” (Tomasello 2009: XIII) on which Tomasello elaborates in the subsequent chapters.

Early Spelke

In the first chapter, “Born (and Bred) to Help”, Tomasello outlines how children come to be (or already are) cooperative so that they can take part in an co-establish human culture.
He advances a theory he dubs “Early Spelke, Later Dweck.”Research done by Tomasello and many others shows that by the time they are about one year old, infants already prove to be cooperative and helpful in many contexts. In addition, these tendencies seem not be taught but come naturally to them given sufficient interaction with a normal environment. (Hence ‘Early Spelke, referring to the work done by Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke on innate or naturally emerging ‘core knowledge’).

Later Dweck
Later in development however, this picture becomes more complex: children come to be concerned about whether others will reciprocate and also about how they are judged by others in the group. They also gradually internalise cultural norms.
Up to now Tomasello has mostly described the initial starting point from which children refine their social behaviour and become truly cultural beings. More precisely, what happens is that children become less ‘indiscriminate’ in terms of who they behave altruistically towards, but become more discerning based on a variety of characteristics.

This phase could be described as the birth of the ‘public self’ which is concerned with ‘impression management.’ The child comes to realize that

“they are targets of the judgements of others who are using social norms as standards.” (Tomasello 2009: 31).

In other words, for the first time they develop a larger we- or group perspective, which is connected to the insight that this ‘we-ness’ is tied to certain social norms (‘They way we do things’).

Experiments show that by the age of three children actively follow social norms and also already participate in enforcing these norms.
If they grasp how a game works, for example, not only do the play it according to the rules, but they also correct others and object if they try to play the game differently.

Interestingly, they also use ‘normative declaratives’ like “One can’t do that” or “It doesn’t work like that,” when doing so.

Those findings contrast sharply with Jean Piaget’s influential view of how social norms are internalised. According to him, (and building on the work of Piaget, moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg), children follow social norms only because they fear punishment.

Instead, from and early age on children already seem to adopt some kind of ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1970) and a “he is me” attitude of identification when interacting with others (see also Meltzoff 2005).

As Tomasello argues,

"without this added dimension of some kind of ‘we’ identity and rationality , it is impossible to explain take it upon themselves to actively enforce social norms on others from a third-party stance, especially those norms that are not based on cooperation but rather on constitutive rules that are, in an important sense, arbitrary" (Tomasello 2009: 39).

For Tomasello these processes form the basis of human cooperative behaviour, cultural transmission, social institutions and cultural practices.

References:

Meltzoff, Andrew N. (2005): Imitation and other minds: The "Like Me" hypothesis. In S. Hurley and N. Chater (Eds.), erspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science. Vol. 2, pp. 55-77). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Nagel, Thomas (1970) The possibility of altruism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Unviersity Press.

Tomasello, Michael (2009): Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA/London, England: Boston Review.

Cognitive Linguistics, Metaphor and Social Cognition

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 10:38:00 +0000

There's an interesting new article in the new issue of Psychological Bullettin arguing that our ability for metaphoric thinking (e.g. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) plays a role in social cognition.
Here's the abstract (see here) :

"Social cognition is the scientific study of the cognitive events underlying social thought and attitudes. Currently, the field's prevailing theoretical perspectives are the traditional schema view and embodied cognition theories. Despite important differences, these perspectives share the seemingly uncontroversial notion that people interpret and evaluate a given social stimulus using knowledge about similar stimuli. However, research in cognitive linguistics (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) suggests that people construe the world in large part through conceptual metaphors, which enable them to understand abstract concepts using knowledge of superficially dissimilar, typically more concrete concepts. Drawing on these perspectives, we propose that social cognition can and should be enriched by an explicit recognition that conceptual metaphor is a unique cognitive mechanism that shapes social thought and attitudes. To advance this metaphor-enriched perspective, we introduce the metaphoric transfer strategy as a means of empirically assessing whether metaphors influence social information processing in ways that are distinct from the operation of schemas alone. We then distinguish conceptual metaphor from embodied simulation—the mechanism posited by embodied cognition theories—and introduce the alternate source strategy as a means of empirically teasing apart these mechanisms. Throughout, we buttress our claims with empirical evidence of the influence of metaphors on a wide range of social psychological phenomena. We outline directions for future research on the strength and direction of metaphor use in social information processing. Finally, we mention specific benefits of a metaphor-enriched perspective for integrating and generating social cognitive research and for bridging social cognition with neighboring fields."

Landau, Mark J., Brian P. Meier and Lucas A. Keefer (2010): A Metaphor-Enriched Social Cognition. In: Psychological Bulletin 136 (6): 1045-1067.