External links
- Official website at Duke University
- Origin of Human Communication, Jean Nicod Lectures (2006)
- Michael Tomasello at IMDb
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Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". [1] His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition." [2]
Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida. He received his bachelor's degree 1972 from Duke University and his doctorate in Experimental Psychology 1980 from University of Georgia. [3]
Tomasello was a professor of psychology and anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, during the 1980s and 1990s. [3] Subsequently, he moved to Germany to become co-director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and later also honorary professor at University of Leipzig and co-director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center. [3] In 2016, he became professor of psychology and neuroscience, Duke University, where he now is James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor.
He works on child language acquisition as a crucially important aspect of the enculturation process. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, rejecting the idea of an innate universal grammar [4] and instead proposing a functional theory of language development (sometimes called the social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition or usage-based approach to language acquisition) in which children learn linguistic structures through intention-reading and pattern-finding in their discourse interactions with others.
Tomasello also studies broader cognitive skills in a comparative light at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig. With his research team, he created a set of experimental devices to test toddlers' (from 6 months to 24 months) and apes' spatial, instrumental, and social cognition; the outcome of which is that social [5] (even ultrasocial) [6] cognition is what truly sets human apart.
More specifically, Tomasello argues that non-human apes lack a series of skills:
Tomasello sees these skills as being preceded and encompassed by the capacity to share attention and intention (collective intentionality), an evolutionary novelty that would have emerged as a cooperative integrating of apes skills that formerly worked in competition. [7]
The overall scheme of sharing of attention and of intention involves inferring a common need; being motivated to act cooperatively to fulfill this need; coordinating individuals' roles and perspectives under the common goal of fulfilling this common need if, and only if, other agents fulfill their commitment toward that goal; and sharing the spoils fairly. Tomasello holds such dual structure of commonality and individuality as being a cognitive integration of skills in mind reading, in instrumental action, and in simulational thinking (meaning agents use an internal representation of the state of things, and simulate actions and outcomes of these actions). Individuals need to make clear or explicit, by eye contact, by gestural pantomime or else, that they intend to coordinate their actions and perspectives under a common goal. Communicating such a specific intent suggest agents can entertain a sense of forming a "we", to which they feel a sense of commitment, such that defecting from collaborating requires an apology or a taking leave. Collaborative agents also see their interaction through a representational format amounting to a bird's eye view or view from nowhere, as suggested by their skills at role switching with a partner, and at inferring what is helpful or relevant to help a partners play his or her role.
Tomasello's defense, use, and deepening of the shared attention and intention hypothesis rely on the experimental data he collected (see also work with Malinda Carpenter [8] ). Tomasello also resorts to an evolutionary two-step scenario (see below), and to philosophical concepts borrowed from Paul Grice, John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, and anthropologist Dan Sperber.
At one point in time, after the emergence of the genus Homo two millions years ago, Homo Heidelbergensis [9] or other close candidate became obligate foragers and scavengers under ecological pressures of desertification that led to scarcity of resources. Individuals able to avoid free-riders and to divide the spoils with collaborative partners would have gained an adaptive advantage over non cooperators. The heightened dependence on joint effort to gain food and the social selection of partners are supposed to account for an evolution toward better skills at coordinating individual's roles and perspectives under a common attentional frame (that of the hunt or scavenging) and under a common goal, giving rise to joint, interpersonal intention. Later, around 200,000 years ago, [10] new ecological pressures presumably posed by competition within groups put those in "loose pools" of collaborators at a disadvantage against groups of coherently collaborative individuals working for a common territorial defense. "Individuals ... began to understand themselves as members of particular social group with a particular identity". [11]
For Tomasello, this two-step evolutionary path of macro-ecological pressures affecting micro-level skills in representation, inferences, and self-monitoring, does not hold because natural selection acts on internal mechanisms. "Cognitive processes are a product of natural selection, but they are not its target. Indeed, natural selection cannot even see cognition; it can only see the effects of cognition in organizing and regulating overt actions." [12] Ecological pressures would have put prior cooperative or mutualistic behaviors at such an advantage against competition as to create a new selective pressure favoring new cognitive skills, which would have posed new challenges, in an autocatalytic way.
Echoing the phylogenetic path, humans' unique skills at joint and collective intentionality develop during the individual's lifetime by scaffolding, not only on simple skills like distinguishing animate/inanimate matter, but also on the communicative conventions and institutions forming the socio-cultural environment, forming feedback loops that enrich and deepen both cultural ground and individual's prior skills. "[B]asic skills evolve phylogenetically, enabling the creation of cultural products historically, which then provide developing children with the biological and cultural tools they need to develop ontogenetically". [13]
The sharing of attention and of intention is taken to be prior to language in evolutionary time and in an individual's lifetime, while conditioning language's acquisition through the parsing of joint attentional scenes into actors, objects, events, and the like. More broadly, Tomasello sees the sharing of attention and of intention as the roots of humans' cultural world (the roots of conventions, of group identity, of institutions): "Human reasoning, even when it is done internally with the self, is ... shot through and through with a kind of collective normativity in which the individual regulates her actions and thinking based on the group's normative conventions and standards". [14]
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Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Imagination is also a cognitive process, it is considered as such because it involves thinking about possibilities. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.
Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
Pascal Robert Boyer is a French-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Cognitive specialization suggests that certain behaviors, often in the domain of social communication, are passed on to offspring and refined to be maximally beneficial by the process of natural selection. Specializations serve an adaptive purpose for an organism by allowing the organism to be better suited for its habitat. Over time, specializations often become essential to the species' continued survival. Cognitive specialization in humans has been thought to underlie the acquisition, development, and evolution of language, theory of mind, and specific social skills such as trust and reciprocity. These specializations are considered to be critical to the survival of the species, even though there are successful individuals who lack certain specializations, including those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder or who lack language abilities. Cognitive specialization is also believed to underlie adaptive behaviors such as self-awareness, navigation, and problem solving skills in several animal species such as chimpanzees and bottlenose dolphins.
Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
Joint attention or shared attention is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. It is achieved when one individual alerts another to an object by means of eye-gazing, pointing or other verbal or non-verbal indications. An individual gazes at another individual, points to an object and then returns their gaze to the individual. Scaife and Bruner were the first researchers to present a cross-sectional description of children's ability to follow eye gaze in 1975. They found that most eight- to ten-month-old children followed a line of regard, and that all 11- to 14-month-old children did so. This early research showed it was possible for an adult to bring certain objects in the environment to an infant's attention using eye gaze.
Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.
Human ethology is the study of human behavior. Ethology as a discipline is generally thought of as a sub-category of biology, though psychological theories have been developed based on ethological ideas. The bridging between biological sciences and social sciences creates an understanding of human ethology. The International Society for Human Ethology is dedicated to advancing the study and understanding of human ethology.
Josep Call is a Spanish comparative psychologist specializing in primate cognition.
Katherine Nelson was an American developmental psychologist, and professor.
Cultural group selection is an explanatory model within cultural evolution of how cultural traits evolve according to the competitive advantage they bestow upon a group. This multidisciplinary approach to the question of human culture engages research from the fields of anthropology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, sociology, and psychology.
Culture and social cognition is the relationship between human culture and human cognitive capabilities. Cultural cognitive evolution proposes that humans’ unique cognitive capacities are not solely due to biological inheritance, but are in fact due in large part to cultural transmission and evolution. Modern humans and great apes are separated evolutionarily by about six million years. Proponents of cultural evolution argue that this would not have been enough time for humans to develop the advanced cognitive capabilities required to create tools, language, and build societies through biological evolution. Biological evolution could not have individually produced each of these cognitive capabilities within that period of time. Instead, humans must have evolved the capacity to learn through cultural transmission. This provides a more plausible explanation that would fit within the given time frame. Instead of having to biologically account for each cognitive mechanism that distinguishes modern humans from previous relatives, one would only have to account for one significant biological adaptation for cultural learning. According to this view, the ability to learn through cultural transmission is what distinguishes humans from other primates. Cultural learning allows humans to build on existing knowledge and make collective advancements, also known as the “ratchet effect”. The ratchet effect simply refers to the way in which humans continuously add on to existing knowledge through modifications and improvements. This unique ability distinguishes humans from related primates, who do not seem to build collaborative knowledge over time. Instead, primates seem to build individual knowledge, in which the expertise of one animal is not built on by others, and does not progress across time.
Deep social mind is a concept in evolutionary psychology; it refers to the distinctively human capacity to 'read' the mental states of others while reciprocally enabling those others to read one's own mental states at the same time. The term 'deep social mind' was first coined in 1999 by Andrew Whiten, professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at St. Andrews University, Scotland. Together with closely related terms such as 'reflexivity' and 'intersubjectivity', it is now well-established among scholars investigating the evolutionary emergence of human sociality, cognition and communication.
Brian Hare is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. He researches the evolution of cognition by studying both humans, our close relatives the primates, and species whose cognition converged with our own. He founded and co-directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center.
Malinda Carpenter,Ph.D, FRSE is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of St Andrews, an international researcher specialising in infant and child communications, prosocial behaviour and group reactions, in how people learn to understand others, and building self esteem; her work includes research between ape and human social cognition, and more recently in considering human-robotic communication futures.
