Presented by the IHC Language, Interaction, and Social Organization Research Focus Group
Monday, October 21 / 3:30 P.M. / Free
McCune Conference Room / 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building

Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in a way that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the rachet effect). The key adaptation involves individuals coming to understand other individuals as intentional agents like the self. This evolutionarily novel form of social understanding emerges in human ontogeny at around one year of age as infants begin to engage with other persons in various kinds of joint attentional activities. Young children's joint attentional skills then enable them to engage in some uniquely powerful forms of cultural learning, including the acquisition of language and many other conventional skills, and to comprehend their worlds in some uniquely powerful ways involving perspectivally based symbolic representations.

Michael Tomasello is Co-Director, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Leipzig, and Honorary Professor of Psychology at Manchester University. He has published many articles and books on the processes of social cognition, social learning, and communication from developmental ontogenetic), comparative (phylogenetic), and cultural (historical) perspectives. His publications include First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development (Cambridge University Press), The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure (Lawrence Erlbaum), and The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press). His research focuses mainly on children from 1 to 4 years of age and nonhuman primates, especially great apes.

This event is sponsored by the IHC Language, Interaction, and Social Organization Research Focus Group.

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