Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T03:55:54.766Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The role of communication in acquisition, curation, and transmission of culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2020

Hyowon Gweon Open the ORCID record for Hyowon Gweon [Opens in a new window]
Hyowon Gweon*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Stanford, CA94305. [email protected] https://sll.stanford.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Veissière et al.'s proposal aims to explain how cognition enables cultural learning, but fails to acknowledge a distinctively human behavior critical to this process: communication. Recent advances in developmental and computational cognitive science suggest that the social-cognitive capacities central to TTOM also support sophisticated yet remarkably early-emerging inferences and communicative behaviors that allow us to learn and share abstract knowledge.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 43 , 2020 , e104
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bonawitz, E., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Goodman, N. D., Spelke, E. & Schulz, L. (2011) The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Cognition 120(3):322–30. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.001.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J. & Henrich, J. (2011) The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(Suppl_2):10918–25. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1100290108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bridgers, S., Jara-Ettinger, J. & Gweon, H. (2019) Young children consider the expected utility of others’ learning to decide what to teach. Nature Human Behaviour 4(2):144–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Csibra, G. & Gergely, G. (2009) Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(4):148–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goodman, N. D. & Frank, M. C. (2016) Pragmatic language interpretation as probabilistic inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20(11):818–29. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.08.005.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grice, H. P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In Syntax and semantics, vol. 3, speech acts, ed. Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L., pp. 41–58. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gweon, H. & Asaba, M. (2017) Order matters: Children's evaluation of underinformative teachers depends on context. Child Development 89(3):e278–e292. http://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12825.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gweon, H., Pelton, H., Konopka, J. A. & Schulz, L. E. (2014) Sins of omission: Children selectively explore when teachers are under-informative. Cognition 132(3):335–41. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.04.013.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gweon, H., Shafto, P. & Schulz, L. (2018) Development of children's sensitivity to overinformativeness in learning and teaching. Developmental Psychology 54(11):2113–25. http://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000580.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gweon, H., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Schulz, L. E. (2010) Infnts consider both the sample and the sampling process in inductive generalization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 107(20):9066–71. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1003095107.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hewlett, B. S., Fouts, H. N., Boyette, A. H. & Hewlett, B. L. (2011) Social learning among Congo Basin hunter-gatherers. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366(1567):1168–78. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.05.016.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heyes, C. (2018a) Cognitive gadgets: The cultural evolution of thinking. Belknap Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jara-Ettinger, J., Gweon, H., Schulz, L. E. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2016) The naïve utility calculus: Computational principles underlying commonsense psychology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20(8):589–604. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.05.011.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendal, R. L., Boogert, N. J., Rendell, L., Laland, K. N., Webster, M. & Jones, P. L. (2018) Social learning strategies: Bridge-building between fields. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22(7):651–65. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.04.003.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rendell, L., Boyd, R., Cownden, D., Enquist, M., Eriksson, K., Feldman, M. W., Fogarty, L., Ghirlanda, S., Lillicrap, T. & Laland, K. N. (2010) Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament. Science 328(5975):208–213.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shafto, P., Goodman, N. D. & Griffiths, T. L. (2014) A rational account of pedagogical reasoning: Teaching by, and learning from, examples. Cognitive Psychology 71:55–89. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2013.12.004.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shneidman, L., Gweon, H., Schulz, L. E. & Woodward, A. L. (2016) Learning from others and spontaneous exploration: A cross-cultural investigation. Child Development 87(3):723–35. http://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12502.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomasello, M. (2010) Origins of human communication. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Vélez, N. & Gweon, H. (2018) Integrating incomplete information with imperfect advice. Topics in Cognitive Science 329(5995):1081–17. http://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12388.Google Scholar