LECTURE 3- THINKING AND COOPERATION Flashcards
3 cognitive skills apes share with humans
- Representation- great apes solve problems by representing situations off line. This is shown through evidence from experiments requiring great apes to fetch tools froma different room e.g. get food from a different room (Tomasello, 2014)
- Inference- great apes make inferences. If they observe that A leads to B when A Is present they expect B to be present
2.self monitoring- great apes have to ability to self monitor and adjust their actions. This process enables them to adjust their actions in real time. In experiments where chimpanzees compete for food with humans, they approach a piece of food without being seen (vs being seen)n if given the choice. This also shows great apes understand intentional relationships in a problem situation.
individual intentionality
These are individual goals + knowledge used to pursue them
It is a form of intelligence
Great apes understand the causal and intentional relationships in a problem situation
They use this knowledge for competition: they know how to pursue individual goals in a social world
Humans have joint intentionality/ great apes have individua intentionality
difference between human thinking and ape thinking
Use the same 3 skills; representation, inference, self monitoring. BUT we use these skills cooperatively rather than competitively
Cooperative cognitive skills and motivations are needed for human communication this is called joint intentionality.
Chimpanzees cooperate in group behaviour in I mode- humans underwent cooperative turn- here it became advantageous to do things together. So they developed joint intentionality
Joint intentionality= cognitive skills and motivations to form and pursue joint goals + shared knowledge to form common ground
Joint attention- unique human ability to share focus, have social coordination, dual level thinking, and mutual expectations
3 cognitive skills vital for human communication
Perspectival representation= representing the others perspective in my mind. Both communicators must hold in their mind the others perspective for human communication to happen
Recursive inference= awareness of your representation of my perspective (thinking about each others thinking back n forth) e.g. thinking if I point here the other person will understand to go that way as they will think to go that way
Communicative self-monitoring=anticipating the likely effect of a communicative action, leading to the pre-correction of errors / constantly monitoring our own communication to make it make sense and correct any errors
otensive signals
a special set of signals to help the mutual assumption of cooperativeness- includes eye contact and addressing others vocally. - by means of which the communicator highlights for the recipient that he has some relevant information for her. E.g. pointing to something with eye contact and excited vocalisation
difference between insistent requestive info and neutral intonations
Insistent requestive information- get this for me e.g. showing were the berries are to get them for her
Neutral intonations= informing e.g. informing someone there is berries so that she might get some for herself
importance of new info
Within the concept of common ground, point ‘new’ things are important, as then we will look for it. We use a mutual assumption of newness to determine what a pointing gesture will be rlevant for them.
If we want to consider alternative meanings of a pointing gesture a human would select the alternative that conevys something NEW relative to the common ground they share
Infants show this distinction between shared and new information
perspective character of pointing and pantoming in humans
When humans began to communicate cooperatively they are constantly taking the other’s perspective on a situation or entity to which they themselves were already attending (trinagualting with each other)
Humans think how their communicative ACT FITS INTO THE LIFE OF THE RECIPIENT
Human communicators are not tied to their own goals and perspective, unlike apes which are.
symbolic nature of human gestures
The act of pantomiming in communication shows a symbolic relationship- meant to envoke in imagination the intended referent
Iconic gestures are mostly categorical
quasi propositional characteristics of human gestures
Individuals interacting in joint attention, can conceptualise the same event, or situation, simultaneously from multipole perspectives.
The symbolisation of these perspectives, with some indication of force-content distinction, made them at least incipiently propositional
This process effectively decontextualizes the individuals experience of the world,
socially recursive inferences
Refers to: ‘I wonder what he thinks I’m thinking’
Great apes do not make inferences about what the other is thinking but humans do
Socially recurisve inferences occur as humans assume by common ground that the commnicator has cooperative motives
Reflecting on their own thinking is vital
