109 found
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  1.  74
    The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition.Michael Tomasello - 1999 - Harvard University Press.
    Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. -/- Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within (...)
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  2.  33
    A Natural History of Human Morality.Michael Tomasello (ed.) - 2015 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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  3. Origins of Human Communication.Michael Tomasello - 2008 - MIT Press.
    In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially ...
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  4. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition.Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne & Henrike Moll - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (5):675-691.
    We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and (...)
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  5.  22
    Primate Cognition.Michael Tomasello & Josep Call - 1997 - Oxford University Press USA.
    In this enlightening exploration of our nearest primate relatives, Michael Tomasello and Josep Call address the current state of our knowledge about the cognitive skills of non-human primates and integrate empirical findings from the beginning of the century to the present.
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  6. Cultural learning.Michael Tomasello, Ann Cale Kruger & Hilary Horn Ratner - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (3):495-511.
    This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. (...)
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  7. Primate Cognition.Amanda Seed & Michael Tomasello - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (3):407-419.
    As the cognitive revolution was slow to come to the study of animal behavior, the vast majority of what we know about primate cognition has been discovered in the last 30 years. Building on the recognition that the physical and social worlds of humans and their living primate relatives pose many of the same evolutionary challenges, programs of research have established that the most basic cognitive skills and mental representations that humans use to navigate those worlds are already possessed by (...)
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  8.  71
    Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm.David Buttelmann, Malinda Carpenter & Michael Tomasello - 2009 - Cognition 112 (2):337-342.
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  9.  54
    The moral psychology of obligation.Michael Tomasello - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43:1-33.
    Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: First, it has a peremptory, demanding force, with a kind of coercive quality, and second, it is often tied to agreement-like social interactions in which breaches prompt normative protest, on the one side, and apologies, excuses, justifications, and guilt on the other. Drawing on empirical research in comparative and developmental psychology, I provide here a psychological (...)
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  10. What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality.Michael Tomasello & Hannes Rakoczy - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (2):121-147.
    It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief–desire psychology of four–year–old children and adults (so–called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children's understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing’ in the sense that it (...)
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  11. The Role of Ontogeny in the Evolution of Human Cooperation.Michael Tomasello & Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera - 2017 - Human Nature 28 (3):274–288.
    To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al. (2012, in Current Anthropology 53(6):673–92) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The key adaptive context in this account was the obligate collaborative foraging of early human adults. Hawkes (2014, in Human Nature 25(1):28–48), following Hrdy (Mothers and Others, Harvard University Press, 2009), provided an alternative account for the emergence of uniquely human cooperative skills in which the key was early human infants’ attempts to solicit care and (...)
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  12.  79
    Do young children have adult syntactic competence?Michael Tomasello - 2000 - Cognition 74 (3):209-253.
  13. Chimpanzees know what others know, but not what they believe.Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call & Michael Tomasello - 2008 - Cognition 109 (2):224-234.
  14. Young children enforce social norms selectively depending on the violator’s group affiliation.Marco Fh Schmidt, Hannes Rakoczy & Michael Tomasello - 2012 - Cognition 124 (3):325-333.
  15.  75
    Joint attention to mental content and the social origin of reasoning.Cathal O’Madagain & Michael Tomasello - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4057-4078.
    Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our beliefs. Up to now, however, we have had little understanding of how this works. Here we argue that a uniquely human socio-linguistic phenomenon which we call ‘joint attention to mental content’ plays a key role. JAM is the ability to focus (...)
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  16.  43
    Young children’s understanding of violations of property rights.Federico Rossano, Hannes Rakoczy & Michael Tomasello - 2011 - Cognition 121 (2):219-227.
  17.  61
    Twelve-month-olds communicate helpfully and appropriately for knowledgeable and ignorant partners.Ulf Liszkowski, Malinda Carpenter & Michael Tomasello - 2008 - Cognition 108 (3):732-739.
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  18.  38
    The role of roles in uniquely human cognition and sociality.Michael Tomasello - 2020 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 50 (1):2-19.
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, EarlyView.
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  19. Young Children Enforce Social Norms.Marco F. H. Schmidt & Michael Tomasello - 2012 - Current Directions in Psychological Science 21 (4):232-236.
    Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely a result of (...)
     
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  20.  31
    Communicative eye contact signals a commitment to cooperate for young children.Barbora Siposova, Michael Tomasello & Malinda Carpenter - 2018 - Cognition 179 (C):192-201.
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  21. Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language.Marco F. H. Schmidt, Hannes Rakoczy & Michael Tomasello - 2011 - Developmental Science 14 (3):530-539.
    Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no (...)
     
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  22.  41
    Chimpanzees deceive a human competitor by hiding.Brian Hare, Josep Call & Michael Tomasello - 2006 - Cognition 101 (3):495-514.
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  23.  69
    A construction based analysis of child directed speech.Thea Cameron-Faulkner, Elena Lieven & Michael Tomasello - 2003 - Cognitive Science 27 (6):843-873.
    The child directed speech of twelve English‐speaking motherswas analyzed in terms of utterance‐level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh‐questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers' utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item‐based phrases such as Are you …, I'll …, It's …, Let's …, What did … The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO (...)
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  24. (1 other version)Do chimpanzees know what others see - or only what they are looking at?Michael Tomasello & Josep Call - 2006 - In Susan Hurley & Matthew Nudds (eds.), Rational Animals? Oxford University Press. pp. 371-384.
     
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  25.  73
    Precís of a natural history of human morality.Michael Tomasello - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (5):661-668.
    ABSTRACTHere I summarize the main points in my 2016 book, A Natural History of Human Morality. Taking an evolutionary point of view, I characterize human morality as a special form of cooperation. In particular, human morality represents a kind of we > me orientation and valuation that emanates from the logic of social interdependence, both at the level of individual collaboration and at the level of the cultural group. Human morality emanates from psychological processes of shared intentionality evolved to enable (...)
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  26. Young children understand and defend the entitlements of others.Marco F. H. Schmidt, Hannes Rakoczy & Michael Tomasello - forthcoming - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
    Human social life is structured by social norms creating both obligations and entitlements. Recent research has found that young children enforce simple obligations against norm violators by protesting. It is not known, however, whether they understand entitlements in the sense that they will actively object to a second party attempting to interfere in something that a third party is entitled to do — what we call counter-protest. In two studies, we found that 3-year-old children understand when a person is entitled (...)
     
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  27.  66
    The Ontogenetic Foundations of Epistemic Norms.Michael Tomasello - 2020 - Episteme 17 (3):301-315.
    In this paper, I approach epistemic norms from an ontogenetic point of view. I argue and present evidence that to understand epistemic norms – e.g., scientific norms of methodology and the evaluation of evidence – children must first develop through their social interactions with others three key concepts. First is the concept of belief, which provides the most basic distinction on which scientific investigations rest: the distinction between individual subjective perspectives and an objective reality. Second is the concept of reason, (...)
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  28.  26
    Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis.Elena Lieven, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello - 2009 - Cognitive Linguistics 20 (3).
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  29.  30
    The effect of humans on the cognitive development of apes.Josep Call & Michael Tomasello - 1996 - In A. Russon, Kim A. Bard & S. Parkers (eds.), Reaching Into Thought: The Minds of the Great Apes. Cambridge University Press. pp. 371--403.
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  30.  45
    What is it like to be a chimpanzee?Michael Tomasello - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-24.
    Chimpanzees and humans are close evolutionary relatives who behave in many of the same ways based on a similar type of agentive organization. To what degree do they experience the world in similar ways as well? Using contemporary research in evolutionarily biology and animal cognition, I explicitly compare the kinds of experience the two species of capable of having. I conclude that chimpanzees’ experience of the world, their experiential niche as I call it, is: intentional in basically the same way (...)
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  31.  33
    The acquisition of finite complement clauses in English: A corpus-based analysis.Holger Diessel & Michael Tomasello - 2001 - Cognitive Linguistics 12 (2).
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  32.  67
    Children’s developing metaethical judgments.Marco F. H. Schmidt, Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera & Michael Tomasello - 2017 - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 164:163-177.
    Human adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N = 136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge (e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging that it is okay to do X). We assessed children’s metaethical judgment, that is, whether they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could (...)
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  33.  42
    Done wrong or said wrong? Young children understand the normative directions of fit of different speech acts.Hannes Rakoczy & Michael Tomasello - 2009 - Cognition 113 (2):205-212.
  34.  25
    The many faces of obligation.Michael Tomasello - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43.
    My response to the commentaries focuses on four issues: the diversity both within and between cultures of the many different faces of obligation; the possible evolutionary roots of the sense of obligation, including possible sources that I did not consider; the possible ontogenetic roots of the sense of obligation, including especially children's understanding of groups from a third-party perspective ; and the relation between philosophical accounts of normative phenomena in general – which are pitched as not totally empirical – and (...)
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  35. Production and comprehension of gestures between orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus) in a referential communication game.Richard Moore, Josep Call & Michael Tomasello - 2015 - PLoS ONE:pone.0129726.
    Orang-utans played a communication game in two studies testing their ability to produce and comprehend requestive pointing. While the ‘communicator’ could see but not obtain hidden food, the ‘donor’ could release the food to the communicator, but could not see its location for herself. They could coordinate successfully if the communicator pointed to the food, and if the donor comprehended his communicative goal and responded pro-socially. In Study 1, one orang-utan pointed regularly and accurately for peers. However, they responded only (...)
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  36.  31
    Communication about absent entities in great apes and human infants.Manuel Bohn, Josep Call & Michael Tomasello - 2015 - Cognition 145 (C):63-72.
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  37.  54
    Can chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) discriminate appearance from reality?Carla Krachun, Josep Call & Michael Tomasello - 2009 - Cognition 112 (3):435-450.
  38.  43
    Reference: Intending that others jointly attend.Michael Tomasello - 1998 - Pragmatics and Cognition 6 (1):229-243.
    My approach to reference focuses on naturally occuring processes of communication, and in particular on children's earliest referential activities. I begin by describing three different kinds of child gesture — ritualizations, deictics, and symbolic gestures — and then proceed to examine young children's early word learning. The account focuses on the joint attentional situations in which young children learn their earliest gestures and linguistic symbols and on the social-cognitive and cultural learning processes involved in the different cases.
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  39.  20
    Children's understanding of the agent-patient relations in the transitive construction: Cross-linguistic comparisons between Cantonese, German, and English.Angel Chan, Elena Lieven & Michael Tomasello - 2009 - Cognitive Linguistics 20 (2).
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  40. Primate vocal and gestural communication.Michael Tomasello & Klaus Zuberbühler - 2002 - In Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen & Gordon M. Burghardt (eds.), The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. MIT Press. pp. 293--29.
  41.  22
    Children’s level of word knowledge predicts their exclusion of familiar objects as referents of novel words.Susanne Grassmann, Cornelia Schulze & Michael Tomasello - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
  42. Universal grammar is dead.Michael Tomasello - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (5):470-471.
    The idea of a biologically evolved, universal grammar with linguistic content is a myth, perpetuated by three spurious explanatory strategies of generative linguists. To make progress in understanding human linguistic competence, cognitive scientists must abandon the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead try to build theories that explain both linguistic universals and diversity and how they emerge.
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  43.  37
    What Chimpanzees Know about Seeing, Revisited: An Explanation of the Third Kind.Josep Call & Michael Tomasello - 2005 - In Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Johannes Roessler (eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford, GB: Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 45--64.
    Chimpanzees follow the gaze of conspecifics and humans — follow it past distractors and behind barriers, ‘check back’ with humans when gaze following does not yield interesting sights, use gestures appropriately depending on the visual access of their recipient, and select different pieces of food depending on whether their competitor has visual access to them. Taken together, these findings make a strong case for the hypothesis that chimpanzees have some understanding of what other individuals can and cannot see. However, chimpanzees (...)
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  44.  35
    Young children's earliest transitive and intransitive constructions.Michael Tomasello & Patricia J. Brooks - 1998 - Cognitive Linguistics 9 (4):379-396.
    Much of children's early syntactic development can be seen as the acquisition of sentence-level constructions that correspond to relatively complex events and states of affairs. The current study was an attempt to determine the relative concreteness (verb-specificity) or abstractness (verb-generality) of such constructions for children just beginning to produce large numbers of multi-word utterances. Sixteen children at 2.0 years of age and sixteen children at 2,5 years of age participated (all English speaking). Each child was taught two novel verbs for (...)
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  45.  34
    Norms Require Not Just Technical Skill and Social Learning, but Real Cooperation.Michael Tomasello - 2021 - Analyse & Kritik 43 (1):219-224.
    Birch’s account of the evolutionary origins of social norms is essentially individualistic. It begins with individuals regulating their own actions toward internally represented goals, as evaluative standards, and adds in a social dimension only secondarily. I argue that a better account begins at the outset with uniquely human collaborative activity in which individuals share evaluative standards about how anyone who would play a given role must behave both toward their joint goal and toward one another. This then scaled up to (...)
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  46.  25
    18-month-Olds comprehend indirect communicative acts.Cornelia Schulze & Michael Tomasello - 2015 - Cognition 136 (C):91-98.
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  47.  24
    The acquisition of the active transitive construction in English: A detailed case study.Anna L. Theakston, Robert Maslen, Elena V. M. Lieven & Michael Tomasello - 2012 - Cognitive Linguistics 23 (1):91-128.
    In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earliest SVO utterances reflect earlier use of those same verbs, and that verbs acquired before 2;7 show an earlier move towards adult-like levels of use in the SVO construction and in object argument complexity than later acquired verbs. There is not a (...)
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  48. Two-year-olds but not domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) understand communicative intentions without language, gestures, or gaze.Richard Moore, Bettina Mueller, Juliane Kaminski & Michael Tomasello - 2015 - Developmental Science 18 (2):232-242.
    Infants can see someone pointing to one of two buckets and infer that the toy they are seeking is hidden inside. Great apes do not succeed in this task, but, surprisingly, domestic dogs do. However, whether children and dogs understand these communicative acts in the same way is not yet known. To test this possibility, an experimenter did not point, look, or extend any part of her body towards either bucket, but instead lifted and shook one via a centrally pulled (...)
     
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  49.  34
    (1 other version)First steps toward a usage-based theory of language acquisition.Michael Tomasello - 2001 - Cognitive Linguistics 11 (1-2).
  50. A tale of two theories: response to Fisher.Michael Tomasello & Kirsten Abbot-Smith - 2002 - Cognition 83 (2):207-214.
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