Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

Cognitive psychology --- Developmental psychology --- Cognition --- Evolutionary psychology. --- Psychology, Comparative. --- Social aspects. --- Behavior, Comparative --- Comparative behavior --- Comparative psychology --- Ethology, Comparative --- Intelligence of animals --- Zoology --- Animal behavior --- Animal intelligence --- Animal psychology --- Human behavior --- Instinct --- Psychology --- Human evolution --- Evolutionary psychology --- Psychology, Comparative --- Social aspects --- Ontwikkelingspsychologie --- Cognitieve psychologie --- Cognition-Social aspects.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

During the second year of his daughter's life, Michael Tomasello kept a detailed diary of her language, creating a rich database. He made a careful study of how she acquired her first verbs and analysed the role that verbs played in her early grammatical development. Using a Cognitive Linguistics framework, the author argues persuasively that the child's earliest grammatical organization is verb-specific (the Verb Island hypothesis). He argues further that early language is acquired by means of very general cognitive and social-cognitive processes, especially event structures and cultural learning. The richness of the database and the analytical tools used make First Verbs a particularly useful and important book for developmental psychologists, linguists, language development researchers and speech pathologists.

Psycholinguistics --- Grammar --- Cognitive grammar --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- -Language acquisition --- Acquisition of language --- Developmental linguistics --- Developmental psycholinguistics --- Language and languages --- Language development in children --- Psycholinguistics, Developmental --- Interpersonal communication in children --- Comparative grammar --- Grammar, Philosophical --- Grammar, Universal --- Philosophical grammar --- Linguistics --- Philology --- Cognitive linguistics --- Verb --- Acquisition --- Grammar, Comparative --- Language acquisition --- Verb phrase --- Verbals --- Reflexives --- Grammatica --- Psycholinguïstiek --- Health Sciences --- Psychiatry & Psychology --- Language acquisition. --- Cognitive grammar.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Ethics --- Ethics, Evolutionary. --- Philosophical anthropology. --- History. --- Philosophical anthropology --- General ethics --- Filosofische antropologie --- Algemene ethiek

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Understanding cooperation as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.

Helping behavior. --- Altruism. --- Cooperativeness. --- Social norms. --- Folkways --- Norms, Social --- Rules, Social --- Social rules --- Cooperation (Psychology) --- Altruistic behavior --- Unselfishness --- Behavior, Helping --- Manners and customs --- Social control --- Social psychology --- Conduct of life --- Helping behavior --- Human behavior --- Interpersonal relations --- Altruism --- Caring --- COGNITIVE SCIENCES/Psychology/Cognitive Psychology

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on ontogenetic processes. His data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child's life. Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological development between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities. But then, Tomasello argues, the maturation of humans' evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality. The first step occurs around nine months, with the emergence of joint intentionality, exercised mostly with caregiving adults. The second step occurs around three years, with the emergence of collective intentionality involving both authoritative adults, who convey cultural knowledge, and coequal peers, who elicit collaboration and communication. Finally, by age six or seven, children become responsible for self-regulating their beliefs and actions so that they comport with cultural norms. Built on the essential ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.--

Behavior evolution. --- Developmental psychology. --- Evolutionary psychology. --- Ontogeny. --- Socialization.