Lecture notes
SOCIAL COGNITION
- Module
- Neuropsychology (PSY0661)
- Institution
- Northumbria University (UNN)
LECUTRE 2 OUT OF 6 IN THE LECTURE SERIES OF PSYCHOLOGY
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Week 2 – social cognitionDevelopmental and cross species research;
- Look at Tomasello paper: Understanding and Sharing Intentions
- Guided reading questions (by section number)
- 1. What is an intention?
- 2. What are 3 levels of intention understanding? +evidence
- 3. What are 3 levels of intention-sharing? +evidence
- 4. What skill do chimps lack? +evidence
- 5. What is Tomasello’s developmental hypothesis?
- 6. What are the alternative theories?
- THE TARGET ARTICLE IS THE FIRST 17 PAGES of paper
Opposition to Fodor’s Modularity Thesis;
- Anti-fodorian theories argue against specific mechanisms:
- Mental modules are:
- Domain specific
- Innate
- Fast & automatic
- Encapsulated
- Critics of modularity opt for processes that are:
- domain general
- learned (not innate)
- slower
- non-encapsulated
why study the black box?
- Noam Chomsky claimed that behaviorism couldn’t explain language
- Humans must have a unique cognitive tool for acquiring language
- Chomsky’s critics (e.g., Tomasello) need to:
- Argue against UG
- Argue for an alternative explanation
Arguments against UG;
- 1) Creole languages
- Linguists often embellish complexity of Creole languages
- 2) Linguistic universals
- Tendencies and Universals have been reduced to principals and parameters (Evans
and Levinson, 2009)
- Critics argue that these are hardly an innate grammar and aren’t very useful for
language acquisition
- 3) The critical period for language acquisition
- Evidence for a critical period is weak
- “Less is more”: Children learn language more effectively because they are limited in
what they can attend to, Dabrowska (1997)
, Dabrowska (1997);
- Showed why UG is a bad theory
- Ask adults of various educational backgrounds
to understand very complex sentences
- E.g., “It was King Louis who the general
convinced that this slave might speak to.”
- Who might the slave speak to?
- Who did the convincing?
- Who was convinced of something?
- So regardless of whether you were a native speaker it matters mostly on your
university education.
- Ug claims you have this innate knowledge and so a native speaker should
understand these complex sentences however, it was education level which made
the sentences easier to understand and so proves against UG.
- Formal education affects grammatical knowledge
Social cognition hypothesis;
- Can we explain language acquisition without UG?
- Tomasello argues that human social competence and intention-sharing lead to
language
- Social cognition is the “little difference that made a big difference” (Tomasello, 2005)
in human cognitive evolution.
- When we carry out actions, there are observable
indicators of our intentions (i.e., Looking at
object, acting with tools, reacting to outcomes)
- When doing this there are a lot of social correct
and relevant behaviours which occur. These are
all physically observable.
- There are also intentions and cognitive
behaviours happening in the person who is doing
the unboxing. He suggests these behaviours
come across before language in every type of
person.
Joint-attentional frames (or triadic engagement);
- 1. Person 1 attends to object/event
- 2. Person 2 attends to object/event
- 3. Person 1 & 2 realize that 1 & 2 are true
- 4. They communicate about object/event
- Uniquely human and very effective for learning words from
others
- Extremely effective for word-learning (Carpenter et al.,
1998)
- Children (1) notice these behaviours early on and
- (2) Come to understand the mental states (i.e., emotions, goals, and plans) of others
- (3) By 12 – 14 months, human children have access to a unique and powerful
mechanism for learning the meanings of words: joint-attentional frames
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