Reading :: The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
By Michael Tomasello

This is a really fantastic, dense book and I'm sorry it took me so long to get to it. Tomasello is a cognitive psychologist who has spent a lot of time investigating differences in the developmental cognition of humans vs. other primates. He is neo-Vygotskian in outlook, but draws more broadly on cognitive and anthropological literature to better understand a basic puzzle: human evolution in itself has not given us the time to evolve cognitive tools, complex symbolic systems, and complex social organizations or institutions (p.2). 

So how did we? The only answer, he says, is social or cultural transmission (p.4), which produces the so-called "ratchet effect" in which people learn, adopt, and adapt modifications from each other (p.5). For other species, the problem isn't invention but stabilization, i.e., learning others' innovations and applying them oneself (p.5). Only humans, he says, understand conspecifics as intentional agents like themselves, thus engaging in cultural learning (p.6). Because they do, they can apply existing cognitive skills (ex: for dealing with space, time, and quantities) to develop "culturally-based skills with a social-collective dimension" (p.7—readers of this blog will recognize Vygotsky's basic distinction between lower and higher mental functions, a distinction that Tomaselli references later). Human children, enmeshed in a cultural world, learn linguistic and other communicative symbols (p.8), something that allows them to adopt multiple perspectives and free themselves from immediate perception (p.9). 

In this book, then, Tomasello presupposes basic cognitive skills, then (like Vygotsky) focuses on how they were transformed evolutionarily, historically, and ontogenetically (p.11). 

To do this, he first discusses biological and cultural inheritance in Chapter 2. Interestingly, only primates understand external social relations (p.17), but nonhuman primates do not understand the world in intentional and causal terms (p.19). To understand how humans inherit culturally, he rejects the innate-vs.-learned dichotomy in favor of Vygotsky's dichotomy of individual (or "natural") and cultural lines of development, with the latter concerning "those things the organism knows and learns that are derived from acts in which it attempts to see the world through the perspective of other persons (including perspectives embodied in artifacts)" (p.51). Here, cultural inheritance involves "intentional phenomena in which one organism adopts another's behavior or perspective on some third entity" (p.52). But the individual and cultural lines of development "become inextricably intertwined early in human development, and virtually every cognitive act of children after a certain age incorporates elements of both" (p.52). 

Part of what makes the cultural line of development work is that we have a biologically inherited ability to understand others as agents, leading to uniquely human forms of cultural inheritance (p.78). We can learn the intentional affordances of artifacts, i.e., what X is supposed to be used for (p.84)—and we can decouple intentional affordances, leading to play and creativity (p.85). Tomasello notes that infants are cultural beings—but at 9 months, they begin understanding others as "intentional agents like themselves," opening up "a whole new world of intersubjectively shared reality" (p.91). 

Moving on to language. Tomasello says that sounds become language when the child understands that there's an intention (p.101). And children who receive heavy scaffolding and joint focus with adults tend to develop a large vocabulary earlier (p.117). What distinguishes linguistic symbols from other forms of communication used by other animal species, in fact, is their perspectival nature (p.123). In discussing how external representations become "internal, individual representations," Tomasello name-checks Vygotsky's notion of internalization, but concedes differences based on our greater understanding now (p.125). 

Later, Tomasello emphasizes again that "social and cultural processes during ontogeny do not create basic cognitive skills. What they do is turn basic cognitive skills into extremely complex and sophisticated cognitive skills" — leading children to reorganize their information about the world, "construe the world in terms of the categories and perspectives and relational analogies embodied in [their] language," and "perhaps" apply these cognitive skills to "other domains such as mathematics" (p.189). 

There's more to this book, much more. I highly recommend it and I know I'll be returning to it.