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Understanding the origins of human social cognition is a central challenge in contemporary science. In recent decades, the idea of a 'Theory of Mind' (ToM) has emerged as the most popular way of explaining unique features of human social cognition. This default view has been progressively undermined by research on 'implicit' ToM, which suggests tha...
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... have two main structural features: ontology and scenes (Abelson, 1981;Schank & Abelson, 1977). Scenes are sequences of acts; each of these acts serves a sub-goal that contributes, in varying degrees, to fulfilling the overall goal of the script. Consider the paradigmatic example of a script: the restaurant script (Schank & Abelson, 1977) (see Fig. 1). From the perspective of a customer, going to a restaurant comprises various scenes (e.g. entering the restaurant, consulting the menu, ordering food, eating food, and paying the bill). Each of these scenes contributes to fulfilling the customer's overall goal of eating food prepared by the restaurant. Outside observers familiar with ...
Citations
... Some authors, however, have argued that this assumption needs to be de-intellectualized and that we must allow for other ways of explaining others' behavior. For example, it is possible that we are using action sequences to make sense of others [76]. More specifically, good predictions of agents' behavior can be derived from extensive observations of behavior in similar situations [35]. ...
... Learning in primates and other animals usually takes place within a social sphere, when individuals are immersed in social interactions. Our claim here is that primates learn from watching others by incorporating new cause-effect relations to existing ones, both as passive observers and as active seekers of information, hereby constructing increasingly complex representations of how events normally unfold [38]. Scripts are often of a social nature, typically agent-patient interactions [44,48]. ...
... They contain core knowledge, a sort of innate understanding of the world that includes the perception of psychological intention [4] and physical causality [23], partly acquired from own experiences and partly from observing others. Script theory has recently been proposed as a way to 'deintellectualise' claims of mental-state attribution, including false-belief tasks [38], but it has broader implication for animal cognition, as a general account of how individuals make sense and predict the behaviour of others. In this view, learning is a continuous and incremental process of adding complexity and diversity to an individual's script repertoire by adding newly discovered cause-effect relations to already-existing ones. ...
Animal learning theory has been enormously influential in setting up laws of how individuals gradually learn associations and instrumentation by reinforcement. Yet, the theory rests on data collected from socially isolated laboratory animals, exposed to artificial cause–effect relations without visible agents. We review the primate vocal learning literature and find that animal learning theory performs poorly in accounting for real-life learning and evolutionarily relevant problem-solving. Instead, learning occurs when conspecifics act as event-causing agents, often without direct consequences for learners. We illustrate this with recent field studies, which suggest that the default mode of learning may not be through reinforcement and repeated trials but by acquiring scripts — mental representations of how events typically unfold. Becoming communicatively competent may be more about learning how events unfold than becoming conditioned to stimuli and responses.
Developmental science has experienced a vivid debate on whether young children prioritize goals over means in their prediction of others’ actions. Influential developmental theories highlight the role of goal objects for action understanding. Yet, recent infant studies report evidence for the opposite. The empirical evidence is therefore inconclusive. The current study advanced this debate by assessing preschool children's verbal predictions of others’ actions. In five experiments ( N = 302), we investigated whether preschool children and adults predict agents to move towards their previous goal (that is, show goal‐related predictions) or predict agents to move along the same movement path that they pursued before. While Experiments 1a, 1b and 1c presented young children and adults with animated agents, Experiments 2a and 2b presented participants with human grasping action. An integrative analysis across experiments revealed that children were more likely to predict the agent to move along the same movement path, Z = ‐4.574, p ≤ 0.0001 ( r = 0.304). That is, preschool children were more likely to predict that agents would move along the same trajectory even though this action would lead to a new goal object. Thus, our findings suggest that young children's action prediction relies on the detection of spatial and movement information. Overall, we discuss our findings in terms of theoretical frameworks that conceive of action understanding as an umbrella term that comprises different forms and facets in which humans understand others’ actions.
Highlights
We investigated whether preschool children predict agents to move towards their previous goal or to move along the same movement path that they pursued before.
Unlike adults, preschool children predicted that agents would move along the same trajectory even though this action would lead to a new goal.
Adults’ goal‐based predictions were affected from contextual details, whereas children systematically made path‐based predictions.
Young children's action prediction relies on the detection of spatial and movement information.
Spoken language, as we have it, requires specific capacities—at its most basic advanced vocal control and complex social cognition. In humans, vocal control is the basis for speech, achieved through coordinated interactions of larynx activity and rapid changes in vocal tract configurations. Most likely, speech evolved in response to early humans perceiving reality in increasingly complex ways, to the effect that primate‐like signaling became unsustainable as a sole communication device. However, in what ways did and do humans see the world in more complex ways compared to other species? Although animal signals can refer to external events, in contrast to humans, they usually refer to the agents only, sometimes in compositional ways, but never together with patients. It may be difficult for animals to comprehend events as part of larger social scripts, with antecedent causes and future consequences, which are more typically tie the patient into the event. Human brain enlargement over the last million years probably has provided the cognitive resources to represent social interactions as part of bigger social scripts, which enabled humans to go beyond an agent‐focus to refer to agent–patient relations, the likely foundation for the evolution of grammar.
This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition
Linguistics > Evolution of Language
Psychology > Comparative
Humans have a reputation for being ‘hyper-cooperative’, as they occasionally behave altruistically when they should not, for instance when helping strangers with no prospect of reciprocity or reputational benefits. Although intriguing, human behaviour is also accountable to evolutionary theory, which predicts that altruism is only adaptive if it benefits close genetic relatives. One way to explain maladaptive helping is that humans and primates experience reality to various degrees as part of social scripts - mental representations of how social events normally unfold. As a consequence, decisions about helping are no longer about kinship but about anticipating the cooperation enforcement strategies of others, particularly negative reciprocity. Social scripts thus extract altruism from the evolutionary confines of kin-biased helping to enable non-kin cooperation with all its partner-control mechanisms. A review of the primate literature suggests that social script theory may explain the often inconsistent results in great ape prosociality experiments as well as puzzling findings of altruism towards non-relatives in the wild. Cognition may enable humans and some animals to behave altruistically towards non-relatives because social scripts make them perceive the need of others as a cooperation problem.
