ToMM, ToBY, and Agency: Core architecture and domain specificity

Leslie, Alan M.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511752902.006

Cited by 842 publications

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“…For example, x might represent an individual's beliefs about the Moon. Individuals with x = 0 perceive the Moon as a self-aware, conscious, entity with goals, emotions, and motivations-thus the Moon's behavior can be understood using folk psychology (Leslie 1994). In contrast, individuals with x = 1 see the Moon as simply a big rock, lacking goals, consciousness, and emotions.…”

Section: Discrete Replicator Models Of Cultural Inheritance Can Be Umentioning

confidence: 99%

Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution

Henrich

Boyd

Richerson

2008

Hum Nat

289

154

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. Do not quote or cite without the authors' permission.Recent debates about the utility of "memes" have revealed some fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of cultural evolution. Memeticists and their many critics seem to share the view that evolutionary principles can only be applied to cultural evolution if culture can be thought of as arising from the transmission of gene-like replicators. The memeticists believe that such particles (or at least close approximations) exist, and thus Darwinian reasoning-which has proven so useful in biology-can be applied to culture. Their critics argue that replicating particles do not exist, and therefore, that it is inappropriate to apply Darwinian ideas to culture. We think both camps have been misguided by an overly enthusiastic analogy between genes and culture.Because much of culture can be understood in the most general sense as information stored in human brains-information that got into those brains by various mechanisms of social learning-we think that population-dynamic concepts and evolutionary models are extremely useful for understanding how such processes work. BUT, and this is a big but, we maintain that constructing appropriate models of cultural evolution demands that close attention be paid to the psychological and social processes involved. From this broader approach, both the memeticists and their critics labor under a number of recurrent misunderstandings about cultural evolution. Here we focus on these five:1. Mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless.2. Replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution.3. Content dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations.4. The "cultural fitness" of a mental representation can be inferred from its success transmission through the population.5. Selection can only occur if the sources of variation are random.These assertions are often used to dismiss whole categories of thinking about cultural evolution. For example, some anti-memeticists have suggested that if there are no cultural replicators, or if selection requires random variation, researchers interested in the distribution of representations can ignore cultural evolutionary models that assume discrete traits. Or, as some memeticists have suggested, if cultural replicators exist and are operating in cumulative evolution, one can ignore a lot of complicated mathematical theorizing-it's just natural selection after all. However, none of these claims are correct. In the rest of this paper, we will try to convince you of this fact.Discrete, replicator models of cultural inheritance can be useful even if mental representations are never discrete A great deal of work on cultural evolution assumes that cultural traits can be modeled as discrete, gene-like entities that are faithfully transmitted from one individual to another. Memeticists like Blackmore (1999) and Aunger (2002) believe...

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Section: Discrete Replicator Models Of Cultural Inheritance Can Be Umentioning

confidence: 99%

Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution

Henrich

Boyd

Richerson

2008

Hum Nat

289

154

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Indeed, one could argue that 'core' conceptual systems (e.g. agency, Leslie, 1994;object mechanics, Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992;and number, Wynn, 1998) ought to promote action and problem solution, not just the mere contemplation of knowledge for its own sake (see e.g. Cosmides & Tooby, 1994;Hood, Carey, & Prasada, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring an understanding of design: evidence from children's insight problem solving

2003

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The human ability to make tools and use them to solve problems may not be zoologically unique, but it is certainly extraordinary. Yet little is known about the conceptual machinery that makes humans so competent at making and using tools. Do adults and children have concepts specialized for understanding human-made artifacts? If so, are these concepts deployed in attempts to solve novel problems? Here we present new data, derived from problem-solving experiments, which support the following. (i) The structure of the child's concept of artifact function changes profoundly between ages 5 and 7. At age 5, the child's conceptual machinery defines the function of an artifact as any goal a user might have; by age 7, its function is defined by the artifact's typical or intended use.(ii) This conceptual shift has a striking effect on problem-solving performance, i.e. the child's concept of artifact function appears to be deployed in problem solving. (iii) This effect on problem solving is not caused by differences in the amount of knowledge that children have about the typical use of a particular tool; it is mediated by the structure of the child's artifact concept (which organizes and deploys the child's knowledge). In two studies, children between 5 and 7 years of age were matched for their knowledge of what a particular artifact "is for", and then given a problem that can only be solved if that tool is used for an atypical purpose. All children performed well in a baseline condition. But when they were primed by a demonstration of the artifact's typical function, 5-yearold children solved the problem much faster than 6 -7-year-old children. Because all children knew what the tools were for, differences in knowledge alone cannot explain the results. We argue that the older children were slower to solve the problem when the typical function was primed because (i) their artifact concept plays a role in problem solving, and (ii) intended purpose is central to their concept of artifact function, but not to that of the younger children. q

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“…The role that these antecedents may play in a theory of the development of mindreading is two-folded. First, they are supposed to explain and justify the pre-ToM child's social and communicative inter-2 There actually are at least two notions of module, advanced, respectively, by Fodor (1983Fodor ( , 2000 and by the supporters of distributed architectures in evolutionary psychology (e.g., Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992;Cosmides & Tooby, 1994a, 1994b and elsewhere (e.g., Minsky, 1985). Our arguments apply to both.…”

Section: Current Studies Of the Nature And The Acquisition Of Mindreamentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Baron-Cohen (1995), for example, has claimed that a fully functioning ToMM (Theory of Mind Mechanism: Leslie, 1994b) would be identifiable around the fourth year of age, as the final step of a developmental sequence which would include the successive activation of several precursors: first, an innate intentional detector, followed by an eye direction detector and a shared attention mechanism. Other precursors of mindreading have been identified in joint attention (Garfield, Peterson, & Perry, 2001;Tomasello, 1995), imitation and emotion sharing (Meltzoff & Gopnik, 1993), the infant's emotional reaction to others (Hobson, 1993), and so on.…”

Section: Current Studies Of the Nature And The Acquisition Of Mindreamentioning

confidence: 99%

Sharedness and privateness in human early social life

Tirassa

Bosco

Colle

2006

Cognitive Systems Research

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This research is concerned with the innate predispositions underlying human intentional communication. Human communication is currently defined as a circular and overt attempt to modify a partner's mental states. This requires each party involved to possess the ability to represent and understand the other's mental states, a capability which is commonly referred to as mindreading, or theory of mind (ToM). The relevant experimental literature agrees that no such capability is to be found in the human species at least during the first year of life, and possibly later. This paper aims at advancing a solution to this theoretical problem. We propose to consider sharedness as the basis for intentional communication in the infant and to view it as a primitive, innate component of her cognitive architecture. Communication can then build upon the mental grounds that the infant takes as shared with her caregivers. We view this capability as a theory of mind in a weak sense.

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ToMM, ToBY, and Agency: Core architecture and domain specificity

Cited by 842 publications

References 0 publications

Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution

Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution

Acquiring an understanding of design: evidence from children's insight problem solving

Sharedness and privateness in human early social life

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