Budapest Mind Society lecture series

György Gergely

Institute for Psychological Research Hungarian Academy of Sciences  

Learning 'about' versus learning 'from other minds: The role of ostensive cues in triggering pedagogical knowledge transfer in human infants  

Tuesday, 23 January, 2007, 5 PM  

CEU Department of Philosophy, 1051 Budapest, Zrínyi u. 14, 4th floor, rm. 412.  

Abstract  

By the end of their first year human infants start to exhibit a number of species-unique social cognitive competences (such as social referencing, imitative learning of novel means, or proto-declarative pointing) that involve triadic interactions in ostensive communicative cuing contexts. The currently dominant interpretation of these early social-cognitive phenomena assumes that their primary function is to serve social motives (such as intersubjective sharing of mental states). In this talk I shall contrast this view with an alternative interpretation based on the theory of human 'pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely, 2006; Gergely & Csibra, 2005, 2006) which assumes that ostensively cued  triadic interactions serve primarily the epistemic function of transferring new and relevant cultural knowledge about referents to infants. The theory argues that others' referential manifestations during triadic interactions are typically framed by specific types of ostensive-communicative cues for which infants show early sensitivity and preference. These include eye-contact, contingent turn-taking reactivity, the prosodic intonation pattern of motherese, and addressing infants by their own name. Such ostensive cues trigger in infants the interpretation that the other exhibits a communicative intention addressed to them to manifest new and relevant information for them to fast learn about the referent. It is hypothesized that ostensive cues can act as an 'interpretation switch' directing infants to construe others' referential knowledge manifestations as pedagogical 'teaching' events. I shall review recent evidence from studies of relevance-guided selective imitative learning and of infants' differential interpretation of others' referential emotion expressions during the second year that provide convergent empirical support for the hypothesized interpretation-modulating role of ostensive cuing in early infancy.