Jedediah WP Allen

While there is general consensus that robust forms of social learning enable the possibility of human cultural evolution, the specific nature, origins, and development of such learning mechanisms remains an open issue. The current paper offers an action-based approach to the study of social learning in general and imitation learning in particular. From this action-based perspective, imitation itself undergoes learning and development and is modeled as an instance of social meta-learning – children learning how to use others as a resource for further learning. This social meta-learning perspective is then applied empirically to an ongoing debate about the reason children imitate causally unnecessary actions while learning about a new artifact (i.e., over-imitate). Results suggest that children over-imitate because it is the nature of learning about social realities in which cultural artifacts are a central aspect.

Much ongoing debate concerns the development of social understanding from infancy through preschool. In developmental cognitive science, this has played out most recently in terms of the nature of, and the relationship between, so-called implicit versus explicit Theory of Mind (ToM). However, notions of implicit, explicit, and their relationship, involve underlying assumptions about the nature of representation, knowing, and learning. These assumptions tend to preclude emergence and, thus, do not allow for an adequate notion of implicitness in the first place. A critical survey of different perspectives from developmental cognitive science will be used to illustrate the rich plurality of explanations. The outcome of this survey will be to argue that only action-based approaches can explain the emergence of new forms of knowing and, in so doing, provide the best ontology in town for understanding implicit versus explicit representation. While there are a variety of action-based approaches in the literature, interactivism is the specific action-based approach used for this argument. After presenting the models of interactive knowing, epistemic reflection, and situation convention, the notions of implicit and explicit ToM will be reinterpreted within the interactivist framework. This reinterpretation will then be used to consider some of the replication problems for early-development ToM studies as well as how to rethink the role of folk psychology for (culturally constituted) ToM development.

Epistemic reflection involves the creation of qualitatively new knowledge. Dierent models have been proposed to account for new knowing through reflection that have typically been grounded in an informationprocessing framework. However, there are in-principle arguments that information-processing approaches preclude the emergence of new representation altogether. Accordingly, any information-processing account of knowing through reflection is plagued by emergence issues. After discussing some of these emergence issues for four prominent models in the cognitive science literature, an alternative action-based model of representation and reflection is presented called interactivism. Interactivism’s model of representation, as grounded in action anticipations, serves as the foundational emergence needed to account for subsequent knowing through reflection. After introducing the interactivist models of representation and reflection through knowing levels, some of the implications for consciousness, enculturation, language, and developmental methodology are discussed.

While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. The few studies on over-imitation in other species are largely taken as evidence that spontaneous over-imitation is not present in other species. This leads to the over-imitation hypothesis – that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper, we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis for the differences between humans and animal cultures. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning and that over-imitation, like skill-learning, should be subject to selective social learning effects. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account the relevant variables given the normative and selective nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids from the experimental literature and conclude that the current body of evidence suggests that some canids and primates may have the capacity for over-imitation. This paper offers a methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, and a theoretical suggestion that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication for claims about human uniqueness suggests that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree, not of kind, between humans and other animals.

There is a large body of empirical work that has investigated the relationship between parents’ child-directed speech and their children’s Theory of Mind development. That such a relationship should exist is well motivated from both Theory Theory and Socio-Cultural perspectives. Despite this general convergence, we argue that theoretical differences between the two perspectives suggests nuanced differences in the expected outcomes of the empirical work. Further, the different ontological commitments of the two approaches have guided the design, coding, and analysis of existing research and imply different future directions. We discuss five areas of extant research that can be extended and diversified most coherently by adopting a SC framework.