Tomasello: uniquely human cognition rooted in shared attention
TL;DR
- Tomasello argues human cognition traces to a cluster of cognitive capacities that emerge early in childhood and appear uniquely human.
- Those capacities: sharing attention with others, understanding others have their own intentions, and imitating what someone else intended to do.
- The 1999 Harvard University Press book bridges evolutionary theory and cultural psychology, drawing on research with both primates and children.
Michael Tomasello's *The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition*, published by Harvard University Press in 1999, argues that human thinking rests on a small cluster of capacities that emerge early in childhood and are, so far as anyone has shown, uniquely human. Two of the researchers we follow shared the book's listing recently, which is how a 1999 title landed in an AI feed.
The 248-page book locates those roots in "a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny": sharing attention with other persons, understanding that others have intentions of their own, and imitating not just what someone else does but "what someone else has intended to do."
The publisher's framing calls the book one that "builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology," and notes that Tomasello is "one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children."
Shared on Bluesky by 2 AI experts
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this is consonant with the social cognition theory of human "specialness" elucidated by, among others, Tomasello, and which forms the backbone of my "this is what I think LLMs don't got" hypothesis. www.hup.harvard.edu/b…
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Originally reported by hup.harvard.edu
Read the original article →Original headline: The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition — Harvard University Press