Eneroth Lectures, with György Gergely

Eneroth lecture #2 will take place on 9 June, 15:00–16:30 in Lecture hall 6, Albano.

Contact: Professor Pehr Granqvist, holder of the Eneroth Professorship

Read more about György Gergely

Abstract

Humans are a highly social species specially adapted to engage in powerful forms of epistemic cooperation between social partners. We do so by relying on species-unique cognitive mechanisms for information transmission. Recent evolutionary-based cognitive theories of communication (e.g., relevance and natural pedagogy theories) propose that humans’ unique communicative competence relies on an evolved cognitive system specialized for recognizing and interpreting ostensive communicative actions. Via this system, social agents are understood as expressing their communicative and informative intentions to share new and relevant information with their social partner in cooperative contexts.

In my talk I’ll first summarize research from natural pedagogy theory demonstrating that even before acquiring linguistic skills, preverbal infants show special sensitivity to recognize a set of non-verbal ostensive communicative signals (e.g., eye-contact, infant-directed speech). These induce in infants expectations about the informative intentions of their communicating partner addressing them. Being addressed through ostensive signals triggers in infants a receptive ‘pedagogical’ learning attitude of epistemic trust towards the communicating social partner and assumptions that the ostensively manifested information is reliable, relevant and represents socially shared cultural knowledge that is useful and safe for the infant to acquire.

The rest of my talk will focus on our more recent studies exploring whether young infants can also recognize third-party ostensive communicative interactions. Such interactions involve transmission of relevant information between social agents engaged in cooperative activities observed from a third-person perspective. These studies provide novel evidence showing that humans’ cognitive adaptation for ostensive communication relies on early emerging cognitive mechanisms specialized for communicative mind-reading and context-sensitive pragmatic inferences that even young preverbal infants can employ. The findings also show that young infants not only comprehend but can also produce appropriate ostensive communicative gestures to convey relevant information needed by their social partner to efficiently cooperate in an interactive joint task.

Finally, I’ll argue that our studies extend current understanding of young infants’ early mentalization abilities. They do so by demonstrating that apart from perception-based beliefs, preverbal infants can also infer and attribute communication-based beliefs to social agents engaged in communicative interactions in a cooperative situation.

On the Eneroth Lectures

Eneroth Lectures is a new lecture series at the Department of Psychology. Academic state-of-the-art lectures by top researchers from all over the world offered every semester and open to the public. The lectures will take place on site on Campus Albano, with the possible complement of Zoom.