Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hernández-Lloreda, María Victoria
• Colmenares, Fernando

Titel

An Interview with Michael Tomasello: Cooperation and Human Cognition

Ist Teil von

• The Spanish journal of psychology, 2016-01, Vol.19, Article E96

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]from my very first writings on chimpanzee versus human culture, I’ve said I’m happy to call it chimp culture, it’s the same thing in a general evolutionary perspective, there’s non-genetic transfer of information across generations, but the proximate mechanisms are different. [...]I would say, there are some quantitative differences in imitative learning but in addition you have this normative conformity and teaching and those are the things that enable the ratchet effect. What you really need for teaching is for the teacher to do whatever it takes to make sure that the learner learns, and then when the learner has learnt, they quit, and the only one that really fits that definition that I know of is the cats bringing the half dead mice, and it’s only that one context, it is just this, it is a quite constrained adaptive specialization so, again the answer to these questions of, “do they do ?” or “don’t they do ?” depends on your definition of x. So I don’t think it’s so productive to get into a definitional battle of what exactly is teaching, but I’ll just say that the examples from animals to my knowledge for any given species is typically one specific behavior that for the meerkats and the lions is bringing the half dead prey. The human version is that the adults are motivated to make sure that the children learn a whole range of things, not only skills that they need but even more widespread and universal, teaching them how to behave in public, how to respect your elders, how to behave socially so that you are accepted into the group.