| Reasoning about instrumental and communicative agency in human infancy. | |
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MedLine Citation:
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PMID: 23205408 Owner: NLM Status: In-Process |
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
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Theoretical rationality and practical rationality are, respectively, properties of an individual's belief system and decision system. While reasoning about instrumental actions complies with practical rationality, understanding communicative actions complies with the principle of relevance. Section 2 reviews the evidence showing that young infants can reason about an agent's instrumental action by representing her subjective motivations and the episodic contents of her epistemic states (including false beliefs). Section 3 reviews the evidence showing special sensitivity in young human infants to some ostensive behavioral signals encoding an agent's communicative intention. We also address the puzzle of imitative learning of novel means actions by 1-year olds and argue that it can be resolved only by assuming that the infant construes the model's demonstration as a communicative, not an instrumental, action. Section 4 reviews the evidence for natural pedagogy, a species-unique social communicative learning mechanism that exploits human infants' receptivity to ostensive-communicative signals and enables infants to acquire kind-wide generalizations from the nonverbal demonstrations of communicative agents. We argue that the essentialist bias that has been shown to be involved in children's concepts of natural kinds also applies to infants' concepts of artifacts. We further examine how natural pedagogy may also boost inductive learning in human infancy. |
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Authors:
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György Gergely; Pierre Jacob |
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Publication Detail:
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Type: Journal Article |
Journal Detail:
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Title: Advances in child development and behavior Volume: 43 ISSN: 0065-2407 ISO Abbreviation: Adv Child Dev Behav Publication Date: 2012 |
Date Detail:
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Created Date: 2012-12-04 Completed Date: - Revised Date: - |
Medline Journal Info:
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Nlm Unique ID: 0370417 Medline TA: Adv Child Dev Behav Country: United States |
Other Details:
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Languages: eng Pagination: 59-94 Citation Subset: IM |
Affiliation:
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Department of Cognitive Science, Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, 1015 Budapest, Hattytú 14, Hungary. gergelygy@ceu.hu |
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From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine
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