Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, commonly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of the mother's speech-specifically its use of metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding-helps to shape and direct the baby's attention, as it also coordinates the partners' emotional communication. We hypothesize that the ability to respond to poetic features of language is present as early as the first few weeks of life and that this ability attunes cognitive and affective capacities in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later aesthetic production and response. By linking developmental social processes with formal cognitive aspects of art, we challenge predominant views in evolutionary psychology that literary art is a superfluous byproduct of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms or primarily an ornament created by sexual selection.
An ethological description of mother-infant interaction suggests that it was adaptive during human evolution. From their early weeks, infants universally respond to certain affect-laden elements of maternal communication that can be called "proto-aesthetic." I hypothesize that these capacities and receptivities, which evolved from about 1.7 million years ago to enable mother-infant bonding, became a reservoir of affective mechanisms that could be used subsequently by ancestral humans when they first began to "artify"-that is, when they invented the "arts" as vehicles of ceremonial religious experience. The ethological, evolutionary, and cross-cultural foundations of the Artification Hypothesis challenge current influential ideas in cognitive science, evolutionary aesthetics, and neuroaesthetics about human aesthetic capacities and behavior. The hypothesis offers a broader and deeper view to these fields by emphasizing preverbal, presymbolic, pancultural, cross-modal, supra-modal, participative, temporally organized, affective, and affinitive aspects of aesthetic cognition and behavior. It additionally proposes that artifying is an unrecognized but vital evolved component of human nature. CORRESPONDENCE: Ellen Dissanayake.
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