On pedagogy

Abstract

Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called 'pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity, the prosodic pattern of 'motherese', and being addressed by one's own name). Infants show special sensitivity to such 'ostensive' cues that signal the teacher's communicative intention to manifest new and relevant knowledge about a referent object. Pedagogy offers a novel functional perspective to interpret a variety of early emerging triadic communicative interactions between adults and infants about novel objects they are jointly attending to. The currently dominant interpretation of such triadic communications (mindreading) holds that infants interpret others' object-directed manifestations in terms of subjective mental states (such as emotions, dispositions, or intentions) that they attribute to the other person's mind. We contrast the pedagogical versus the mindreading account in a new study testing 14-month-olds' interpretation of others' object-directed emotion expressions observed in a communicative cueing context. We end by discussing the far-reaching implications of the pedagogical perspective for a wide range of early social-cognitive competences, and for providing new directions for future research on child development.

Why do dogs (Canis familiaris) select the empty container in an observational learning task?

“…Recent studies on infant social cognition provide convergent evidence indicating that young preverbal infants are prone to show special sensitivity and preference for a basic set of ostensive-communicative signals (such as direct eye contact, being addressed in motherese, turn-taking contingent reactivity- Ricciardelli et al 2000;Cleveland and Striano 2007;Nielsen 2006;Senju and Csibra 2008;Yoon et al 2008) and referential cues (such as gaze-shift or pointing- Teuscher and Triesch 2007;Senju et al 2006;Grossmann et al 2008;. It has been argued that human infants are biologically prepared to interpret such cues as expressing the other's overt communicative intention towards them to convey new and relevant information about referents (see Gergely and Csibra 2006;Gergely et al 2007;Csibra and Gergely 2009). Clearly, such early sensitivity to communicative cues may provide a necessary cognitive prerequisite that supports preverbal infants' early emerging competence to engage in different types of triadic interactions, including social learning by imitation (Warneken and Tomasello 2007;Tomasello and Haberl 2003;Moll and Tomasello 2007;Moll et al 2008).…”

The Archaeology of Teaching and the Evolution ofHomo docens

“…In addition to joint attention, Csibra and Gergely (2009:149) argue that "human communication is often preceded, or accompanied, by ostensive signals that (i) disambiguate that the subsequent action (for example, a tool-use demonstration) is intended to be communicative and (ii) specify the addressee to whom the communication is addressed. " Gergely, Egyed, and Király (2007) provide experimental evidence for the importance of the ostensive nature of the teacher's behavior. In brief, extensions of mindreading capacities are crucial for the evolution of pedagogy.…”

Imitation as an inheritance system

“…One mechanism might simply be a disposition to imitate more in childhood, while the learner is still in the proximity of its parents (Schiel & Huber 2006). Gergely & Csibra's natural pedagogy is another obvious candidate to be a mechanism encouraging verticality (Gergely & Csibra 2006;Gergely et al 2007;Tennie et al 2009; although see Virányi & Range in press, suggesting that selective imitation in pedagogical contexts may not be limited to humans). If children tend only to imitate when a pedagogical context is signalled, that disposition may have acted in recent evolutionary history to ensure copying from parents predominates, limiting the extent to which they copy behaviours horizontally or from unrelated individuals.…”