The cultural evolution of teaching

Abstract

Teaching is an important process of cultural transmission. Some have argued that human teaching is a cognitive instinct – a form of ‘natural cognition’ centred on mindreading, shaped by genetic evolution for the education of juveniles, and with a normative developmental trajectory driven by the unfolding of a genetically inherited predisposition to teach. Here, we argue instead that human teaching is a culturally evolved trait that exhibits characteristics of a cognitive gadget. Children learn to teach by participating in teaching interactions with socializing agents, which shape their own teaching practices. This process hijacks psychological mechanisms involved in prosociality and a range of domain-general cognitive abilities, such as reinforcement learning and executive function, but not a suite of cognitive adaptations specifically for teaching. Four lines of evidence converge on this hypothesis. The first, based on psychological experiments in industrialised societies, indicates that domain-general cognitive processes are important for teaching. The second and third lines, based on naturalistic and experimental research in small-scale societies, indicate marked cross-cultural variation in mature teaching practice, and in the ontogeny of teaching among children. The fourth line indicates that teaching has been subject to cumulative cultural evolution, i.e. the gradual accumulation of functional changes across generations.

Does child-directed speech facilitate language development in all domains? A study space analysis of the existing evidence.

“…To construe clear speech registers like CDS, FDS and elderspeak as didactically motivated behaviour, i.e., a way of teaching language, would logically render teaching indistinguishable from any signal enhancements that improve intelligibility and listener comprehension. Even though definitions of teaching vary widely by discipline (Kline, 2015), postulating that any kind of adjustment to the needs of listeners constitutes teaching does not do justice to the functional distinctiveness of this human capacity (Gurven et al, 2020;Brandl et al, 2023). Unless one wants to equate speech adjustment with teaching there is no need to invoke the intent to teach language as an explanatory construct for clear speech registers.…”

“…The concept of teaching here implies a set of behaviours that serve pedagogical and didactic functions but may or may not be produced intentionally (see Kline [2015] for a thorough review of diverse conceptualisations of teaching). Just like teaching itself is best explained not as a universal human adaptation but a cognitive gadget that capitalises on human capacities such as domain-general cognition and mindreading (Brandl et al, 2023;Heyes, 2018) and is adaptive in certain socio-cultural contexts but not others (Gurven et al, 2020) it is plausible that using CDS to facilitate language development is also a culturally transmitted cognitive gadgetone that capitalises on the human capacities for affect expression and speech accommodation. In certain socio-cultural contexts, especially those that promote distal dyadic interactions during child rearing (Keller, 2018), vocal and linguistics features that arise from affect expression and speech accommodation may be consolidated and conventionalised if they have didactic utility (i.e.…”