This week’s reading and lecture were on the topic of the evolution of social cognition, and in particular the relationship between ‘mind reading’ and language. For the tutorial this week we’d like you to think a bit more about where the human capacity for mind reading, and social cognition more generally, come from. Team A are going to read a short paper presenting data which they interpret as showing that humans have “evolved some specialized social-cognitive skills (beyond those of primates in general) for living and exchanging knowledge in cultural groups: communicating with others, learning from others, and ‘reading the mind’ of others in especially complex ways” (Herrmann et al., 2007, p. 1365), i.e. that our social intelligence is underpinned by specialized biological adaptations in the mind. Team B are going to read a review article arguing that human mind-reading capacities are themselves socially learnt, rather than necessarily an evolved mental module. It’s up to you whether you frame this tutorial as a debate, or instead take it in turns to describe the paper you read in your team, describe it to the other group, and discuss strengths, weaknesses, and the issues raised more generally – I think the positions in these two papers aren’t necessarily conflicting, or not completely conflicting, but you might disagree. Regardless of whether you decide to run it as a debate or something more cooperative, don’t worry: next week we’ll be back into full on scratch-their-eyes-out debating mode, talking about protolanguage again.
You will probably need to be on the University network to access the papers, which are:
Team B: Heyes, C. M., & Frith, C. D. (2014). The cultural evolution of mind reading. Science, 344, 1243091. You can also to listen to a short podcast about this article.