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The role of communication in acquisition, curation, and transmission of culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2020

Hyowon Gweon*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Stanford, CA94305. gweon@stanford.edu https://sll.stanford.edu

Abstract

Veissière et al.'s proposal aims to explain how cognition enables cultural learning, but fails to acknowledge a distinctively human behavior critical to this process: communication. Recent advances in developmental and computational cognitive science suggest that the social-cognitive capacities central to TTOM also support sophisticated yet remarkably early-emerging inferences and communicative behaviors that allow us to learn and share abstract knowledge.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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