The role of cultural practices in the emergence of modern human intelligence.
Innate cognitive capacities are orchestrated by cultural practices to produce high-level cognitive processes. In human activities, examples of this phenomenon range from everyday inferences about space and time to the most sophisticated reasoning in scientific laboratories. A case is examined in which chimpanzees enter into cultural practices with humans (in experiments) in ways that appear to enable them to engage in symbol-mediated thought. Combining the cultural practices perspective with the theories of embodied cognition and enactment suggests that the chimpanzees' behaviour is actually mediated by non-symbolic representations. The possibility that non-human primates can engage in cultural practices that give them the appearance of symbol-mediated thought opens new avenues for thinking about the coevolution of human culture and human brains.
Hutchins
Edwin
E
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA. ehutchins@ucsd.edu
D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003071:Cognition; D003469:Culture; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D002679:Pan troglodytes; D012919:Social Behavior