Evolution Language · 31 March 2026 ·
Helpless infants turn to Grice: An embodied account of the emergence of communication in infancy
Title: *Helpless infants turn to Grice: An embodied account of the emergence of communication in infancy**
Abstract:
Many pragmatic accounts have focussed on specific cognitive abilities, such as the ability to meta-represent others’ beliefs to establish communicative intent, to explain why humans have evolved ostensive-referential communication. These are argued to be distinct human abilities (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) with specific ontogenetic precursors (Csibra, 2010). In this talk, I want to suggest an alternative based on the uniquely human developmental trajectory in which ready-to-learn infants are constrained in their ability to explore the world. This fundamentally changes how infants learn to engage with their environment. Helpless infants instead learn to pay attention and coordinate with others. This ultimately leads to the establishment of key behavioural patterns that provide the foundations for ostensive-referential communication system in humans.
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Evolution Psychology · 23 March 2026 ·
Postnatal dependency as the foundation for social learning in humans
Human societies are built on sophisticated social learning abilities. Learning from others provides us with the ability to transmit information and knowledge faster and more adaptively than genetic transmission would allow us. This has provided humans with the ability to adapt to a wide variety of environmental niches and provides one of the most important aspects of our phenotype.
But where does this ability to engage in social learning come from? Many authors, such as Gergely Csibra and György Gergely have focussed on specific cognitive adaptations, such as the ability to understand communicative signals as markers of intentional communication. Others, such as Cecilia Heyes, have argued that these abilities are themselves the product of a process of social learning that provided its own foundations. In a recent publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological sciences, I argue that this ability instead emerges from human’s prolonged period of dependency after birth. This fundamentally reshapes the way that human infants explore their world: Rather than directly interacting with the affordances in the environment, human infants’ prolonged period of dependency creates an environment where they explore the world through others. Even compared to other apes, that share some aspects of this prolonged dependency, human infants spend more than twice as long until they have learned to walk. Once they have finally started to explore the world on their own, they have learned that the ‘[t]he path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person’ (Vygotsky, 1972), which provides the foundations for the complex social learning that we observe in humans. This provides an alternative explanation for human social learning, grounded in an embodied, enactive and ecological account of infant development.
The full paper is available open access and Richard Moore has written a nice commentary, highlighting some additional points.
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Psychology Evolution · 22 February 2017 ·
You’re clever for your kids’ sake: A feedback loop between intelligence and early births
The gap between our cognitive skills and that of our closest evolutionary ancestors is quite astonishing. Within a relatively short evolutionary time frame humans developed a wide range of cognitive abilities and bodies that are very different to other primates and animals. Many of these differences appear to be related to each other. A recent paper by Piantadosi and Kidd argues that human intelligence originates in human infants’ restriction of their birth size, leading to premature births and long weaning times that require intensive and intelligent care. This is an interesting hypothesis that links the ontogeny of the body with cognition.
Read the full article over at Replicated Typo”
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Evolution Psychology · 4 May 2012 ·
Presenting at the LEL Postgraduate conference: Implicit and Explicit Iterative Mindreading
I will present a paper on my dissertation topic, iterative mind-reading, at this year’s LEL postgraduate conference. This work is based on a collaboration with Cathleen O’Grady, under the supervision of Kenny Smith and Thom Scott-Phillips.
You can find the abstract here: