We propose that humans are adapted to transfer knowledge to, and receive knowledge from, conspecifics by teaching. This adaptation, which we call 'pedagogy', involves the emergence of a special communication system that does not presuppose either language or high-level theory of mind, but could itself provide a basis facilitating the development of these human-specific abilities both in phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. We speculate that tool manufacturing and mediated tool use made the evolution of such a new social learning mechanism necessary. However, the main body of evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from developmental psychology. We argue that many central phenomena of human infant social cognition that may seem puzzling in the light of their standard functional explanation can be more coherently and plausibly interpreted as reflecting the adaptations to receive knowledge from social partners through teaching.

The paper provides a summary of our recent research on preverbal infants (using violation-of-expectation and observational learning paradigms) demonstrating that one-year-olds interpret and draw systematic inferences about other's goal-directed actions, and can rely on such inferences when imitating other's actions or emulating their goals. To account for these findings it is proposed that oneyear -olds apply a non-mentalistic action interpretational system, the 'teleological stance' that represents actions by relating relevant aspects of reality (action, goal-state, and situational constraints) through the principle of rational action, which assumes that actions function to realize goal-states by the most efficient means available in the actor's situation. The

This experiment investigated 12-month-old infants’ ability to link an event’s beginning to its probable ending. Following Csibra, Biro, Koos, and Gergely (2003), infants were habituated to a simple chasing event involving animated balls, and at test saw 2 possible endings: either 1 ball caught the other or failed to do so. Two controls Do Not Copy were added to the previous work. First, the total amount of motion was controlled in the test endings; second, the endings were paired with a nonchasing beginning to ensure that behavior at test reflected representation of the event beginning itself. The results replicated Csibra et al.’s finding that infants look longer at the noncatching ending following the chasing beginning; moreover, infants showed no preference for either ending following the no-chasing beginning. This study supports the claim that infants can calculate the rational ending of a goal-directed motion event.

This work investigates children’s early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., big, long), maximum standard absolute (e.g., full, straight), and minimum standard absolute (e.g., spotted, bumpy) GAs in the way that the standard of comparison is set and how it interacts with the discourse context. I then ask if adverbs enable infants to learn these differences. In a corpus analysis, I demonstrate that statistically significant patterns of adverbial modification are available to the language learner: restricted adverbs (e.g., completely) are more likely than non-restricted adverbs (e.g., very) to select for maximal GAs with bounded scales. Non-maximal GAs, which are more likely to be modified by adverbs in general, are more likely to be modified by a narrower range, predominantly composed of intensifiers (e.g., very). I then ask if language learners recruit this information when learning new adjectives. In a word learning task employing the preferential looking paradigm, I demonstrate that 30-month-olds use adverbial modifiers they are not necessarily producing to assign an interpretation to novel adjectives. Adjectives modified by completely are assigned an

www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT Children’s understanding of death as the cessation of agency: a test using sleep versus death

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Abstract not found

I am a philosopher of mind. In the early 1990’s I was primarily addressing metaphysical issues in the philosophy of mind raised by Brentano’s definition of intentionality a century earlier. My questions were: can intentionality be naturalized? Could the puzzling features of intentionality be accounted for by using concepts that would be

This dissertation presents an approach to robot programming by demonstration based on two key concepts: demonstrator intent is the most meaningful signal that the robot can observe, and the robot should have a basic level of behavioral competency from which to interpret observed actions. Intent is a teleological, robust teaching signal invariant to many common sources of noise in training. The robot can use the knowledge encapsulated in sensorimotor schemas to interpret the demonstration. Furthermore, knowledge gained in prior demonstrations can be applied to future sessions. iv I argue that programming by demonstration be organized into declarative and procedural components. The declarative component represents a reusable outline of underlying behavior that can be applied to many different contexts. The procedural component represents the dynamic portion of the task that is based on features observed at run time. I describe how statistical models, and Bayesian methods in particular, can be used to model these components. These models have many features that are beneficial for learning in this domain, such as tolerance for uncertainty, and the ability to incorporate prior knowledge into inferences. I demonstrate this architecture through experiments on a bimanual humanoid robot using tasks from the pick and place domain.

Imitation by social interaction? Analysis of a minimal