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.

Taking a distributed view of language, this paper naturalizes symbol grounding. Learning to talk is traced to – not categorizing speech sounds – but events that shape the rise of human-style autonomy. On the extended symbol hypothesis, this happens as babies integrate micro-activity with slow and deliberate adult action. As they discover social norms, intrinsic motive formation enables them to reshape co-action. Because infants link affect to contingencies, dyads develop norm-referenced routines. Over time, infant doings become analysis amenable. The caregiver of a nine-month-old may, for example, prompt the baby to fetch objects. Once she concludes that the baby uses ‘words ’ to understand what she says, the infant can use this belief in orienting to more abstract contingencies. New cognitive powers will develop as the baby learns to act in ways that are consistent with a caregiver’s false belief that her baby uses ‘words.’

Abstract. Research on social cognition needs to overcome a disciplinary disintegration. On the one hand, in cognitive science and philosophy of mind – even in recent embodied approaches – the explanatory weight is still overly on individual capacities. In social science on the other hand, the investigation of the interaction process and interactional behaviour is not often brought to bear on individual aspects of social cognition. Not bringing these approaches together has unfairly limited the range of possible explanations of social understanding to the postulation of complicated internal mechanisms (contingency detection modules for instance). Starting from the question What is a social interaction? we propose a fresh look at the problem aimed at integrating individual cognition and the interaction process in order to arrive at more parsimonious explanations of social understanding. We show how an enactive framework can provide a way to do this, starting from the notions of autonomy, sense-making and coordination. We propose that not only each individual in a social encounter but also the interaction process itself has autonomy. Examples illustrate that these autonomies evolve

Since Autism was first outlined (Kanner, 1943), an agreed-upon definition of Autism has been reached and standardized diagnostic methods produced. To date, however, no clear etiology has been established, and proposed treatments vary widely. Research has uncovered enough about Autism’s underlying neuroand cognitive psychology to allow us to outline treatment implications to benefit those families seeking help now who are unwilling to wait for the elusive ultimate answer. The Autism Treatment Center of America ™ has been using The Son-Rise Program ® (SRP) with families since 1983 in order to fulfill this need. The SRP was developed by parents experimenting with ways to reach their severely autistic child (Kaufman, 1976). Science at this time offered no guidance on facilitating the social development of children with Autism. Since their son emerged from Autism after 3 _ years of intensive work, the Kaufmans have offered SRP to families internationally. To date, no rigorous longitudinal testing of the efficacy of SRP has been performed yet it can be seen that the key principles of this approach draw

). p. 73, Jerusalem, 1991. Francis, Hazel, Learning to Read. London, 1982. Gillis-Carlebach, Miriam, The "Third" Language in Beginning Reading and Language Flexibility. In: Proceedings of the Third International Jerusalem Symposium on Encouraging Reading, pp. 127-137. Jerusalem, 1987. Gillis-Carlebach, Miriam, From Heder to Computer (Hebrew). RamatGan, 1987. Gillis-Carlebach, Miriam, Easy Versus Difficult Words to Read - A Field Study with First Graders (Hebrew). Iyunim Be'Chinuch 5, pp. 63- 69, 1990. Gillis-Carlebach, Miriam, Every Child is My Only One (German). Hamburg, 1992. Gillis-Carlebach, Miriam, Critical Re-examination of Research in Early Reading Instruction and its Application. Eric, Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills. Illinois, 1989. Gillis-Carlebach, Miriam, The Psychological Profile and the Reading Profile of Dyslexic Children. International Journal of Special Education, Canada, Vol. 15, pp. 191-198, 1991. Godfrey, J.J. et. al., Performance of Dyslex...

Development and early focal brain injury 2 Over the past ten years, we have made significant progress in addressing key questions concerning deficit and development after early stroke. We found evidence of subtle early impairment and subsequent development in each domain examined. However, the profiles of impairment and development differed across domains. Deficits of language acquisition are initially pervasive in that they are observed following injury to widely distributed brain areas. Spatial analytic deficits exhibit more specific patterns of brain-behavior association, similar to those observed among adults with injury to comparable brain regions. Had we been working in isolation, the separate investigators associated with this project may have reached very different conclusions about the nature of development following early injury. Instead, we were forced to look for ways to resolve the apparent disparity in our cross-domain findings. The model that best fits our data focuses on redefining the nature of early plasticity. Recent animal studies provide strong evidence that plasticity plays a central role in brain development. Brain organization is to a large extent

The authors contributed equally to this work. Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism (MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption is that higher-level cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are