Stupid Primates & Embodied Minds (or Stupid Minds and Embodied Primates?)

On a very cool episode of video blog blogginghead.tv’s “Science Saturday” called “Stupid Primates”, experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe and psychologist Laurie Santos discuss her work on the psychological shortcomings of humans and other primates. Her team’s idea is that we shouldn’t only look at the cognitive abilities we’re really proud of, like language, cooperation, and the ability to reason about other minds. Instead of trying to discover the evolutionary precursors of these abilities and looking at if and in which ways other species possess them, we should also look at the evolutionary foundations of the things we’re not so proud of, like our tendency to cheat and deceive, and especially our tendency to behave irrational and illogical.

Interestingly, monkeys also show some of the same irrational behavior as we do, such as cognitive dissonance and loss aversion. If you’re interested, you should really check out this episode.

If monkeys make some of the very same mistakes we do, this speaks for the interpretation that we make some of our mistakes because we are wired that way. For some arguments in a similar vein, you can also check out this discussion betwen science Journalist Carl Zimmer and psychologist Gary Marcus, author of Kluge. You can also check out Gary Marcus being interviewed by blogger and author Jonah Lehrer.

On a related note, there’s a really cool episode of the Brain Science Podcast, where cognitive psychologist Art Glenberg talks about embodied cognition. Glenberg’s main research focus are the bodily, “low-level” underpinnings of language comprehension. He’s done quite a lot of research on the ways language is grounded in action and embodiment, and how we use bodily states and our experience with the world to construct meaning. He is influenced by cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s work on metaphor and embodied language comprehension.

It should be noted that, the term “image schema”, i.e. a recurring stereotyped perceptual structure or pattern generated from experience with and exposure to the world and used to categorize and understand objects and events, which Glenberg attributes to Lakoff, was AFAIK coined by Lakoff’s collaborator Mark Johnson.

In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson wrote the very influential book “Metaphors We Live By”, looking at the intrinsic metaphorical structure of language as exemplified for example by the many WAR metaphors found when talking about conversation: I defended my position, He attacked my argument, etc. or in the ways we visualize Life as being a CONTAINER filled our emptied of essences: I’ve had a full life. Life is empty for him, Her life is crammed with activities, Get the most out of life, etc.

Lakoff & Johnson (1980) even go further and claim that this metaphorical structure also extends to the way our conceptual system is mapped out. Glenberg’s experiments give empircal support to this view. For example, he showed that people were better at understanding sentences like “he opened the drawer”, when they had to indicate whether the sentence makes sense by extending their arm in a manner similar to the movement described in the sentence then when they had to make a movement analogous to the movement of closing a drawer to indicate its correctness , and vice versa.

Glenberg also reports that he has submitted a paper together with Vittorio Gallese on the relation between the grammar of natural languages and the hierarchical structure of neural action systems. This sounds akin to the work of Phillip Lieberman, who claims that

“The supposed unique aspect of syntax, its “reiterative” productivity, appears to derive from subcortical structures that play a part in neural circuits regulating motor control.“ (Lieberman 2005),

especially stressing the importance of the basal ganglia in the production and evolution of language.

Interestingly, Gallese has also published a paper with George Lakoff, called “The Brain’s Concepts”, which focuses on the embodied, sensory-motor nature of conceptual structures and the role of mirror neurons in concept formation and language comprehension.

Anyways, check out the episode, I think it’s really worth it.

References:

Lieberman, Phillip (2005): The pied piper of Cambridge. The Linguistic Review 22: 289–302.

Gallese Vittorio, Lakoff George (2005) The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Reason and Language. Cognitive Neuropsychology, , 22:455-479

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Evolutionary Metaphysics V

So this is my last post about “Baboon Metaphysics” and what we get if we try to combine it with some other lines of research. Now which steps were necessary for the evolution of the human mind and language, and in which order?
As a starter, our LCAs with chimpanzees should have exhibited or later evolved the following traits:

1 A rudimentary Theory-of-Mind and a conceptual system which enabled them to form multimodal mental-representations had to be present (Cheney & Seyfarth 2007, Barsalou 2005, Gil-da-Costa et al. 2004)

2a enhanced displaced conceptual control somehow evolved, probably due to prefrontal enlargement, resulting in higher frontal control over neural processes (Barsalou 2005, Deacon 1998, Miller et al. 2002, Rilling 2006)

2b enhanced ToM-abilities, probably influenced by greater frontal control, but also due to some elaboration of an existing mirror neuron system (which is present, for example in maqaques) which then was integrated into a higher order system together with cortical midline structures responsible for social and self-evaluation and possibly other information structures, forming the ‘social network.’ (Cheney & Seyfarth 2007, Uddin et al. 2007, Wheatley et al. 2007, Barsalou in press a, Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004)

3. Greater social and cultural complexity paired with the motivation to cooperate and share mental states with others (Tomasello et al. 2005, Herrmann et al. 2007), possibly co evolutionary influences of social complexity, theory of mind (Dunbar 1998, Dunbar & Shultz 2007) as well as technological advances (Reader and Laland 2002, Reader 2003) and brain expansion.

4. higher ability of displaced, goal-directed an planning simulation of physical categories (physical stance, folk physics) functional categories (design stance, folk biology, mechanics) and intentional categories (intentional stance, folk psychology, ToM) aiding survival and reproductive success trough comprehensive prediction in dangerous environments and socially complex groups (Dennett 1987, Poirier et al. 2005, Tooby & DeVore 1987, Ryder & Favorov 2001)

5. Evolution of extensive symbolic capacities and ‘protolanguage’(which I haven’t addressed here) aided among other factors by displaced frontal control and other selective pressures such as the need to communicate displaced information, share intentions and cooperate, foraging, competition, sexual selection such as display of genetic fitness, establishment of trust, etc. etc. (Deacon 1998, Bickerton 2006, Jackendoff 2002, Pinker 1994, Tomasello et al. 2005, Desalles 2007, Franks and Rigby 2002).

6. Further enhancement of symbol-usage through interactions between language and embodied simulation and ‘symbolic theft’ (embodied-experience to language mapping) (Barsalou in press b, Cangelosi et al. 2002)

7. Evolutionary/cultural feedbacks from language to the conceptual system (Lupyan 2006, Burling 2005, Barsalou 2005, in press a) and further influence of metaphorical structure to language (Lakoff and Johnson, 1987, 1999). The ability to blend mental spaces together and form what-if structures and envision technological/cultural innovations, and goal-directed actions (Turner 2003, Miller et al. 2002,Cheney and Seyfarth 2007) Cheney & Seyfarth write that if you search for what-if on Google you’ll get about 150,000,000 hits, which as they say, might be too much of a good thing.

Oh yeah, and mirror neurons also possibly played a rule in language evolution (Arbib 2005). And I didn’t say anything about syntactic/grammatical evolution (Jackendoff 2002) And I forgot recursion (Hauser et al. 2002) as well. And as almost everyone else I’m sure the Baldwin Effect has something important to do with language evolution (Jackendoff 2002, Kirby 2000). Neither did I address the fact that… oh well, as you see, language evolution is a pretty darn complex interdisciplinary field, but I think I pinpointed some of the (if not all) key issues critical for the evolution of language and the human mind. Hope you enjoyed my digressions inspired by Cheney and Seyfarth’s book. Cheers.

References:

Arbib, Michael A. 2005. “From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 105-167

Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.” Trends. Cog. Sc. 9.7: 309-311.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. In press. “Grounded Cognition.” In: Annual Review of Psychology 59

Barsalou, Lawrence W. in press b. “Grounding symbolic operations in the brain’s modal systems.” Embodied grounding: Social, cognitive, affective, and neuroscientific approaches. Eds. G.R. Semin & E.R. Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bickerton, Derek. 2006. “Language Evolution”

Burling, Robbins. 2005. The Talking Ape. Oxford: OUP

Cangelosi, A., Greco, A., & Harnad, S. 2002. “Symbol Grounding and the Symbolic Theft Hypothesis”. Simulating the Evolution of Language. Eds. A.Cangelosi & D. Parisi . London: Springer

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Deacon, Terrence William 1998. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, M.A.: Bradford Books.

Desalles, Jean-Louis. 2007. Why We Talk. Oxford: OUP.

Dunbar, Robin 1998. “Theory of Mind and the Evolution of Language.” In: James
R. Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Chris Knight (eds.). Approaches to the Evolution of Language. Social and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Dunbar, R. I. M. and Susanne Shultz. 2007.“Evolution in the Social Brain” Science 317: 1344-1347

Franks, Bradley and Kate Rigby 2005. “Deception and mate selection: some implications for relevance and the evolution of language” Language Origins: Perspectives on Evolution. Ed. Maggie Tallerman. Oxford: OUP.

Gil-da-Costa, Ricardo, Allen Braun, Marco Lopes, Marc D. Hauser, Richard E. Carson, Peter Herscovitch and Alex Martin. 2004. “Toward an evolutionary perspective on conceptual representation: Species-specific calls activate visual and affective processing systems in the macaque.” PNAS 101.50: 17516–17521.

Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2002. “The Faculty ofLanguage: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” In: Science 298, 1569-1579.

Herrmann, Esther, Josep Call, María Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Brian Hare, and Michael Tomasello. 2007. “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science 317: 1360-1365.

Jackendoff, Ray. 2002.. Foundations of language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kirby, Simon 1998. “Fitness and the Selective Adaptation of Language.” In: James R. Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Chris Knight (eds.). Approaches to the Evolution of Language. Social and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 359-383.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Book

Lupyan, Gary. 2006. “Labels Facilitate Learning of Novel Categories.” The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference. Eds. A. Cangelosi, A.D.M. Smith & K.R. Smith Singapore: World Scientific,190-197

Miller, Earl K., David J. Freedman and Jonathan D. Wallis 2002. “The Prefrontal Cortex: Categories, Concepts and Cognition.” In: Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 357: 1123–1136

Poirier, Pierre, Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Jean-Frédéric Depasquale.2005. “Embodied Categorization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005.

Pinker, Steven 1994. The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Lane Penguin Press.

Reader, S.M. 2003. “Relative brain size and the distribution of innovation and social learning across the nonhuman primates.” The Biology of Traditions: Models and Evidence. Eds. D.M. Fragaszy and S. Perry, 56-93.

Reader, S.M. and K.N. Laland. 2002. “Social Intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates” PNAS 99: 4436-4441.

Rilling, James K. 2006. Human and NonHuman Primate Brains: Are They Allometrically Scaled Versions of the Same Design? Evolutionary Anthropology 15: 67-77.

Ryder, Dan and Oleg V. Favorov. 2001. “The New Associationism: A Neural Explanation for the Predictive Powers of Cerebral Cortex.” Brain and Mind 2.2. 161-194.

Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll. 2004. “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28.4

Tooby, John and Irven DeVore 1987. “The Reconstruction of Hominid Rvolution Through Strategic Modelling.” The Evolution of Human Behavior: Primate Models. Ed. W.G. Kinzey. Albany: SUNY.

Turner, Mark. 2003. “Double-Scope Stories.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman

Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Laila Craighero. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–192.

Uddin, Lucina Q., Marco Iacoboni, Claudia Lange and Julian Paul Keenan. 2007.“The Self and Social Cognition: The Role of Cortical Midline Structures and Mirror Neurons.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11.4 53-157.

Wheatley, Thalia, Shawn C. Milleville and Alex Martin. “Understanding Animate Agents: Distinct Roles for the Social Network and Mirror System.” Psychological Science 18.6 (2007): 469-474.

Evolutionary Metaphysics IV

Since I drifted away from discussing baboons and Cheney and Seyfarth’s book quite a bit, I decided to name this post (jokingly) ‘Evolutionary Metaphysics, because, according to the OED, metaphysics includes questions about

"the underlying concepts or first principles on which a particular branch of knowledge is based."

OK, there actually is already such a field, called evolutionary epistemology, or its evil twin brother, evolutionary psychology, but I’ll still go with this title.
In my last post, I considered some proposals how our – in some parts species-continuous – conceptual system had been extended. Deacon (1998) and Barsalou (2005) both observed the higher frontal cortical control which humans show compared to other animals. Whereas Deacon proposed that we had a ‘front heavy’ cognitive style, Barsalou broke our conceptual extensions down into component parts. Some of them explicitly seem to be reliant on frontal control, such as Mental Time Travel and Conceptual Blending.
Another proposal for a human specialization similar to these traits is cause-and-effect reasoning, in order to outwit defences of plants and animals, as well as competitors (Tooby and DeVore 1987). The enhancement of these capacities in humans is congruent with the fact that the prefrontal cortex synthesizes the information received from other areas into representations of concepts, rules and contingencies, and that this structure is especially elaborate in primates and especially so in humans (Miller et al. 2002, Deacon 1998, Ivry & Knight 2002). Prefrontal enlargement could have led to enhanced cognitive control over the conceptual system, and thereby to a greater cognitive control over our own actions and their goals.

However, when taking into account human ToM-abilities, there seems to be a lot more to it than just prefrontal enlargement. How wan we take different perspectives and attribute false beliefs to others? Regarding the blending of incompatible concepts, Mark Turner asks: ”How can we fire up incompatible mental patterns simultaneuously […] Evolutionary, how did our species develop this ability?” (Turner 2003: 118). What are the evolutionary steps complementing higher frontal control?
Cheney and Seyfarth amassed evidence for the existence of mental representations in baboons; neuroimaging studies showed the same for macaque monkeys (Gil-da-Cost et al. 2004). Following Barsalou (2005) in assuming a common architecture for human and animal conceptual systems, what are the foundations of social cognition in other animals, on which human ToM-abilities were built?
One part of the answer seems to lie in the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ “a particular class of visuomotor neurons, originally discovered in area F5 of the monkey premotor cortex, that discharge both when the monkey does a particular action and when it observes another individual (monkey or human) doing a similar action” (Rizzolatti et al. 2001: 661). A similar mirror neuron system crucial to the understanding of action, imitation, and also involved in language is argued to exist in humans (Rizzolatti/Craighero 2004). Mirror neurons sometimes seem to be hyped as the answer to every open question in the cognitive studies, but at the moment no one really seems to know what to conclude from them.

So how do we understand others? Gallese and his colleagues (2004) propose that we understand others and infer mental states to them by simulating their actions in our ‘mirror system.’ These proposals are in accordance with Barsalou’s view of conceptualization as integrated simulations of experience-based concepts in our conceptual system (Barsalou in press) But as Barsalou himself stresses, mirror circuits seem to be part of a larger system which also involves inhibitory processes that keep simulated and own mental states apart from each other (Decety and Grazes 2006) and the establishment of joint attention (Sebanz et al. 2006).
This larger system is sometimes identified as a functional system called ‘social network’ which integrates contributed information from others systems into the mental representation of an animate being (Wheatley et al. 2007). Wheatley and colleagues found that the mirror system does not respond selectively to biological actions, but to actions in general. The failure of the mirror system to be modulated by the interpretation of animacy when observing or simulating an action makes it unlikely to be the origin of general social cognition. Instead, Wheatley and his colleagues argue that inferring animacy is done by the ‘social network’ and propose to see the mirror system as a general simulation machinery which is employed in tandem by the social network, imagery and other cognitive processes.They conclude that the social network’s ability to infer animacy should be seen as an important component of, as well as an evolutionary precursor to our complex social cognition and Theory of Mind-abilities.

Yet another component of the social network may be the so-called cortical midline structures (CMS), which process information about others and the self in more evaluative and abstract and ways (Uddin et al. 2007). Uddin and her colleagues see CMS and the mirror system as interactive components. They propose that the mirror system is responsible for the ability to map representations of others onto our own mental architecture, and that the CMS evaluates and underscores these mappings. It would be interesting to know if CMS exist in non-human primates and other animals, and if not, if there are possible homologues. Another question is if Wheatley et al.’s and Uddin et al’s proposals are compatible. I, for instance, have no idea. In my next post I will sum up my previous observations and see if I can draw some rough skeletal evolutionary scenario from it.

References:

Barsalou, Lawrence W. In press. “Grounded Cognition.” In: Annual Review of Psychology 59

Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005a. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.” Trends. Cog. Sc. 9.7: 309-311.

Deacon, Terrence William 1998. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution ofLanguage and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Decety, Jean, & Julie Grèzes. 2006. “The power of simulation: Imagining one's own and other's behavior.” Brain Research 1079: 4-14.

Gil-da-Costa, Ricardo, Allen Braun, Marco Lopes, Marc D. Hauser, Richard E. Carson, Peter Herscovitch and Alex Martin. 2004. “Toward an evolutionary perspective on conceptual representation: Species-specific calls activate visual and affective processing systems in the macaque.” PNAS 101.50: 17516–17521.

Ivry Richard and Robert T. Knight. 2002. “Making order from chaos: the misguided frontal lobe” Nature Neuroscience 5.5: 394-396.

Miller, Earl K., David J. Freedman and Jonathan D. Wallis 2002. “The Prefrontal Cortex: Categories, Concepts and Cognition.” In: Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 357: 1123–1136

Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Laila Craighero. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–192.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese. “Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of Action.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (2001): 661–670.

Sebanz, N., Bekkering, H., & Knoblich, G. 2006. Joint action: Bodies and minds moving together. Tr. Cog. Sc. 10: 70-76.

Tooby, John and Irven DeVore 1987. “The Reconstruction of Hominid Rvolution Through Strategic Modelling.” The Evolution of Human Behavior: Primate Models. Ed. W.G. Kinzey. Albany: SUNY.

Uddin, Lucina Q., Marco Iacoboni, Claudia Lange and Julian Paul Keenan. 2007. “The Self and Social Cognition: The Role of Cortical Midline Structures and Mirror Neurons.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11.4 (2007): 153-157.

Wheatley, Thalia, Shawn C. Milleville and Alex Martin. “Understanding Animate
Agents: Distinct Roles for the Social Network and Mirror System.” Psychological Science 18.6 (2007): 469-474.

Baboon Metaphysics III: Links with other Fields of Cognitive Science

In my last post I argued that “Baboon Metaphysics” only mentioned half of the story of what makes the human conceptual system unique. What Cheney and Seyfarth did not address in their still absolutely excellent and insightful book, is the way our conceptual system has been extended in respect to that of other animals, and the way language may interact with conceptualization and other cognitive processes, instead of simply being the expression of cognitive processes absolutely independent from it. (Although I don’t want to attribute such a view to Cheney and Seyfarth just because they haven’t said anything about it, this theory still seems to be quite prominent. See, for example, Edmund Blair Bolles' review of Steven Pinker’s new book “The Stuff of thought (2007) ).
In the words of Robbins Burlings (2005): “What has language done to us?” Work by Gary Lupyan and others shows that there is evidence that language, thinking, and concepts interact and that language helps us organize and categorize the world and sometimes alters how we process information (Kenneally 2007: 106-111). This is certainly not a return to strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf thesis, considering that Cheney and Seyfarth clearly showed that there are concepts and conceptualization without language, and evidence that language itself is partly grounded in embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff and Johnson 1999). But these interactive processes, and the way our own extended conceptual abilities rely on enhanced cognitive supplements to our basic neural architecture, are definitely part of the whole picture.

In my last post, I mentioned that Barsalou (2005) argued that frontal lobe control is a critical factor enhancing the displacement- and computation-abilities of conceptual simulation, and therefore a crucial factor of defining what makes the human extended conceptual system different from animal mental representations, which evolutionary are the basic architecture for our cognitive abilities, and which Cheney and Seyfarth described marvelously. Terrence Deacon has a similar proposal what makes us human. According to him

“The prominent enlargement of the prefrontal cortex and the correlated shifts in connection patterns that occurred during human brain evolution introduced strong biases into the learning process and gave human prefrontal circuits a greater role in many neural processes unrelated to language. Though intense selection was directed toward this one aspect of mind and brain, its secondary effects have also ramified to influence the whole of human cognition. (Deacon 1998: 417)

Because the prefrontal cortex is the most important structure that supports symbolic reference (Deacon 1998: 266) and in human beings, prefrontal circuits play a greater role in all neural processes of the brain than in any other species (Deacon 1998: 265), we are “The Symbolic Species” inhabiting mental worlds mediated by thousands of hierarchical structured symbol-symbol relationships (see also Kenneally’s (2007) prelude for a quite poetic description of the semiotic universes we create and communicate about) intertwined with our physical lives, our embodied experience of the outside world. As I mentioned in my last post Barsalou (2005), too, sees our symbolic capacities mediated by greater frontal control as crucial:

“What results is control of the distributed property architecture to represent components of situations and to combine them in novel ways.“

These combination of representations into an ‘integrated simulation’, can be found in another field of inquiry, namely mental images:

“Mental images need not result simply from the recall of previously perceived objects or events; they can also be created by combining and modifying stored perceptual information in novel ways.” (Kosslyn et al. 2001).

Interestingly “most of the neural processes that underlie like-modality perception are also used in imagery; and imagery, in many ways, can ‘stand in’ for (re-present, if you will) a perceptual stimulus or situation“ (Kosslyn et al. 2001). This supports Barsalou’s view that conceptualization consists of integrated “reenactments of perceptual, motor, and introspective states acquired during experience with the world, body, and mind “ (Barsalou in press). Also interesting in this regard is Mark Turner’s stance at what makes us uniquely human: conceptual blending - the integration of two mental spaces/conceptual structures to form a new one, enabling mental time travel and escape, as well as what-if relations. Turners describes it as “a basic human mental operation, with constitutive and governing principles. It played a crucial role, probable the crucial role, in the descent of our species over the last fifty or one hundred thousand years” (Turner 2003).

By the way, Edmund Blair Bolles has posted a great discussion of a paper by Don Ross which deals with the evolution of human culture and joint attention. Go check it out!

References:
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005a. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.”
Trends. Cog. Sc. 9.7: 309-311.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. In press. “Grounded Cognition.” In: Annual Review of Psychology 59

Burling, Robbins. 2005. The Talking Ape. Oxford: OUP.

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Deacon, Terrence William 1998. The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of
Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Pinker, Steven 2007. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking.

Kenneally, Christine. 2007. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. New York: Viking.

Kosslyn, Stephen M., Giorgio Ganis and William L. Thompson. 2001.“Neural Foundations of Imagery.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2: 635-642.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Book

Turner, Mark. 2003. “Double-Scope Stories.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman

Baboon Metaphysics II

In my last post, I wrote about Dorothy Cheney’s and Robert Seyfarth’s new book “Baboon Metaphysics” and their claim that

“Baboons teach us that it is possible to have a complex society based on cognitive processes that are both computational and representational without either language or a theory of mind. Concepts (of a sort) can exist without words; computation can occur without grammar, Along with many other species of animals, baboons provide us with a natural experiment that allows us to ask “What it thought – what can it possibly be – without language and a theory of mind.?” (p. 276)

In their book, the authors refer to a wealth of other literature about animal communication, cognition and human evolution, and I will write about some of these papers from then to then.

One important implication of Cheney and Seyfarth’s argument is the “Continuity of the conceptual system across species“ (Barsalou 2005a), which outright contradicts the strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf-thesis, radical constructivism and cultural relativism. The Conceptual system is a “system distributed throughout the brain that represents knowledge about the world“(Barsalou 2005b: 621). Primates and monkeys have rich conceptual systems, they therefore can think without language. Conceptual representation in humans and monkeys has common neural substrates, suggesting how human cognition build upon these evolutionary precursors (Gil-da-Costa 2004).
Additional systems seem to have extended the conceptual abilities of humans significantly (Barsalou 2005a). And this is where, Cheney and Seyfarth’s “First thought, then language” ceases to tell the whole story. I don’t think this can really be called a shortcoming of the book, but I’m a bit disappointed that the authors didn’t at least hint at what makes our conceptual system different from that of other animals, and in which ways it could be influence by language. Though they stress that the human ability to have a theory of mind “favored an ability to speak, expand one’s vocabulary, and combine words in sentences to convey novel meanings” (p.281) and they concur with Tomasello et al. (2005) that “shared intentionality”, the motivation to cooperate with others and to share intentions and mental states with them, is a crucial principle of humanness, culture, and language, they still don’t go further than “Thought came first; speech and language appeared later, as its expression”(p.281).
But for me, the story doesn’t end here. Cheney and Seyfarth stress the fact that the “same basic architecture for representing knowledge is present in humans” (Barsalou 2005a), and rightly so. As Barsalou (2005b) puts it, conceptualization processes work

"via integrated simulations of agents, objects, settings, actions, and introspections. On recognizing a familiar type of category instance, an entrenched situated conceptualization associated with it becomes active to provide relevant inferences via pattern completion". (Barsalou 2005b: 645)

This pattern completion seems to be an essential feature of all cognitive systems, because it allows an organism to prepare for and predict actions and events, thus aiding survival. (Barsalou 2005). Many neuroscientists are convinced that the brain’s main task is prediction in order to survive in dangerous environments (Ryder/Favorov 2001), and, we can add with Cheney and Seyfarth, to be able to function in large social groups. With a theory of mind, humans have much better predictive strategies at hand, and thus are even better equipped to cooperate and function in large societies. This is one of the key themes in “Baboon Metaphysics.” But what else makes our conceptual system different, and how so? Besides having a ToM, Barsalou (2005a) argues that another uniquely human complement of the conceptual system is that they “represent situations that are completely unrelated to the current situation,” enhancing learning and future performance by mentally simulating past events, an maximizing the achievement of goals by simulation of planned events in the future.

Barsalou stresses the importance of the frontal lobe for such activations. He adds language as another possibility for the extensions of the human conceptual system. Barsalou speculates that “the linguistic system provides exquisite control over the simulation system as it represents non-present situations.” Thus, what could make humans essentially different, along with higher social ToM-competence, may be their “control of the distributed property architecture to represent components of situations and to combine them in novel ways.“ This ability again is hugely reliant on frontal activation. These observations resonate with Terrence Deacon’s (1998) depiction of our ‘front-heavy” cognitive style, which makes us “The Symbolic Species”, Mark Turner’s theory of Conceptual Blending, as well as with work by Stephen Kosslyn, which I will address in my next post on the book.
In sum, this combinations of Cheney and Seyfarth’s work with Barsalou’s and others considerations about the human conceptual system is, I think, extremely interesting, and makes “Baboon Metaphysics” – coming from one side and looking to meet with research such as Barsalou’s, Deacon’s, and Turner’s – an important milestone in our quest of unravelling the human mind.

References:
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005a. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.” Trends. Cog. Sc. 9.7: 309-311.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005b “Situated Conceptualization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 619-650.

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Deacon, Terrence William. 1998. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Gil-da-Costa, Ricardo, Allen Braun, Marco Lopes, Marc D. Hauser, Richard E. Carson, Peter Herscovitch and Alex Martin. 2004. “Toward an evolutionary perspective on conceptual representation: Species-specific calls activate visual and affective processing systems in the macaque.” PNAS 101.50: 17516–17521.

Ryder, Dan and Oleg V. Favorov. 2001. "The New Associationism: A Neural Explanation for the Predictive Powers of Cerebral Cortex.” Brain and Mind 2.2. : 161-194.

Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll. 2004. “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28.5

Shared Symbolic Storages

The last kind of category discussed in Pierre Poirier, Benoit Hardy-Vallée, and Jean-Frédéric Despasquale’s (2005) article about “Embodied Categorization” are ‘linguistic categorizers.’

Concepts
Poirier et al. call linguistic categories ‘concepts’, that is, first and foremost public objects whose usage is controlled by the linguistic community. Seen this way, the generally established system of concepts is the shared symbolic storage of a community. Jerry Fodor (1998) has a similar notion of concepts, stating that one requirement (Nr. 5 of 5, to be precise) for concepts is that they be

“public; they’re the sorts of things that lots of people can, and do, share” (p. 28).

Fodor’s other requirements for concepts are that they:

1. are states of the mind/brain that function as mental effects or causes.
   
2. that they are categories, that is that they function as mental operations “by which the brain classifies objects and events” (Cohen/Lefebvre 2005: 2).
   
3. that they are compositional, that is that they, one the one hand, consist of constituents (of other, hierarchically intertwined, ‘lower’ concepts), and, on the other hand, that they are the constituents of what Fodor calls ‘thoughts’(i.e. his “cover term for the mental representations which […] express the propositions that are the objects of propositional attitudes.” (p. 25) As if that would make anything clearer, since ‘proposition’ and ‘propositional attitude’ are terms that are just as controversial)
   
4. that a lot of them are learned. (Jesse Prinz (2005) even argues that all concepts are learned, a hypothesis Fodor definitely wouldn’t like. And of course, Prinz’s definition of concepts is different, too.)
   

Hurford (2007) further differentiates between ‘proto-concepts’, ‘pre-linguistic concepts’ and ‘linguistic concepts’ in order to account for neuropsychological (Barsalou 2005a) and ethological evidence (Cheney & Seyfarth 2007) for mental and conceptual representations in other animals (= ‘proto-concepts’ and in higher mammals probably (and definitely so in our ancestors) even ‘pre-linguistic concepts’). Thus, the shared/public-requirement of Fodor (1998) only holds for linguistic concepts.

Concepts and Categories
Regarding the difference between concepts and categories: concepts can be said to represent categories, e.g. when we encounter a member of the category DOG, the DOG concept is activated (Prinz 2005), or, in Barsalou’s (2005) terms, a category corresponds to a component of experience, whereas the conceptual system consists of the collected representations of these categories.
Thus, on seeing a dog, the human conceptual system construes this perception as a category instance of DOG by binding the specific perceived token (i.e. the individual dog) “to knowledge for general types of things in memory (i.e., concepts)” (p. 581).
Poirer et al. argue that linguistic categorizers are "farthest removed from their basic sensorimotor counterparts” (p. 761),although, as argued by Lakoff and Johnson (1980,1999), they still seem to be heavily influenced by embodied experience.

Linguistic Categories and Language Acquisition

Poirier et al. make an interesting analogy between the embodiment perspective they adopt throughout their paper and language acquisition. A child can be seen as simulating the arbitrary word-category/siginfiant-signifié contingencies she is presented with through her linguistic environment, forming “internal models of her community’s lexicalized categories”(p. 761) which enables her to communicate with others. Evidence for the importance of linguistic/lexicalized categorization comes from the fact that words help us to acquire new categories, “that category labels play a role in the formation and shaping of concepts” (Lupyan 2006) and that they

“play an especially important role in shaping representations of entities whose perceptual features alone are insufficient for reliable classification.” (Luypan 2005).

To conclude, it seems that all forms of categorizations may in some way be present in human cognition, and that many of the feats that make us ‘uniquely human’ are augmented by sophisticated forms of categorization which can best be described from the perspective of embodied evolutionary-developmental computational cognitive neuroscience.

Next week I will try to discuss the implications of computational/AI/robotics research, as presented by Poirier et al, for the study of human cognition and behavior.

References:
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.” Trends. Cog. Sc. 9.7: 309-311.

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cohen, Henri and Claire Lefebvre. 2005 “Bridging the Category Divide.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 1-15.

Fodor, Jerry A. 1998. Concepts. Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford Congitive Science Series. Oxford: Clarendon.

Hurford, James R. The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution 1. Oxford OUP.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Book

Lupyan, Gary. 2005. “Carving Nature at its Joints and Carving Joints into Nature: How Labels Augment Category Representations.” Modelling Language, Cognition and Action: Proceedings of the 9th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop. Eds. A. Cangelosi, G. Bugmann & R. Borisyuk Singapore: World Scientific. 87-96

Lupyan, Gary. 2006. “Labels Facilitate Learning of Novel Categories.” The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference. Eds. A. Cangelosi, A.D.M. Smith & K.R. Smith Singapore: World Scientific,190-197

Poirier, Pierre, Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Jean-Frédéric Depasquale. 2005. “Embodied Categorization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Prinz, Jesse. 2005. "The Return of Concept Empirism." Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier.