Tomasello 's Account of Cultural Learning
Tomasello founds accumulative cultural evolution account based on cultural learning. He identifies three forms of cultural learning in hierarchical order, based on the perspective that the learner would take through this process, being reflective, mental or intentional agent. He emphasizes on the reciprocal relation between human cognition and culture as a result of active participation of agent with its capability of perspective taking towards itself, others through intersubjectivity, and environment. This implies that cultural learning is partly individual since an active agent, direct her attention to something out of herself and participates actively in her enculturation that is mostly ignored …show more content…
Also, cultural learning is a result of human unique intentional/causal cognition that is not only to have an “understanding of relational categories and basic antecedent-consequent event sequences, but also to perceive the underlying causes as mediating the dynamic relations among these objects and events...that are not readily observable (1999, P.23)”. On the other hand, his evolutionary hypothesis suggests that “as primate cognitive understanding of relational categories evolved first in the social domain to comprehend third-party social relationships, human causal understanding also evolved first in the social domain to comprehend others as intentional agents (ibid)”. So, this cognition that enables human to understand the antecedent-consequent relations among external events in the absence of its own direct involvement can be translated to understand and perceive third party as intentional (mental) agents in social domain, on which he founds his account of culture. Then he provides lines of evidence on child cognition development in normal children and relates it to the cultural learning together with experiments on autistic children, wild and encculturated chimpanzees as …show more content…
In imitative learning, the intentional agent involves in simple perspective-taking of the learner towards an external event; in instructed learning that occurs mostly in pedagogic settings, the mental agent involves in an alternating-coordinating perspective-taking through an asymmetric form of intersubjectivity between the learner/child and the teacher/adult; and at a higher level of cognition, reflective agent is involved in an integrated perspective-taking through a symmetrical form of intersubjectivity, in the process of collaborative learning that is the edge of accumulative cultural evolution since it involves in both learning and creating novel cultural products while ensures fidelity in cultural transmission. Tomasello defines each form of cultural learning and provides lines of evidence to validate the internal relations of his account, namely the relation between social-cognition development- based on a normal child 's ability for perspective-taking- and forms of cultural
Tomasello founds accumulative cultural evolution account based on cultural learning. He identifies three forms of cultural learning in hierarchical order, based on the perspective that the learner would take through this process, being reflective, mental or intentional agent. He emphasizes on the reciprocal relation between human cognition and culture as a result of active participation of agent with its capability of perspective taking towards itself, others through intersubjectivity, and environment. This implies that cultural learning is partly individual since an active agent, direct her attention to something out of herself and participates actively in her enculturation that is mostly ignored …show more content…
Also, cultural learning is a result of human unique intentional/causal cognition that is not only to have an “understanding of relational categories and basic antecedent-consequent event sequences, but also to perceive the underlying causes as mediating the dynamic relations among these objects and events...that are not readily observable (1999, P.23)”. On the other hand, his evolutionary hypothesis suggests that “as primate cognitive understanding of relational categories evolved first in the social domain to comprehend third-party social relationships, human causal understanding also evolved first in the social domain to comprehend others as intentional agents (ibid)”. So, this cognition that enables human to understand the antecedent-consequent relations among external events in the absence of its own direct involvement can be translated to understand and perceive third party as intentional (mental) agents in social domain, on which he founds his account of culture. Then he provides lines of evidence on child cognition development in normal children and relates it to the cultural learning together with experiments on autistic children, wild and encculturated chimpanzees as …show more content…
In imitative learning, the intentional agent involves in simple perspective-taking of the learner towards an external event; in instructed learning that occurs mostly in pedagogic settings, the mental agent involves in an alternating-coordinating perspective-taking through an asymmetric form of intersubjectivity between the learner/child and the teacher/adult; and at a higher level of cognition, reflective agent is involved in an integrated perspective-taking through a symmetrical form of intersubjectivity, in the process of collaborative learning that is the edge of accumulative cultural evolution since it involves in both learning and creating novel cultural products while ensures fidelity in cultural transmission. Tomasello defines each form of cultural learning and provides lines of evidence to validate the internal relations of his account, namely the relation between social-cognition development- based on a normal child 's ability for perspective-taking- and forms of cultural