The Cultural Origins of HUMAN COGNITION Harvard Univ. Press 2000
Keywords: - innate cognitive modules - cognitive skills of
language and complex mathematics are like chess: they are the
products of both historical and ontogenetic developments working
with a variety of preexisting human cognitive skills, some of
which are shared with other primates and some of which are
uniquely human - my account for how a single human cognitive
adaption could result in all of the many differences in human
and nonhuman primate cognition is that this single adaptation
made possible an evolutionarily new set of processes, that is,
processes of sociogenesis - symbolic forms of communication to
emerge - human cognitive ontogeny - imitation - The new and
powerful forms of social cognition that result open up the
cultural line of human development in the sense that children
are now in a position to participate with other persons in joint
attentional activities and so to understand and attempt to
reproduce their intentional actions