A computational model of the cultural co-evolution of language and mindreading
- PDF / 4,192,906 Bytes
- 39 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 70 Downloads / 176 Views
A computational model of the cultural co-evolution of language and mindreading Marieke Woensdregt1
· Chris Cummins2 · Kenny Smith3
Received: 9 August 2019 / Accepted: 14 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Several evolutionary accounts of human social cognition posit that language has coevolved with the sophisticated mindreading abilities of modern humans. It has also been argued that these mindreading abilities are the product of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Taken together, these claims suggest that the evolution of language has played an important role in the cultural evolution of human social cognition. Here we present a new computational model which formalises the assumptions that underlie this hypothesis, in order to explore how language and mindreading interact through cultural evolution. This model treats communicative behaviour as an interplay between the context in which communication occurs, an agent’s individual perspective on the world, and the agent’s lexicon. However, each agent’s perspective and lexicon are private mental representations, not directly observable to other agents. Learners are therefore confronted with the task of jointly inferring the lexicon and perspective of their cultural parent, based on their utterances in context. Simulation results show that given these assumptions, an informative lexicon evolves not just under a pressure to be successful at communicating, but also under a pressure for accurate perspectiveinference. When such a lexicon evolves, agents become better at inferring others’ perspectives; not because their innate ability to learn about perspectives changes, but because sharing a language (of the right type) with others helps them to do so. Keywords Language evolution · Mindreading · Cultural evolution · Computational modelling · Iterated learning · Bayesian inference
M.W. was funded by a Principal’s Career Development Ph.D. Scholarship from the University of Edinburgh.
B
Marieke Woensdregt [email protected]
1
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2
Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
3
Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
123
Synthese
1 Introduction The hypothesis that human social cognition is a product of cultural evolution is motivated in part by evidence showing that language plays a role in the development of social cognition in modern-day humans (Heyes 2018; Heyes and Frith 2014). Studies of typically-developing children (Astington and Baird 2005; Milligan et al. 2007), and deaf children who had a delayed exposure to sign language (see Meristo et al. 2011; Peterson and Siegal 2000; Pyers and de Villiers 2013, for reviews) have shown that exposure to mental state language and discourse promotes the development of mental state attribution (i.e. mindreading; also known as theory of mind). Furthermore, longitudinal studies have shown that caregivers tailor how they talk about mental states to the developm
Data Loading...
