Natural pedagogy

Gergely Csibra*, György Gergely

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

We propose that human communication is specifically adapted to allow the transmission of generic knowledge between individuals. Such a communication system, which we call 'natural pedagogy', enables fast and efficient social learning of cognitively opaque cultural knowledge that would be hard to acquire relying on purely observational learning mechanisms alone. We argue that human infants are prepared to be at the receptive side of natural pedagogy (i) by being sensitive to ostensive signals that indicate that they are being addressed by communication, (ii) by developing referential expectations in ostensive contexts and (iii) by being biased to interpret ostensive-referential communication as conveying information that is kind-relevant and generalizable.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)148-153
Number of pages6
JournalTrends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume13
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2009

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