Gergely György

• Doctor of Psychology
• University Professor at Central European University

Pragmatic theories assume that during communicative exchanges humans strive to be optimally informative and spontaneously adjust their communicative signals to satisfy their addressee’s inferred epistemic needs. For instance, when necessary, adults flexibly and appropriately modify their communicative gestures to provide their partner the relevant...

There is no room for pragmatic expectations about communicative interactions in core cognition. Spelke takes the combinatorial power of the human language faculty to overcome the limits of core cognition. The question is: Why should the combinatorial power of the human language faculty support infants' pragmatic expectations not merely about speech...

A novel, interdisciplinary exploration of the relative contributions of rigidity and flexibility in the adoption, maintenance, and evolution of technical traditions. Techniques can either be used in rigid, stereotypical ways or in flexibly adaptive ways, or in some combination of the two. The Evolution of Techniques, edited by Mathieu Charbonneau,...

Humans engage in cooperative activities from early on and the breadth of human cooperation is unparalleled. Human preference for cooperation might reflect cognitive and motivational mechanisms that drive engagement in cooperative activities. Here we investigate early indices of humans’ cooperative abilities and test whether 14-month-old infants exp...

The authors present an ambitious attempt to outline the gradual evolution of the cognitive foundations of ostensive communication. We focus on three problematic aspects of the distinction between expression and communication: ambiguity in the distinction's central principle of "complementary mechanisms," inconsistencies in the application of the di...

We argue for a relevance-guided learning mechanism to account for both innovative reproduction and faithful imitation by focusing on the role of communication in knowledge transmission. Unlike bifocal stance theory, this mechanism does not require a strict divide between instrumental and ritual-like actions, and the goals they respectively fulfill...

We argue for a relevance-guided learning mechanism to account for both innovative reproduction and faithful imitation by focusing on the role of communication in knowledge transmission. Unlike bifocal stance theory, this mechanism does not require a strict divide between instrumental and ritual-like actions, and the goals they respectively fulfill...

A recently discovered electrophysiological response, the social N400, suggests that we use our language system to track how social partners comprehend language. Listeners show an increased N400 response, when themselves not, only a communicative partner experiences a semantic incongruity. Does the N400 reflect purely semantic or mentalistic computa...

Recent studies demonstrated neural systems in bilateral fronto-temporal brain areas in newborns specialized to extract linguistic structure from speech. We hypothesized that these mechanisms show additional sensitivity when identically structured different pseudowords are used communicatively in a turn-taking exchange by two speakers. In an fNIRS e...

We developed a new eye-tracker based technique to investigate the reactions of one-year-old infants to stimulus contingencies generated by their own incidental leg movements. In a split-screen paradigm, infants were presented with two identical images that could dynamically change location. The motion of the image on one side of the screen was perf...

Goal-directed social interactions (whether instrumental or communicative) involve co-dependent, partially predictable actions of interacting agents as social goals cannot be achieved by continuously exchanging the same, perfectly predictable, or completely random behaviors. We investigated whether 10-month-olds are sensitive to the co-dependence an...

Fourteen-month-olds selectively imitated a sub-efficient means (illuminating a lightbox by a head-touch) when this was modeled by linguistic ingroup members in video-demonstrations. A follow-up study with slightly older infants, however, could replicate this effect only in a video-demonstration context. Hence it still remains unclear whether infant...

I have argued for the merits of the view that assumes two basic and initially independent cognitive systems that have evolved as separate adapta- tions to two different kinds of intentional agency that constitute our uniquely human social-cultural environment, which I called instrumental and communicative agency. The two specialized systems of adap...

Interpreting others’ actions as goal-directed, even when the actions are unfamiliar, is indispensable for social learning, and can be particularly important for infants, whose own action repertoire is limited. Indeed, young infants have been shown to attribute goals to unfamiliar actions as early as 3 months of age, but this ability appears restric...

Sub-efficient action routines often represent culture-specific conventional forms of actions that belong to the repertoire of cultural knowledge shared by a social group. Children readily acquire such sub-efficient routines from social demonstrations and often preserve them in their action repertoire despite encountering more efficient alternatives...

Social cognition might play a critical role in language acquisition and comprehension, as mindreading may be necessary to infer the intended meaning of linguistic expressions uttered by communicative partners. In three electrophysiological experiments, we explored the interplay between belief attribution and language comprehension of 14-month-old i...

Great apes are able to request objects from humans by pointing. It is unclear, however, whether this is an associated response to a certain set of cues (e.g. the presence and attention of a human addressee) or a communicative signal which can be adjusted to relevant aspects of the spatial and social context. In three experiments, we tested captive...

Foundations of Affective Social Learning - edited by Daniel Dukes August 2019

Significance We demonstrate that 10.5-mo-old infants—before understanding the symbolic contents encoded by unfamiliar signals—can recognize turn-taking interactions that serve communicative information transmission based on detecting variability in the signal sequences exchanged. Sensitivity to this abstract structural cue is sufficient to attribut...

Infants employ sophisticated mechanisms to acquire their first language, including some that rely on taking the perspective of adults as speakers or listeners. When do infants first show awareness of what other people understand? We tested 14‐month‐old infants in two experiments measuring event‐related potentials. In Experiment 1, we established th...

Pragmatic theories of communication assume that humans evolved a species-unique inferential capacity to express and recognize intentions via communicative actions. We show that 13-month-old non-verbal infants can interpret the turn-taking exchange of variable tone sequences between unfamiliar agents as indicative of communicative transfer of goal-r...

Both human infants and nonhuman primates can recognize unfamiliar entities as instrumental agents ascribing to them goals and efficiency of goal-pursuit. This competence relies on movement cues indicating distal sensitivity to the environment and choice of efficient goal-approach. Although dogs’ evolved sensitivity to social cues allow them to reco...

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We...

We welcome Kline's systematic overview of teaching from a functional evolutionary perspective. However, Kline's framework does not provide satisfying characterization of the adaptive problems driving the evolution of teaching through communication found in humans, where the key function is better characterized in terms of licensing inferences to op...

Humans possess efficient mechanisms to behave adaptively in social contexts. They ascribe goals and beliefs to others and use these for behavioural predictions. Researchers argued for two separate mental attribution systems: an implicit and automatic one involved in online interactions, and an explicit one mainly used in offline deliberations. Howe...

Infants start pointing systematically to objects or events around their first birthday. It has been proposed that infants point to an event to share their appreciation of it with others. In this study, we tested another hypothesis, according to which infants’ pointing could also serve as an epistemic request directed to the adult. Thus, infants’ mo...

Harshness and unpredictability early in life appear to be independently associated with long-term developmental outcomes, with environmental stressors affecting parental investment (e.g., responsiveness), which then shapes child development (e.g., onset of puberty). Research has detailed mediating physiological pathways, but has not specified how c...

Object-directed emotion expressions provide two types of information: They can convey the expressers' person-specific subjective disposition toward objects, or they can be used communicatively as referential symbolic devices to convey culturally shared valence-related knowledge about referents that can be generalized to other individuals. By presen...

Book synopsis: Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms, undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book will be the first to report on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at bi...

Theoretical rationality and practical rationality are, respectively, properties of an individual's belief system and decision system. While reasoning about instrumental actions complies with practical rationality, understanding communicative actions complies with the principle of relevance. Section 2 reviews the evidence showing that young infants...

The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicits orientation following behavior in 8-month-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye tracker. We found that an object's occasional orientat...

The authors argue that the currently popular view endorsed by a number of attachment theorists and infant researchers that assumes a possibly evolutionarily based and human-specific direct causal and functional link between the ontogeny of early security of infant attachment on the one hand, and the acquisition of explicit mentalizing skills on the...

We propose that the cognitive mechanisms that enable the transmission of cultural knowledge by communication between individuals constitute a system of 'natural pedagogy' in humans, and represent an evolutionary adaptation along the hominin lineage. We discuss three kinds of arguments that support this hypothesis. First, natural pedagogy is likely...

Many argue that dogs show unique susceptibility to human communicative signals that make them suitable for being engaged in complex co-operation with humans. It has also been revealed that socially provided information is particularly effective in influencing the behaviour of dogs even when the human's action demonstration conveys inefficient or mi...

Gender differences favoring women in relation to awareness of the subjective (internal) world are well demonstrated but their origins are poorly understood. We trained 173 12-month-olds to visually fixate a video image in response to an internal cue (opening own mouth), external cue (seeing a face open its mouth), or both cues. Female infants showe...

Performing goal-directed actions toward an object in accordance with contextual constraints, such as the presence or absence of an obstacle, has been widely used as a paradigm for assessing the capacity of infants or nonhuman primates to evaluate the rationality of others’ actions. Here, we have used this paradigm in a functional magnetic resonance...

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Performing goal directed actions towards an object according to contextual constraints has been widely used as a paradigm to assess the capacity of infants to evaluate the rationality of others' actions. Here we used fMRI to visualize the cortical regions involved in the assessment of action rationality. To this end, we scanned 15 participants, sho...

The Early Development of Understanding Intentional Agency and Representing Other Minds: A Brief Historical Introduction (1978–2005)Criteria for an Adequate Developmental Theory of Understanding Intentional AgencyPreverbal Understanding of Other Minds: The Beginnings of a Paradigm Change? (2005–)Teleology “Ungrounded” : Differences Between Human and...

Introduzione. Approcci psicoanalitici all'eziologia dei disturbi affettivi del Sé La maggior parte delle scuole psicoanalitiche, nonostante le loro diversità, ha sto-ricamente condiviso due ipotesi generali sull'eziologia e il trattamento analitico dei disturbi affettivi del Sé. La prima riguarda le origini psicosociali ed evolutive di molte patolo...

Boxing Clever? Piaget showed that 10-month-old infants will persist in looking for a toy in box A, where it has been placed several times, even after having been shown that it has been moved to box B, whereas 12-month-old infants do not. This phenomenon marks a developmental milestone in human infant cognition that Topál et al. (p. 1269 ; see the P...

Absztrakt Jelen kiserletsorozatunkban olyan kiserleti helyzeteket alakitottunk ki, melyben a Gergely es Csibra altal javasolt „termeszetes pedagogia” hipoteziseből kovetkező predikciokat probaltuk megvizsgalni 14 es 18 honapos csecsemők es kutyak eseteben. Az elmelet alapfeltevese, hogy az emberben a kognitiv kepessegek evolucioja soran kialakult a...

Spencer et al. argue that infants’ perseverative search errors cannot be ascribed to an interpretive bias induced by communicative cues as we proposed. We argue that their model leads to different predictions about infant behavior from those derived from natural pedagogy in certain situations and therefore fails to provide a viable alternative to o...

Absztrakt A csecsemőkori megismeres kutatoi hosszu ideig a targyakra iranyulo erzelmeknek csak a szemelykozpontu ertelmezesevel foglalkoztak. Ez a megkozelites az erzelmet az adott szemely targgyal kapcsolatos egyedi, szemelyspecifikus viszonyakent reprezentalja. Feltetelezesunk szerint azonban a kommunikativ helyzetekben megjelenitett referenciali...

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 mech...

The proposal that the understanding and imitation of observed actions are made possible through the ‘mirror neuron system’ (Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V., 2001, Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding of action. Nature Review Neuroscience, 2, 661–670) has led to much speculation that a dysfunctional mirror system may...

Having repeatedly retrieved an object from a location, human infants tend to search the same place even when they observe the object being hidden at another location. This perseverative error is usually explained by infants' inability to inhibit a previously rewarded search response or to recall the new location. We show that the tendency to commit...

In this chapter we propose an evolutionary-based social cognitive theory of the early development of the representational affective self in humans and its role in emotional self-regulation and control. We first identify species-unique properties of human caregiver–infant interactions and critically discuss alternative proposals concerning the funct...

In this chapter we propose an evolutionary-based social cognitive theory of the early development of the representational affective self in humans and its role in emotional self-regulation and control. We first identify species-unique properties of human caregiver-infant interactions and critically discuss alternative proposals concerning the funct...

This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among...

This is the third volume of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind. The extent to which cognitive structures, processes, and contents are innate is one of the central questions concerning the nature of the mind, with important implications for debates throughout the human sciences. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psycho...

In our daily life, we continuously monitor others' behaviors and interpret them in terms of goals, intentions, and reasons. Despite their central importance for predicting and interpreting each other's actions, the functional mechanisms and neural circuits involved in action understanding remain highly controversial. Two alternative accounts have b...

Recent studies have demonstrated that 6-month-olds perceive manual actions as object-directed (Woodward, 1999)--and that 8-, but not 6-month-olds, apply this interpretation even to unfamiliar actions if these produce salient object-directed effects (Kiràly, Jovanovic, Prinz, Aschersleben, & Gergely, 2003). The present study had two objectives. Firs...

Early Development of the Self as a Physical AgentEarly Understanding of the Self as a Social AgentUnderstanding Self and Other as Teleological Agents: The 9-Month Social-Cognitive RevolutionUnderstanding the Self and Other as Intentional Mental AgentsUnderstanding Self and Other as Representational Agents and the Development of the Autobiographical...

Tanulmányunkban egy új hipotézist fejtünk ki, miszerint az emberi faj a tudás tanítással történő átadására és elsajátítására adaptálódott. Ezt az adaptációt, amelyet „pedagógiának”neveztünk el, egy speciális kommunikációs rendszer valósítja meg, amely nem előfeltételezi sem a nyelv, sem a magas szintű tudatelmélet meglétét, hanem éppen hogy maga se...

Az evolúció során kiválasztódott fajspecifikus adaptáció eredményeképpen az ember sajátos hajlandóságot mutat arra, hogy spontán átadja releváns kulturális tudását fajtársainak, illetve hogy az ilyen tanítás tartalmát gyorsan és közvetlenül elsajátítsa egy erre a feladatra specializált társas tanulási rendszer, az úgynevezett természetes „pedagógia...

Developmental psychology and psychopathology has in the past been more concerned with the quality of self-representation than with the development of the subjective agency which underpins our experience of feeling, thought and action, a key function of mentalisation. This review begins by contrasting a Cartesian view of pre-wired introspective subj...

Infants show very early sensitivity to a variety of behavioral cues (such as self-propulsion, equifinal movement, free variability, and situational adjustment of behavior) that can be exploited when identifying, predicting, and interpreting goal-directed actions of intentional agents. We compare and contrast recent alternative models concerning the...

Humans show a strong and early inclination to interpret observed behaviours of others as goal-directed actions. We identify two main epistemic functions that this 'teleological obsession' serves: on-line prediction and social learning. We show how teleological action interpretations can serve these functions by drawing on two kinds of inference ('a...

Social stimuli are important proximate determinants of human thought, action, and behaviour. But does the social environment also have deeper, profounder, and possibly more distal impact on more lasting psychological structures and forms, generalizing across time and domains, such as traits, self-consciousness, abilities, and talents? This volume t...

Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called 'pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity, t...

In recent years there has been a shift within developmental psychology away from examining the cognitive systems at different ages, to trying to understand exactly what are the mechanisms that generate change. What kind of learning mechanisms and representational changes drive cognitive development? How can the imaging techniques available help us...

We propose that humans are adapted to transfer knowledge to, and receive knowledge from, conspecifics by teaching. This adaptation, which we call 'pedagogy', involves the emergence of a special communication system that does not presuppose either language or high-level theory of mind, but could itself provide a basis facilitating the development of...

How does cultural knowledge shape the development of human minds and, conversely, what kind of species-specific social-cognitive mechanisms have evolved to support the intergenerational reproduction of cultural knowledge? We critically examine current theories proposing a human-specific drive to identify with and imitate conspecifics as the evoluti...

Tomasello et al.'s two prerequisites, we argue, are not sufficient to explain the emergence of Joint Collaboration. An adequate account must include the human-specific capacity to communicate relevant information (that may have initially evolved to ensure efficient cultural learning). This, together with understanding intentional actions, does prov...

We contrast two positions concerning the initial domain of actions that infants interpret as goal-directed. The 'narrow scope' view holds that goal-attribution in 6- and 9-month-olds is restricted to highly familiar actions (such as grasping). The cue-based approach of the infant's 'teleological stance', however, predicts that if the cues of equifi...

The paper provides a summary of our recent research on preverbal infants (using violation-of-expectation and observational learning paradigms) demonstrating that one-year-olds interpret and draw systematic inferences about other’s goal-directed actions, and can rely on such inferences when imitating other’s actions or emulating their goals. To acco...

Converging evidence demonstrates that one-year-olds interpret and draw inferences about other's goal-directed actions. We contrast alternative theories about how this early competence relates to our ability to attribute mental states to others. We propose that one-year-olds apply a non-mentalistic interpretational system, the 'teleological stance'...

The paper suggests a way of understanding borderline personality disorder in terms of the failure of a secure base. We begin with an account of optimal self-development in a secure attachment context, highlighting the importance of the caregiver's ability to help the small child think about his own and others' minds. This optimal self-development i...

The author introduces the concept of mentalization as a central interpretative mechanism of social reality testing. It is argued that developmentally the emergence of this mentalizing capacity to interpret other people's actions in terms of their causal intentional mind states (such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions) is preceded by an e...

Two experiments investigated whether infants represent goal-directed actions of others in a way that allows them to draw inferences to unobserved states of affairs (such as unseen goal states or occluded obstacles). We measured looking times to assess violation of infants’ expectations upon perceiving either a change in the actions of computer-anim...