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Published on: April 19, 2017
The role of cultural practices in the emergence of modern human intelligence
1Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA. ehutchins@ucsd.edu
Abstract:
Innate cognitive capacities are orchestrated by cultural practices to produce high-level cognitive processes. In human activities, examples of this phenomenon range from everyday inferences about space and time to the most sophisticated reasoning in scientific laboratories. A case is examined in which chimpanzees enter into cultural practices with humans (in experiments) in ways that appear to enable them to engage in symbol-mediated thought. Combining the cultural practices perspective with the theories of embodied cognition and enactment suggests that the chimpanzees' behaviour is actually mediated by non-symbolic representations. The possibility that non-human primates can engage in cultural practices that give them the appearance of symbol-mediated thought opens new avenues for thinking about the coevolution of human culture and human brains.
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