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The cultural evolution of mind reading
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The cultural evolution of mind reading
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Journal Article
The cultural evolution of mind reading
2014
Overview
No parent needs reminding that children are born with a surprising set of abilities. But children still need many hours of guidance and instruction. Heyes and Frith review one particular social cognitive skill: reading the minds of others (or at least working out what other people are thinking and feeling). An unrefined capacity for “mind reading” is present in infants, but teaching is necessary to develop the full-blown capacity seen in adults. The authors draw parallels between learning to read and learning to read minds. Science , this issue p. 10.1126/science.1243091 It is not just a manner of speaking: “Mind reading,” or working out what others are thinking and feeling, is markedly similar to print reading. Both of these distinctly human skills recover meaning from signs, depend on dedicated cortical areas, are subject to genetically heritable disorders, show cultural variation around a universal core, and regulate how people behave. But when it comes to development, the evidence is conflicting. Some studies show that, like learning to read print, learning to read minds is a long, hard process that depends on tuition. Others indicate that even very young, nonliterate infants are already capable of mind reading. Here, we propose a resolution to this conflict. We suggest that infants are equipped with neurocognitive mechanisms that yield accurate expectations about behavior (“automatic” or “implicit” mind reading), whereas “explicit” mind reading, like literacy, is a culturally inherited skill; it is passed from one generation to the next by verbal instruction.
