During the first two years of human life a common neural substrate underlies the hierarchical organization of elements in the development of speech as well as the capacity to combine objects manually, including tool use. Subsequent cortical differentiation, beginning at age two, creates distinct, relatively modularized capacities for linguistic grammar and more complex combination of objects. An evolutionary homologue of the neural substrate for language production and manual action is hypothesized to have provided a foundation for the evolution of language (...) before the divergence of the hominids and the great apes. Support comes from the discovery of a Broca's area homologue and related neural circuits in contemporary primates. In addition, chimpanzees have an identical constraint on hierarchical complexity in both tool use and symbol combination. Their performance matches that of the two-year-old child who has not yet developed the neural circuits for complex grammar and complex manual combination of objects. (shrink)

In our commentary we elaborate on Barresi & Moore's use of language as a tool. In particular, we highlight the importance of cognitive linguistic research with its emphasis on the relation between morpnosyntax and intentional schemes. We also speculate about how language itself might play a role in children's integration of first and third person knowledge.

Barresi & Moore's account predicts that infants deprived of visual input will be delayed in achieving social understanding, a hypothesis that receives some support from studies of language use. by blind children. It is proposed that recently developed false belief and appearance/reality tasks be used to explore this issue further. Three possibly distracting conceptual issues are also discussed.

The psychology of emotions illuminates the questions of intentional capacities raised by Barresi & Moore (B&M). Complex emotions require the development of a sense of self and are based on social comparisons between mainly imagined objects. The fourth level in B&M's framework requires something like a constructive agent rather than a mental agent.

We agree with Müller's epigenetic view of evolution and ontogeny and applaud his multilevel perspective. With him, we stress the importance in ontogeny of progressive specialisation rather than prewired structures. However, we argue that he slips from “speech” to “language” and that, in seeking homologies, these two levels need to be kept separate in the analysis of evolution and ontogeny.

The belief that syntax is an innate, autonomous, species-specific module is highly questionable. Syntax demonstrates the mosaic nature of evolutionary change, in that it made use of (and led to the enhancement of) numerous preexisting neurocognitive features. It is best understood as an emergent characteristic of the explosion of semantic complexity that occurred during hominid evolution.

Individuals do not operate “at a stage of development.” They operate at a range of different levels of hierarchical complexity depending on skill area, task, context, degree of support, and other variables. It is thus necessary to postulate the concept of domain to refer to the particular conceptual, behavioral, or affective area within which activity operates. The concept raises questions and implications for theory building and application. Such issues are elaborated by discussing a variety of domains and social contexts. A (...) postformal case example of leadership in higher education illuminates the concept of domains and the interrelationships among domains. (shrink)

(2008). Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on Postformal Thought and Hierarchical Complexity. World Futures: Vol. 64, Postformal Thought and Hierarchical Complexity, pp. 297-304.

This paper contrasts two relatively independent forms of human development: waking up, the process and practices of psychospiritual awakening , and growing up, the process of moving from lesser narcissistic and ethnocentric self-identities towards mature postconventional self-identities with greater degrees of inclusion, perspective-taking, caring, and compassion. Each is a unique type of growth, contemplative and transformative, with different ways of engaging and differing goals and results. The former is about transcending or deconstructing the ego and the latter about building, strengthening, (...) and diversifying the ego. Whereas the Buddhist tradition and contemplative practices aim at awakening and transcending samsara (worldly conditions) by cultivating compassion and taming the mind, the Western tradition cultivates greater degrees of care and compassion by developing a mature ego within samsara that is both social-justice and eco-justice informed. The project of transcending the ego should not be confused with growing and maturing the ego. Self-transcendence and self-development must inform each other, and both are necessary for realizing our full human potential. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore assume an equivalence between ontogenetic and evolutionaiy transformations of social understanding. The mechanisms of evolution allow for novel structures to arise, both through terminal addition and through the onset of novel pathways at time points that precede the end points of ancestral pathways. Terminal addition may not be the appropriate model for the evolution of human object-directed imitation, intermodal equivalence, or joint attention.

Barresi & Moore do not consider information about intentional relations available within emotional engagement with others and do not see that others are perceived in the second as well as the third person. Recognising second person information forces recognition of similarities and connections not otherwise available. A developmental framework built on the assumption of the complete separateness of self and other is inevitably flawed.

Barresi & Moore (B&M) provide a useful tool for the comparative study of social cognition that could, however, be improved by more subtle analysis of first person information about intentional relations. Knowledge of misrepresentation also needs to be better handled within the theory. I urge skepticism about B&M's sweeping phylogenetic claims.

Barresi & Moore contrast two theories of autism: (1) in autism there is a general inability to integrate first and third person information (of any kind), and (2) in autism there is a specific inability to represent an agent's perceptual or volitional mental state being about another agents mental state. Two lines of experimental evidence suggest that the first of these is too broad, favoring instead the more specific “theory of mind” account.

The data reviewed in Barresi & Moore's treatment of social understanding is recast in terms of a model of social intelligence that was advanced some time ago (Gallup 1982). When it comes to their analysis of the behavior of other individuals, most primates (and humans younger than 18 months of age) appear to function as radical behaviorists, whereas chimpanzees and older infants show evidence of becoming primitive cognitive psychologists.

Second person intentional relations, involving intentional activities directed at the perceptor, are qualitatively different from first and third person relations. They generate a peculiar, bidirectional kind of intentionality, especially in the realm of visual perception. Systems specialized in dealing with this have been selected by evolution. These systems can be considered to be the evolutionary precursors to the human theory of mind.

Segregated neural circuits that effect particular domain-specific behaviors can be differentiated from neuroanatomical structures implicated in many different aspects of behavior. The basal ganglionic components of circuits regulating nonlinguistic motor behavior, speech, and syntax all function in a similar manner. Hence, it is unlikely that special properties and evolutionary mechanisms are associated with the neural bases of human language.

Müller's review of the neuroscientific evidence undermines nativist claims for autonomous syntax and the argument from the poverty of the stimulus. Generativists will appeal to data from language acquisition, but here too there is growing evidence against the nativist position. Epigenetic naturalism, the developmental alternative to nativism, can be extended to epigenetic socionaturalism, acknowledging the importance of sociocultural processes in language and cognitive development.

Contrary to Müller's claims, and in support of modular theories, genetic factors play a substantial and significant role in language. The finding that some children with specific language impairment (SLI) have nonlinguistic impairments may reflect improper diagnosis of SLI or impairments that are secondary to linguistic impairments. Thus, such findings do not argue against the modularity thesis. The lexical/functional distinction appears to be innate and specifically linguistic and could be instantiated in either symbolic or connectionist systems.

The synthetic position adopted by Müller is weakened by a large number of overinterpretations and misrepresentations, together with a caricatured view of innateness and modularity.

I enlarge on the theme that the brain mechanisms required for languageand other aspects of the human mind evolved through selective changes in the regulatory genes governing growth. Extension of the period of postnatal growth increases the role of the environment in structuring the brain, and spatiotemporal programming (heterochrony) ofgrowth might explain hierarchical representation, hemispheric specialization, and perhaps sex differences.

The conclusion that language is not really innate or modular is based on several fallacies. I show that the target article confuses communicative skills with linguistic abilities, and that its discussion of brain/language relations is replete with factual errors. I also criticize its attempt to contrast biological and linguistic principles. Finally, I argue that no case is made for the “alternative” approach proposed here.

Müller provides a valuable synthesis of neurobiological evidence on the epigenetic development of neural structures involved in language acquisition. The pluripotentiality of developing neural tissue crucially constrains linguistic/cognitive theorizing about supposedly innate neural mechanisms and contributes significantly to our understanding of experience–dependent processes involved in language acquisition. Without this understanding, any proposed explanation of language acquisition is suspect.

Müller misconstrues autonomy to mean strict locality of brain function, something quite different from the functional autonomy that linguists claim. Similarly, he misperceives the interaction of learned and innate components hypothesized in current generative models. Evidence from sign languages, Creole languages, and neurological studies of rare forms of aphasia also argues against his conclusions.

A substantial body of theoretical literature testifies to the evolutionary functions of emotions. Relatively little has been written about their developmental functions. This article discusses the developmental functions of emotions from the perspective of differential emotions theory (DET; Izard, 1977, 1991). According to DET, although all the emotions retain their adaptive and motivational functions across the lifespan, different sets of emotions may become relatively more prominent in the different stages of life as they serve stage-related developmental processes. In the first (...) section, we present a brief overview of relevant aspects of the theory. In the second section, we discuss how emotions play a central role in helping the individual achieve developmental milestones and tasks during four major periods of life: Infancy, toddler through preschool years, middle to late childhood, and adolescence. The underlying thesis of this article is that emotions play a central role in stimulating social cognitive attainments at each stage of development. (shrink)

The Model of Hierarchical Complexity is introduced in terms of its main concepts, background, and applications. As a general, quantitative behavioral developmental theory, the Model enables examination of universal patterns of evolution and development. Behavioral tasks are definable and their organization of information in increasingly greater hierarchical, or vertical, complexity is measurable. Fifteen orders of hierarchical complexity account for task performances across domains, ranging from those of machines to creative geniuses. The four most complex orders are demonstrated by postformal stages (...) of thought, which measure beyond formal operations, the highest stage found by Piaget for adults. (shrink)

Critical consideration is given the empirical evidence for psychological models of religious development, its supposed relationship to other domains of psychological development, and especially, moral development. Significant problems with stage conceptions in these models augur a fundamental rethinking of religious development as a construct in developmental psychology. Model of Hierarchical Complexity has demonstrable promise for enabling greater precision in constructs and methods. This may resolve some central problems and advance research in the field.

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because (...) both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by or In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed. (shrink)

Preston & de Waal are understandably cautious in applying their model to autism. They emphasise multiple cognitive impairments in autism, including prefrontal-executive, cerebellar-attention, and amygdala-emotion recognition deficits. Further empirical examination of imitation ability in autism may reveal deficits in the neural and cognitive basis of perception-action mapping that have a specific relation to the empathic deficit.

As anthropology becomes more interested in consciousness and its numerous states, and with a slowly increasing appeal to neuroscience for insights and explanations of consciousness, there is an understandable interest in the components of consciousness and how they combine into alternative states in different sociocultural settings. One of those components should be the complexity of information processing producing the knowing aspect of consciousness. The author introduces an approach to this aspect in the form of conceptual systems theory, a neo-Piagetian model (...) of cognitive development, which has been used to good effect to explain information processing in social situations but heretofore neglected by anthropologists. The neuroanthropological underpinnings of CST are discussed, as is the range of potential applications to ethnological and ethnographic problems. (shrink)

The introduction and validation of a new instrument, The Moral Reasoning Inventory, designed to measure an individuals' moral reasoning (MR) in response to two moral dilemmas within a business setting is the subject of this article. The instrument consists of two moral dilemma scenarios with eight MR statements. Two measurement scales were used for analyzing patterns of individual responses: the strength of belief in the reasons and the importance of those reasons for resolving the dilemma. Managers enrolled in a part-time (...) MBA program were administered the new instrument. Data analysis clearly supported the effectiveness of the instrument to differentiate patterns of consistency in MR within decision groups. (shrink)