Guest Speaker

Abstract
      Apes and other nonhuman primates have very little voluntary control over their vocal signals.  In contrast, apes have much more voluntary control over their gestures - using them flexibly as needed, even in combination, in different communicative circumstances.   Moreover, in using many gestures a signaler must be concerned about whether a recipient is attending to the gesture visually, in a way that is not necessary for vocalizations broadcast indiscriminately.  For these reasons and others, human cooperative communication most likely began in the gestural modality.   An especially interesting and important gesture is pointing, which apes do not do for one another, but only for humans and only in one of its functions (requesting). Human infants use the pointing gesture spontaneously for at least three different functions from before language begins, two of them purely cooperative (sharing emotions and providing others with needed information).  It is argued that the pointing gesture embodies many aspects of the human adaptation for cooperative interactions involving shared intentionality and joint attention - and so it is the best candidate we have for an immediate precursor to human language.

About Dr. Tomasello
      Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where he is a member of the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Leipzig and at Manchester University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Rome and the British Academy, and an Instructor at the International Cognitive Science Institute, the Summer School in Linguistics in San Marino, Italy, and the Linguistic Society of America Summer School at Stanford University. He received his BA in Psychology from Duke University and PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Georgia. From 1980 to 1998, he was an Affiliate Scientist at the Yerkes Primate Center. 

     Dr. Tomasello's major research interests are in processes of social cognition, social learning and communication from developmental, comparative and cultural perspectives, especially as related to language and its acquisition. His current theoretical focus is on processes of shared intentionality, and his empirical research is mainly on human children, ages 1-4, and great apes.  He is the author of Primate Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1999), and A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (Harvard University Press 2003).  

      Some recent articles include: 

• Chimpanzees understand psychological states: The question is which ones and to what extent (Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 153-156.), Hare, B., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2006).
  
  
• Chimpanzees deceive a human competitor by hiding. Cognition, 101, 495-514, Melis, A., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2006).
  
  
• Chimpanzees recruit the best collaborators. Science, 31 ,1297 - 1300, Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2007).
  
  
• How 14- and 18- month- olds know what others have experienced.  Developmental Psychology, 43, 309-317.