Gyorgy Gergely: Central European University, Budapest, Stanford Center
for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences

Human minds construct cultural products that form part of the environmental niche to which new generations of human minds must adapt. A remarkable feature of cultural transmission is that infants fast-learn a vast amount of cultural skills very early on even when they cannot yet fully grasp their relevant causal, functional, intentional, or adaptive properties. This represents an apparent paradox: how can such cognitively ‘opaque’ cultural forms be successfully transmitted and maintained across generations? Are there specialized cognitive mechanisms evolved to make efficient intergenerational transfer of such cultural knowledge possible?

The dominant view holds that it is the capacity for imitative learning that serves the evolutionary function of
cultural transmission in humans. I’ll argue, however, that presently proposed models of imitative learning face
the problem of ‘relevance-blindness’ as they lack appropriate selection mechanisms to differentiate relevant
(to be re-enacted and learned) from non-relevant, incidental to be disregarded) aspects of observed
behaviors. ‘Relevance-blind’ imitative copying would be a wasteful and inefficient transmission mechanism
likely to lead to distorted reproduction and eventual extinction of useful cultural innovations over the
generations.

I’ll suggest that the emergence of cognitively opaque cultural skills during hominin evolution and the
consequent need for their efficient intergenerational transmission created evolutionary pressure leading to the
selection of a new type of ‘relevance-guided’ social-communicative learning mechanism of mutual design:
the system of ‘Natural Pedagogy’ (NP) (Gergely & Csibra, 2006). On the naïve “teacher’s” side, NP involves an
instinctual inclination to ostensively manifest – and guide the ignorant “learner’s” inferences to identify –
relevant cultural information to be fast-learned. On the naïve “learner’s” side, NP involves evolved sensitivity
to ‘ostensive’ (e.g., eye-contact, contingent reactivity, or infant-directed speech) and referential (e.g., gaze-shift
or pointing) cues that are interpreted to signal the other’s communicative intention to manifest new, relevant
(and generalizable) cultural knowledge about a referent (and its kind). Such cues trigger a receptive learning
attitude to fast-learn ostensively manifested contents even when they are cognitively opaque to the
learner. I’ll present evidence to support the NP hypothesis from our infancy studies testing the basic
assumptions of the theory about the nature of early cultural learning in humans in a number of different
knowledge domains.