"Children of different ages live in different worlds. This is partly due to learning: as children learn more and more about the world they experience it in different ways. But learning cannot be the whole story or else children could learn anything at any age—which they cannot.
Michael Tomasello argues that children of different ages live and learn in different worlds because their capacities to cognitively represent and operate on their experience change in significant ways over the first years of life. These capacities change because they are elements in a maturing cognitive architecture evolved for agentive decision making and action, including in shared agencies in which individuals must mentally coordinate with others. The developmental proposal is that from birth infants are goal-directed agents who cognitively represent and learn about actualities; at 9-12 months toddlers become intentional (and joint) agents who also imaginatively and perspectively represent and learn about possibilities; and at 3-4 years children become metacognitive (and collective) agents who also metacognitively represent and learn about objective/normative necessities. These developing agentive architectures—originally evolved in humans' evolutionary ancestors for particular types of decision making and action—help to explain why children learn what they do when they do."
"A radical reconsideration of how we develop the qualities that make us human, based on decades of cutting-edge experimental work by the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child's life.
Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity.
Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work."
