Events

Upcoming Seminar: Denis Tatone, CEU Cog Sci

Abstract:

Humans engage in resource transfer to initiate and maintain a number of social relations, each characterized by its specific directive standards (relational models). Crucially, transfer-based relations have been considered a stable feature of our ancestral social ecology. On these premises, we hypothesize that humans may have evolved a tendency to interpret the occurrence of resource transfer as a diagnostic cue of underlying social relations. Compatibly with this hypothesis, we will show that infants possess the conceptual repertoire necessary to represent interactions based on resource transfer (such as giving and taking), and interpret these as instantiations of different social relations.