Gergely and other psychologists (Gergely – Unoka 2008) advance the hypothesis of cooperation between the natural pedagogy and the social biofeedback models. Their proposal takes into account the infant’s internalisation process of contingently “marked” emotion-mirroring displays. Such affective mirroring manifestations involve the infant’s generation of second-order representations of primary non-conscious …
Natural pedagogy focuses on knowledge transfer and how such transfer may occur. The theory describes a communicative relationship which is, by definition, an exchange influenced and determined by the principle of epistemic primacy that portrays infants as «avid seekers of information provided by others» (Poulin-Dubois et al. 2010, p. 303). …
There are good reasons to suppose that the infant’s innate disposition for informational sensitivity is grounded on a representational mind. As Kim Sterelny (1991, p. 21) writes: «there can be no informational sensitivity without representation. To learn about the world and to use what we learn to act in new …
Gergely and Csibra argue that natural pedagogy has been selected during hominid evolution to ensure 1) fast and efficient acquisition and intergenerational transfer of cultural knowledge, and 2) overcoming the hard social environmental conditions of «cognitive opacity» for human cultural forms. Pedagogical cues work as an “interpretation switch”, signalling to …
The book Learning through Others (2020) illustrates and discusses the infant social learning theory called “Natural Pedagogy”. The natural pedagogy theory, proposed by György Gergely and Gergely Csibra, has the ambitious scope of providing a model of infant social learning. This particular social learning system is funded on a communicative …
