Triadic relations and emergence of mind in nonhuman primates

Abstract

When considering the evolutionary origin of language, we should attend to the social-cognitive aspects of language acquisition in addition to the linguistic competence. This view is an emphasis of Bruner's “Language Acquisition Supporting System (LASS)” and recently intensively studied from the comparative-cognitive-developmental perspective. In this article, I summarize the research project of cognitive development in chimpanzees at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University (CDC2000), with special reference to the development of social cognition. During the early infancy, chimpanzee infants showed developmental trajectories similar to human infants. Especially, the chimpanzee infants established close dyadic relationship with their mothers on the basis of mutual gaze and social smiling. However, triadic interactions on the basis of sharing attention, more important social interactions for humans, were not observed in chimpanzees even at their juvenile period. This difference in social interactions between humans and chimpanzees may be the source of more critical difference in the understanding of others. Furthermore, the problem of “enculturation” is also discussed in relation to Vygotsky's concept of “zone of proximal development”.