LANGUAGE AND REASONING IN HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS Tatiana Chernigovskaya St. Petersburg State University Part V. - презентация

1 LANGUAGE AND REASONING IN HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS Tatiana Chernigovskaya St. Petersburg State University Part V

2 Mirror neurons have been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain by Rizzolatti They are tuned to fire to observation of fine manual actions and actions performed in mouth, become activated independent of an agent, be it the self or a third person whose action is observed. The activation in mirror neurons binds the observation and enaction of some behavior by the self or by the observed other. The emergence of language, social intelligence and tool development is associated with this finding

3 Outstanding finding of mirror systems by Rizzolatti and Arbib ( ) give new dimensions for analyzing biological foundations of cognitive development and language and for Theory of Mind (ToM) - the term coined by Premack and Woodruff in 1978 in relation to chimpanzees capacity for deception (Premack & Woodruff 1978) that later becomes increasingly used in describing the cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and autism.

4 Prof. Rizzolatti

5 So, Why Language is what makes us so specific? Could there be a different evolution? A different mutation?

6 Jerry Fodor Why pigs dont have wings? Why pigs dont have wings? - Because they are pigs Humans have language because they are humans