A NEW APPROACH TO EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to understanding human psychological agency.Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then mon...

How an evolutionary psychology of agency explains dimensions of human behavior and experience overlooked by the computational model of mind.Modern cognitive science is dominated by a mind-as-computer model that pays scant attention to the evolutionary history via which human psychological processes came into existence. It thus struggles to explain why human psychology and experience are the way they are. In The Organization of Human Experience, Mi...

Winner of the William James Book AwardWinner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award“A landmark in our understanding of human development.”—Paul Harris, author of Trusting What You’re Told“Magisterial…Makes an impressive argument that most distinctly human traits are established early in childhood and that the general chronology in which these traits appear can…be identified.”—Wall Street Journal

First published in 1997, Primate Cognition was a groundbreaking and highly successful book that set the agenda for a new field of study. Borrowing theoretical constructs and paradigms from human cognitive science and developmental psychology, the book reviewed all of the empirical research existing at that time concerning both physical cognition (space and objects, tools and causality, features and categories, and quantities) as well as social cognition (social knowledge and inter...

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, American Psychological AssociationWinner of a PROSE Award, Association of American PublishersShortlist, Cognitive Development Society Book AwardA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearA Natural History of Human Morality offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and hum...

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. In a startlingly original proposal, 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 chan...

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thin...

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The newly emerging approaches to language termed, "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics," however, are much less formally oriented. Instead, functional and cognitive approaches to language structure are typically couched in terms already familiar to cognitive scientists: perception, attention, conceptualization, meaning, symbols, categories, schemas, pers...

This book, which gathers in one place the theories of 10 leading cognitive and functional linguists, represents a new approach that may define the next era in the history of psychology: It promises to give psychologists a new appreciation of what this variety of linguistics can offer their study of language and communication. In addition, it provides cognitive-functional linguists new models for presenting their work to audiences outside the boundaries of traditional linguistics. Thus, it ...

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The New Psychology of Language volumes broke new ground by introducing functional and cognitive approaches to language structure in terms already familiar to psychologists, thus defining the next era in the scientific study of language.The Classic Edition volumes re-introduce some of the most important cognitive and functional li...

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The New Psychology of Language volumes broke new ground by introducing functional and cognitive approaches to language structure in terms already familiar to psychologists, thus defining the next era in the scientific study of language.The Classic Edition volumes re-introduce some of the most important cognitive and functional li...

Most research on children's lexical development has focused on their acquisition of names for concrete objects. This is the first edited volume to focus specifically on how children acquire their early verbs. Verbs are an especially important part of the early lexicon because of the role they play in children's emerging grammatical competence. The contributors to this book investigate:* children's earliest words for actions and events and the cognitive structures that might underlie...