Why a species as successful as Homo sapiens should spend so much time in fiction, in
telling one another stories that neither side believes, at first seems an evolutionary riddle …

There is much controversy over what is needed for culture to flourish and what has led
human culture to be different from “cultural” characteristics of other animals. Here I argue …

The past 50 years have seen an accumulation of evidence suggesting that associative
learning depends on high-level cognitive processes that give rise to propositional …

Symbolic play and language are known to be highly interrelated, but the developmental
process involved in this relationship is not clear. Three hypothetical paths were postulated to …

Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend
play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for …

This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is
conceptualized as a collective invention, on the model of writing or the wheel, and the book …

While numerous publications have shown that apes can learn some aspects of human
language, one frequently cited difference between humans and apes is the relative …

Children's ability to reason about junctures leading to two different destinations emerges
slowly, with convergent evidence for a conceptual watershed at approximately 4 years …

In this response, we provide further clarification of the propositional approach to human
associative learning. We explain why the empirical evidence favors the propositional …

Die Gesangskünste von Vögeln haben Künstler und Denker vielfach zu Parallelen mit den
menschlichen Künsten angeregt. Erst Charles Darwin jedoch hat solchen Parallelen eine …