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All Outputs (16)

Perspective-taking is spontaneous but not automatic (2020)
Journal Article
O’Grady, C., Scott-Phillips, T., Lavelle, S., & Smith, K. (2020). Perspective-taking is spontaneous but not automatic. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(10), 1605-1628. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021820942479

Data from a range of different experimental paradigms—in particular (but not only) the dot perspective task—have been interpreted as evidence that humans automatically track the perspective of other individuals. Results from other studies, however, h... Read More about Perspective-taking is spontaneous but not automatic.

A simple (experimental) demonstration that cultural evolution is not replicative, but reconstructive - and an explanation of why this difference matters (2017)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T. (2017). A simple (experimental) demonstration that cultural evolution is not replicative, but reconstructive - and an explanation of why this difference matters. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 17(1-2), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342188

Two complementary approaches to a naturalistic theory of culture are, on the one hand, mainstream cultural evolution research, and, on the other, work done under the banners of cultural attraction and the epidemiology of representations. There is muc... Read More about A simple (experimental) demonstration that cultural evolution is not replicative, but reconstructive - and an explanation of why this difference matters.

Pragmatics and the aims of language evolution (2016)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T. (2017). Pragmatics and the aims of language evolution. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 24(1), 186-189. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1061-2

Pragmatics has historically played a relatively peripheral role in language evolution research. This is a profound mistake. Here I describe how a pragmatic perspective can inform language evolution in the most fundamental way: by making clear what th... Read More about Pragmatics and the aims of language evolution.

Meaning in great ape communication: Summarising the debate (2015)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T. (2016). Meaning in great ape communication: Summarising the debate. Animal Cognition, 19(1), 233-238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0936-3

Does non-human great ape communication have meaning in the same way as human words (and some other human behaviours)? I recently argued that the answer to this question is most likely to be in the negative (Scott-Phillips in Anim Cogn 18(3):801–805,... Read More about Meaning in great ape communication: Summarising the debate.

The ease and extent of recursive mindreading, across implicit and explicit tasks (2015)
Journal Article
O'Grady, C., Kliesch, C., Smith, K., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). The ease and extent of recursive mindreading, across implicit and explicit tasks. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(4), 313-322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.01.004

Recursive mindreading is the ability to embed mental representations inside other mental representations e.g. to hold beliefs about beliefs about beliefs. An advanced ability to entertain recursively embedded mental states is consistent with evolutio... Read More about The ease and extent of recursive mindreading, across implicit and explicit tasks.

What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective (2015)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective. Think, 14(40), 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1477175615000093

What is art? Marcel Duchamp made this question pertinent when he developed his ‘Readymades’: ordinary, manufactured objects that he presented as art. In this paper, I use pragmatics – the branch of linguistics concerned with language use in context,... Read More about What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective.

Meaning in animal and human communication (2015)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). Meaning in animal and human communication. Animal Cognition, 18(3), 801-805. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0845-5

What is meaning? While traditionally the domain of philosophy and linguistics, this question, and others related to it, is critical for cognitive and comparative approaches to communication. This short essay provides a concise and accessible descript... Read More about Meaning in animal and human communication.

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language (2015)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language. Current Anthropology, 56(1), 56-80. https://doi.org/10.1086/679674

Comparisons with the cognition and communication of other species have long informed discussions of the origins and evolution of human communication and language. This research has often focused on similarities and differences with the linguistic cod... Read More about Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language.

Simulating the real origins of communication (2014)
Journal Article
Blythe, R., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2014). Simulating the real origins of communication. PLoS ONE, 9(11), Article e113636. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113636

How communication systems emerge is a topic of relevance to several academic disciplines. Numerous existing models, both mathematical and computational, study this emergence. However, with few exceptions, these models all build some form of communica... Read More about Simulating the real origins of communication.

How Darwinian is cultural evolution? (2014)
Journal Article
Claidière, N., Scott-Phillips, T., & Sperber, D. (2014). How Darwinian is cultural evolution?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1642), Article 20130368. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0368

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectiona... Read More about How Darwinian is cultural evolution?.

The niche construction perspective: A critical appraisal (2014)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T., Laland, K., Shuker, D., Dickins, T., & West, S. (2014). The niche construction perspective: A critical appraisal. Evolution: International Journal of Organic Evolution, 68(5), 1231-1243. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12332

Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary... Read More about The niche construction perspective: A critical appraisal.

Combinatorial communication in bacteria: Implications for the origins of linguistic generativity (2014)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T., Gurney, J., Ivens, A., Diggle, S., & Popat, R. (2014). Combinatorial communication in bacteria: Implications for the origins of linguistic generativity. PLoS ONE, 9(4), Article e95929. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0095929

Combinatorial communication, in which two signals are used together to achieve an effect that is different to the sum of the effects of the component parts, is apparently rare in nature: it is ubiquitous in human language, appears to exist in a simpl... Read More about Combinatorial communication in bacteria: Implications for the origins of linguistic generativity.

Why is combinatorial communication rare in the natural world, and why is language an exception to this trend? (2013)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T., & Blythe, R. (2013). Why is combinatorial communication rare in the natural world, and why is language an exception to this trend?. Journal of the Royal Society. Interface, 10(88), Article 20130520. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.0520

In a combinatorial communication system, some signals consist of the combinations of other signals. Such systems are more efficient than equivalent, non-combinatorial systems, yet despite this they are rare in nature. Why? Previous explanations have... Read More about Why is combinatorial communication rare in the natural world, and why is language an exception to this trend?.