Cognitive Gadgets

Imitation is the case Heyes has studied longest, and it's where her argument feels most concrete. Copying another body's movements is a genuine puzzle. When we watch someone raise their hand and then raise our own the same way, we're solving what psychologists call the correspondence problem: matching a movement we see from the outside to one we produce from the inside, two things that look and feel nothing alike. The nativist reflex is to posit a dedicated mirror system, present from birth, that does this translation automatically. Heyes thinks the correspondence gets built rather than given.

Her account runs through ordinary associative learning. Infants spend enormous amounts of time in situations where they both perform an action and see it performed — being imitated by caregivers, watching their own hands, moving in front of mirrors, sharing synchronized activity. Each of these pairs a visual experience of a movement with the motor experience of making it. Over thousands of repetitions, the brain links the two, so that seeing the action comes to activate the machinery for doing it. The mirroring, in other words, is a residue of experience. Change the experience and you change the mirroring — and Heyes points to studies where training people on countermatched pairings, seeing one action while performing another, measurably reshapes their mirror responses.

Mind-reading — the everyday ability to attribute beliefs, desires and intentions to other people — is often treated as the crown jewel of human cognition, the thing that lets us cooperate, deceive, teach and gossip. The standard nativist claim is that we possess a theory-of-mind module that comes online in early childhood, roughly around the age when children pass the classic false-belief test, the one where they must grasp that someone can hold a belief the child knows to be wrong. Heyes accepts that something develops here. She denies it is an organ switching on.

Her move is to split the phenomenon in two. There is a fast, implicit sensitivity to where others are looking and what they seem to be tracking — a low-level attentional business that we may well share with other animals and that could be part of the starter kit. And there is the explicit, effortful, conceptual capacity to reason about beliefs as beliefs. That second thing, she argues, is a gadget: taught, largely through language and through the way adults narrate mental life to children. Cultures that talk more about inner states, that use mental-state words richly and early, produce children who pass these tasks sooner.

Step back from imitation and mind-reading and language one at a time, and Heyes's larger claim comes into focus. If the signature capacities of human thought are cognitive gadgets — devices built during development through social learning and handed down across generations — then the sharp line we like to draw between nature and culture runs in a different place than we assumed. It does not separate the biological body from the learned mind. It runs inside cognition itself, between a modest inherited starter kit and a rich set of culturally transmitted instruments that get loaded onto it.

This reframes what human nature even means. On the nativist picture, becoming human is a matter of unfolding: the genes contain the design, and the environment supplies the raw material for a plan already written. On Heyes's picture, becoming human is a matter of assembly, and the blueprint lives outside any single brain, distributed across the practices and conversations and demonstrations of the surrounding group. Each child rebuilds the toolkit from scratch, using materials the culture keeps in circulation. Lose the transmission and you don't get a delayed human mind; you get a different one.

The tidy story we began with — special-purpose mental organs installed by natural selection — survives Heyes's argument only in a reduced form. The organs shrink to a starter kit of general learning and sociality; the distinctively human tools move to the cultural side of the ledger, built anew in each child from materials the group keeps circulating. Imitation, mind-reading and language stop being things we simply have and become things we make, laboriously, out of experience that a human upbringing reliably supplies.