The Social-cognitive Niche: An Exploration of the Co-evolutionary Relationship between Human Mind and language, with a Particular Focus of the Self-organisational properties of the Emergence of Symbolic Representation.
- Research Team
- Lewys Brace
- Investigators
- Jason Noble, Glyn Hicks
This work explored the relationship between the origin and subsequent evolution of the human mind and language; a relationship that is believed to be symbiotic in nature. This piece aimed to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it set out a theoretical framework, using the principles of complexity theory and self-organisation, which attempts to explain this relationship from a holistic perspective.
Secondly, it presented an agent-based model of a vervet monkey social group, which sought to investigate the variables that were perceived to underpin the emergence of symbolic representation within a population of language users.
The belief here was that, by understanding the influence of these variables, one would be able to better understand the genesis of the aforementioned relationship.
Categories
Life sciences simulation: Evolution
Socio-technological System simulation: Human environment interaction, Human population, Self Organized Networks, Social and Socio-economic Systems, Social Networks
Algorithms and computational methods: Agents
Transdisciplinary tags: Complex Systems, Computer Science