Herbert S. Terrace – författare

How do we develop self-awareness, or a sense of self? One of the most popular theories is that language plays a major role: language and the narrative form allow us to develop a sense of self because this sense is dependent upon representational thought and the psychological manipulation of representations. Some scholars argue against this theory, claiming that more than language and representational thought is needed. Comparing human and animal cognition is a particularly powerful way of examining this disagreement; if animals possess self-awareness without having the representational linguistic capabilities of humans, then the comparison will provide significant evidence for the argument that language and narrative form do not play the only role, and that researchers may have overlooked a cognitive link. Terrace and Metcalfe propose to facilitate this work of some participants, such as Endel Tulving, Janet Metcalfe, and Daniel Povinelli, shows that self-awareness, metacognitions, and representational thought are unique to humans, while that of precursors to self-aware thought processes exist in non-human primates, the debate is likely to be lively and informative. This volume will be of great interest to researchers in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology.

Human infants do not seem to be born with concepts of self or joint attention. One basic goal of Agency and Joint Attention is to unravel how these abilities originate. One approach that has received a lot of recent attention is social. Some argue that by virtue of an infant's intense eye gaze with her mother, she is able, by the age of four months, to establish a relationship with her mother that differentiates between "me" and "you." At about twelve months, the infant acquires the non-verbal ability to share attention with her mother or other caregivers. Although the concepts of self and joint attention are nonverbal and uniquely human, the question remains, how do we establish metacognitive control of these abilities? A tangential question is whether nonhuman animals develop abilities that are analogous to self and joint attention. Much of this volume is devoted to the development of metacognition of self and joint attention in experiments on the origin of consciousness, knowing oneself, social referencing, joint action, the neurological basis of joint attention, the role of joint action, mirror neurons, phenomenology, and cues for agency.

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In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed—not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words. Language is a uniquely human quality, and attempting to find it in animals is wishful thinking at best. The failure of Project Nim meant we were no closer to understanding where language comes from.In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of infant language acquisition, leading up to a child’s first words. By placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues that this theory explains Nim’s inability to acquire words and, more broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.