Hans Moll
Biographic Data
| ID | 89697 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hans Moll |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hans |
| FAMILY NAME | Moll |
| SIGNATURE | MOLL H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9356-3077 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Young children teach objective facts as opposed to subjective opinion
We examined an understudied aspect of children's pedagogical cognition and investigated whether children selectively transmit objective information. In three experiments ( N = 168), 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to distinguish between objective and subjective statements (Experiment 1) and to choose objective or subjective information to pass on to others (Experiments 2 and 3). Children of both ages distinguished between the two types of statement…
Ontogenetic steps of understanding beliefs: From practical to theoretical
In this article, we postulate that belief understanding unfolds in two steps over ontogenetic time. We propose that belief understanding begins in interactive scenarios in which infants and toddlers respond directly and second-personally to the actions of a misinformed agent. This early understanding of beliefs is practical and grounded in the capacity for perspective-taking. Practical belief understanding guarantees effective interaction and com…
Learning from another
Learning is a capacity whereby an individual undergoes a distinctive kind of change: a change of what she is able to think or do, a change either in the scope or quality of her capacities. It is widely held that the capacity for learning takes a unique shape in humans and differs from how non-human animals learn. This view is popular among philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. In spite of the wide agreement about its uniqueness, it re…
Know thy audience: Children teach basic or complex facts depending on the learner's maturity
What kind of information is appropriate to teach depends on learner characteristics. In three experiments, 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 170, 50% female, 68% White; data collection: 2022–2023) chose between basic and complex information to teach an infant or adult audience. The older, but not younger, children, taught more complex information to adults and more basic information to infants, (OR = 2.03). Both ages overcame their own preference fo…
Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges
The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation…
The Development of Sharing Experiences: From Dyadic Engagement to Taking Others’ Perspectives
We argue that the main difference between humans and other animals lies in humans’ unique form of sociality: their shared intentionality. Instead of conceiving of shared intentionality as a special skill humans have in addition to the skills they share with nonhuman animals (the additive account), we propose to think of shared intentionality as transforming human cognition in its entirety (the transformative account, as in the thesis of Kern and …
How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals
This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tom…
Introducing this Special Issue
Children’s Pedagogical Competence and Child-to-Child Knowledge Transmission: Forgotten Factors in Theories of Cultural Evolution
Theories of cultural evolution tend to agree that teaching is one of the most powerful social learning mechanisms whereby knowledge gets passed on from one generation to the next. Researchers have mainly focused on the communicative signals adults produce when teaching. Natural pedagogy theory, for example, discusses how adults’ use of ostensive communication leads children to adopt a learning stance and interpret the information they receive as …
Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis
How Young Children Learn from Others
Journal Article How Young Children Learn from Others Get access Henrike Moll Henrike Moll Correspondence: Henrike Moll, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, SGM 501, 3620 South McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90090-1061, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 54, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 340–355, https://doi.org/10.1…
Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking . Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled”…
Future planning in preschool children
The capacity to plan ahead and provide the means for future ends is an important part of human practical reasoning. When this capacity develops in ontogeny is the matter of an ongoing debate. In this study, 4- and 5-year-olds performed a future planning task in which they had to create the means (a picture of a particular object, e.g., a banana) that was necessary to address a future end (of completing a game in which such a picture was missing).…
Tension in the Natural History of Human Thinking
Michael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking, I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens' cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt th…
Taking versus confronting visual perspectives in preschool children
Recent evidence suggests that 3-year-olds can take other people's visual perspectives not only when they perceive different things (Level 1) but even when they see the same thing differently (Level 2). One hypothesis is that 3-year-olds are good perspective takers but cannot confront different perspectives on the same object (Perner, Stummer, Sprung, & Doherty, 2002). In 2 studies using color filters, 3-year-olds were unable to judge in what colo…
Three-year-olds understand appearance and reality—just not about the same object at the same time
Young children struggle in the classic tests of appearance versus reality. In the current Study 1, 3-year-olds had to determine which of 2 objects (a deceptive or a nondeceptive one) an adult requested when asking for the "real X" versus "the one that looks like X." In Study 2, children of the same age had to indicate what a single deceptive object (e.g., a chocolate-eraser) looked like and what it really was by selecting one of two items that re…
Social Engagement Leads 2‐Year‐Olds to Overestimate Others’ Knowledge
Previous research has found that young children recognize an adult as being acquainted with an object most readily when the child and adult have previously engaged socially with that object together. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that such social engagement is so powerful that it can sometimes lead children to overestimate what has been shared. After having shared two objects with an adult in turn, 2‐year‐old children played with…
Replik auf die Kommentare
We’ve built this digital research platform to provide academics everywhere with fast, stable and secure digital access to our library of over 110,000 scholarly books and 800,000 journal articles. We’ve tested the platform in close cooperation with leading academic institutions. If you have any questions or you notice something doesn’t quite work as it should, please visit our Help/FAQ page and let us know
Month-olds understand the cooperative logic of requests
Fourteen‐Month‐Olds Know What “We” Have Shared in a Special Way
People often express excitement to each other when encountering an object that they have shared together previously in some special way. This study investigated whether 14‐month‐old infants know precisely what they have and have not shared in a special way (and with whom). In the experimental condition an adult and infant shared an object (the target) excitedly because it unexpectedly reappeared in several places. They then shared 2 other objects…
Cooperation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis
Nicholas Humphrey's social intelligence hypothesis proposed that the major engine of primate cognitive evolution was social competition. Lev Vygotsky also emphasized the social dimension of intelligence, but he focused on human primates and cultural things such as collaboration, communication and teaching. A reasonable proposal is that primate cognition in general was driven mainly by social competition, but beyond that the unique aspects of huma…
How 14- and 18-month-olds know what others have experienced
Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants observed an adult experiencing each of 2 objects (experienced objects) and then leaving the room; the infant then played with a 3rd object while the adult was gone (unexperienced object). The adult interacted with the 2 experienced objects in 1 of 3 ways: by (a) sharing them with the infant in an episode of joint engagement, (b) actively manipulating and inspecting them on his or her own as the infant watched (i…
Level 1 perspective‐taking at 24 months of age
The current study sought to determine the age at which children first engage in Level 1 visual perspective‐taking, in which they understand that the content of what another person sees in a situation may sometimes differ from what they see. An adult entered the room searching for an object. One candidate object was out in the open, whereas another was visible for the child but behind an occluder from the adult's perspective. When asked to help th…
Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representati…
Religion in Australia: A Sociological Investigation
How 14- and 18-month-olds know what others have experienced
Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants observed an adult experiencing each of 2 objects (experienced objects) and then leaving the room; the infant then played with a 3rd object while the adult was gone (unexperienced object). The adult interacted with the 2 experienced objects in 1 of 3 ways: by (a) sharing them with the infant in an episode of joint engagement, (b) actively manipulating and inspecting them on his or her own as the infant watched (i…
Taking versus confronting visual perspectives in preschool children
Recent evidence suggests that 3-year-olds can take other people's visual perspectives not only when they perceive different things (Level 1) but even when they see the same thing differently (Level 2). One hypothesis is that 3-year-olds are good perspective takers but cannot confront different perspectives on the same object (Perner, Stummer, Sprung, & Doherty, 2002). In 2 studies using color filters, 3-year-olds were unable to judge in what colo…
Three-year-olds understand appearance and reality—just not about the same object at the same time
Young children struggle in the classic tests of appearance versus reality. In the current Study 1, 3-year-olds had to determine which of 2 objects (a deceptive or a nondeceptive one) an adult requested when asking for the "real X" versus "the one that looks like X." In Study 2, children of the same age had to indicate what a single deceptive object (e.g., a chocolate-eraser) looked like and what it really was by selecting one of two items that re…
Month-olds understand the cooperative logic of requests
How Young Children Learn from Others
Journal Article How Young Children Learn from Others Get access Henrike Moll Henrike Moll Correspondence: Henrike Moll, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, SGM 501, 3620 South McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90090-1061, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 54, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 340–355, https://doi.org/10.1…
Future planning in preschool children
The capacity to plan ahead and provide the means for future ends is an important part of human practical reasoning. When this capacity develops in ontogeny is the matter of an ongoing debate. In this study, 4- and 5-year-olds performed a future planning task in which they had to create the means (a picture of a particular object, e.g., a banana) that was necessary to address a future end (of completing a game in which such a picture was missing).…
Tension in the Natural History of Human Thinking
Michael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking, I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens' cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt th…
Religion in Australia: A Sociological Investigation
Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representati…
Level 1 perspective‐taking at 24 months of age
The current study sought to determine the age at which children first engage in Level 1 visual perspective‐taking, in which they understand that the content of what another person sees in a situation may sometimes differ from what they see. An adult entered the room searching for an object. One candidate object was out in the open, whereas another was visible for the child but behind an occluder from the adult's perspective. When asked to help th…
Cooperation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis
Nicholas Humphrey's social intelligence hypothesis proposed that the major engine of primate cognitive evolution was social competition. Lev Vygotsky also emphasized the social dimension of intelligence, but he focused on human primates and cultural things such as collaboration, communication and teaching. A reasonable proposal is that primate cognition in general was driven mainly by social competition, but beyond that the unique aspects of huma…
How 14- and 18-month-olds know what others have experienced
Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants observed an adult experiencing each of 2 objects (experienced objects) and then leaving the room; the infant then played with a 3rd object while the adult was gone (unexperienced object). The adult interacted with the 2 experienced objects in 1 of 3 ways: by (a) sharing them with the infant in an episode of joint engagement, (b) actively manipulating and inspecting them on his or her own as the infant watched (i…
Fourteen‐Month‐Olds Know What “We” Have Shared in a Special Way
People often express excitement to each other when encountering an object that they have shared together previously in some special way. This study investigated whether 14‐month‐old infants know precisely what they have and have not shared in a special way (and with whom). In the experimental condition an adult and infant shared an object (the target) excitedly because it unexpectedly reappeared in several places. They then shared 2 other objects…
Month-olds understand the cooperative logic of requests
Social Engagement Leads 2‐Year‐Olds to Overestimate Others’ Knowledge
Previous research has found that young children recognize an adult as being acquainted with an object most readily when the child and adult have previously engaged socially with that object together. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that such social engagement is so powerful that it can sometimes lead children to overestimate what has been shared. After having shared two objects with an adult in turn, 2‐year‐old children played with…
Replik auf die Kommentare
We’ve built this digital research platform to provide academics everywhere with fast, stable and secure digital access to our library of over 110,000 scholarly books and 800,000 journal articles. We’ve tested the platform in close cooperation with leading academic institutions. If you have any questions or you notice something doesn’t quite work as it should, please visit our Help/FAQ page and let us know
Three-year-olds understand appearance and reality—just not about the same object at the same time
Young children struggle in the classic tests of appearance versus reality. In the current Study 1, 3-year-olds had to determine which of 2 objects (a deceptive or a nondeceptive one) an adult requested when asking for the "real X" versus "the one that looks like X." In Study 2, children of the same age had to indicate what a single deceptive object (e.g., a chocolate-eraser) looked like and what it really was by selecting one of two items that re…
Taking versus confronting visual perspectives in preschool children
Recent evidence suggests that 3-year-olds can take other people's visual perspectives not only when they perceive different things (Level 1) but even when they see the same thing differently (Level 2). One hypothesis is that 3-year-olds are good perspective takers but cannot confront different perspectives on the same object (Perner, Stummer, Sprung, & Doherty, 2002). In 2 studies using color filters, 3-year-olds were unable to judge in what colo…
Tension in the Natural History of Human Thinking
Michael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking, I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens' cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt th…
Future planning in preschool children
The capacity to plan ahead and provide the means for future ends is an important part of human practical reasoning. When this capacity develops in ontogeny is the matter of an ongoing debate. In this study, 4- and 5-year-olds performed a future planning task in which they had to create the means (a picture of a particular object, e.g., a banana) that was necessary to address a future end (of completing a game in which such a picture was missing).…
Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking . Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled”…
How Young Children Learn from Others
Journal Article How Young Children Learn from Others Get access Henrike Moll Henrike Moll Correspondence: Henrike Moll, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, SGM 501, 3620 South McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90090-1061, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 54, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 340–355, https://doi.org/10.1…
Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis
How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals
This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tom…
Introducing this Special Issue
Children’s Pedagogical Competence and Child-to-Child Knowledge Transmission: Forgotten Factors in Theories of Cultural Evolution
Theories of cultural evolution tend to agree that teaching is one of the most powerful social learning mechanisms whereby knowledge gets passed on from one generation to the next. Researchers have mainly focused on the communicative signals adults produce when teaching. Natural pedagogy theory, for example, discusses how adults’ use of ostensive communication leads children to adopt a learning stance and interpret the information they receive as …
Ontogenetic steps of understanding beliefs: From practical to theoretical
In this article, we postulate that belief understanding unfolds in two steps over ontogenetic time. We propose that belief understanding begins in interactive scenarios in which infants and toddlers respond directly and second-personally to the actions of a misinformed agent. This early understanding of beliefs is practical and grounded in the capacity for perspective-taking. Practical belief understanding guarantees effective interaction and com…
Learning from another
Learning is a capacity whereby an individual undergoes a distinctive kind of change: a change of what she is able to think or do, a change either in the scope or quality of her capacities. It is widely held that the capacity for learning takes a unique shape in humans and differs from how non-human animals learn. This view is popular among philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. In spite of the wide agreement about its uniqueness, it re…
Know thy audience: Children teach basic or complex facts depending on the learner's maturity
What kind of information is appropriate to teach depends on learner characteristics. In three experiments, 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 170, 50% female, 68% White; data collection: 2022–2023) chose between basic and complex information to teach an infant or adult audience. The older, but not younger, children, taught more complex information to adults and more basic information to infants, (OR = 2.03). Both ages overcame their own preference fo…
Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges
The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation…
The Development of Sharing Experiences: From Dyadic Engagement to Taking Others’ Perspectives
We argue that the main difference between humans and other animals lies in humans’ unique form of sociality: their shared intentionality. Instead of conceiving of shared intentionality as a special skill humans have in addition to the skills they share with nonhuman animals (the additive account), we propose to think of shared intentionality as transforming human cognition in its entirety (the transformative account, as in the thesis of Kern and …
Young children teach objective facts as opposed to subjective opinion
We examined an understudied aspect of children's pedagogical cognition and investigated whether children selectively transmit objective information. In three experiments ( N = 168), 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to distinguish between objective and subjective statements (Experiment 1) and to choose objective or subjective information to pass on to others (Experiments 2 and 3). Children of both ages distinguished between the two types of statement…
Child and Animal Learning Development (20 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Developmental psychology (13 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Cognition (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Cognitive science (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works)