Mindvaults : sociocultural grounds for pretending and imagining / / Radu J. Bogdan

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910779403103321
• Autore: Bogdan Radu J
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge, Mass., : MIT Press, ©2013; ©2013
• ISBN: 0-262-31434-7; 1-299-44327-3; 0-262-31433-9
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (259 p.)
• Disciplina: 153.3
• Soggetti: Imagination; Imagination in children; Social psychology; Social perception; Social cognitive theory
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-232) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Contents; Preface; Introduction; I QUESTIONS; 1 What Sort of Evolution?; 2 What Sort of Ontogeny?; 3 What Sort of Competence?; II DEVELOPMENTAL ANSWERS; Before Four: Playing with Culture; 4 Early Foundations; 5 Pretending; After Four: Others and Self; 6 Change of Mind; 7 Imagining; 8 Epilogue; Appendix; Glossary; References; Index
• Sommario/riassunto: An argument that the uniquely human capacities of pretending and imagining develop in response to sociocultural and sociopolitical pressures in childhood.The human mind has the capacity to vault over the realm of current perception, motivation, emotion, and action, to leap--consciously and deliberately--to past or future, possible or impossible, abstract or concrete scenarios and situations. In this book, Radu Bogdan examines the roots of this uniquely human ability, which he terms "mindvaulting." He focuses particularly on the capacities of pretending and imagining, which he identifies as the first forms of mindvaulting to develop in childhood. Pretending and imagining, Bogdan argues, are crucial steps on the ontogenetic staircase to the ; intellect.Bogdan finds that pretending and then imagining develop from a variety of sources for reasons that are specific and unique to human childhood. He argues that these capacities arise as responses to sociocultural and sociopolitical pressures that emerge at different stages of childhood. Bogdan argues that some of the properties of mindvaulting--including domain versatility and nonmodularity--resist standard evolutionary explanations. To resolve this puzzle, Bogdan reorients the evolutionary analysis toward human ontogeny, construed as a genuine space of evolution with specific pressures and adaptive responses. Bogdan finds that pretending is an ontogenetic response to sociocultural challenges in early childhood, a pre-adaptation for imagining; after age four, the adaptive response to cooperative and competitive sociopolitical pressures is a competence for mental strategizing that morphs into imagining.