The Evolution of Agency

Join us for a talk by Michael Tomasello, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. This talk is part of the Kempner Seminar Series, a research-level seminar series on recent advances in the field.

Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness. Nature builds psychological agents. I propose a typology of four different types of agentive architecture in creatures ancestral to humans, from simple control system organization to control system organization with multiple layers of executive control to early human shared agency.

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