Abstract

Sociality is paramount for human beings not only because much of human behavior is social behavior, but also because even human individual cognition is largely the result of social processes. In particular, we argue that most human high-level cognitive processes develop as social relations and practices are internalized (mainly through language), thus transforming the basic cognitive processes that are in large part shared with other mammals. In this contribution we present some examples of how the internalization of language can modify human cognitive processes and discuss both the advantages and the difficulties of studying cognition from this perspective. Finally, we argue about the role that computational models can play for overcoming such difficulties.