ArticleScientific reports2016
On The Evolutionary Origin of Symbolic Communication.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- What Dynamic Approaches Have Taught Us About Cognition and What They Have Not: On Values in Motion and the Importance of Replicable Forms.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Review
- Disembodiment and Language in Schizophrenia: An Integrated Psychopathological and Evolutionary Perspective.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2023Article
- Editorial: Cell Communication in Vascular Biology, Volume II.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Article
- Preferred sound groups of vocal iconicity reflect evolutionary mechanisms of sound stability and first language acquisition: evidence from Eurasia.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Do Bats Have the Necessary Prerequisites for Symbolic Communication?Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The emergence of symbolic communication is often cited as a critical step in the evolution of Homo sapiens, language, and human-level cognition. It is a widely held assumption that humans are the only species that possess natural symbolic communication schemes, although a variety of other species can be taught to use symbols. The origin of symbolic communication remains a controversial open problem, obfuscated by the lack of a fossil record. Here we demonstrate an unbroken evolutionary pathway from a population of initially noncommunicating robots to the spontaneous emergence of symbolic communication. Robots evolve in a simulated world and are supplied with only a single channel of communication. When their ability to reproduce is motivated by the need to find a mate, robots evolve indexical communication schemes from initially noncommunicating populations in 99% of all experiments. Furthermore, 9% of the populations evolve a symbolic communication scheme allowing pairs of robots to exchange information about two independent spatial dimensions over a one-dimensional channel, thereby increasing their chance of reproduction. These results suggest that the ability for symbolic communication could have emerged spontaneously under natural selection, without requiring cognitive preadaptations or preexisting iconic communication schemes as previously conjectured.
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