CHRISTINE M. JOHNSON
 

Dr. Johnson earned a B.A. in Psychobiology from the University of California Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Cornell University. She currently teaches in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California San Diego. Raised in a family of biologists, she learned from an early age to revere the natural world and to take great pleasure in its contemplation. She was fortunate enough to begin her career with the inimitable Dr. Kenneth Norris as her mentor, studying social behavior in Hawaiian Spinner dolphins. Her other field work includes observing Indian Ocean Bottlenose behavior in Australia, and Bahamian Spotted dolphins with the intrepid Dr. Denise Herzing. She has also studied behavior, communication, and cognition in a variety of captive marine mammals, including Bottlenose, Orcas, Spinners, Lags and Commersons dolphins, as well as California Sea Lions. Her primary motivations are the fascination the animals themselves engender, and an avid interest in issues on the evolution of mind. In particular, her comparative work has come to focus on the cognitive demands and adaptations that emerge within the social domain. Her current research on social cognition in bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park continues this enterprise.

ABSTRACT

CULTURES: A CROSS-SPECIES PERSPECTIVE... Viewing culture as a fundamentally social phenomenon focuses our attention on processes that are observable in a variety of species. To the extent that a species relies on learning processes - i.e. those that evaluate and select among alternatives - its members will respond to variability in their environment. As a result, the greater this dependence on learning, the more individual behavior will be differentially affected by idiosyncratic experience. Social learning involves not only learning from, but also learning about, other individuals. Thus, as social complexity increases, individual differences become both a product and a source of this variability. At the same time, social learning mechanisms - like imitation and instruction - tend to result in behavioral convergence across individuals. Furthermore, the cognitive demands of social complexity, including developing skills in negotiation and self control, are eased by conformity to the rules and roles that emerge over the course of interaction. Any system that can thus incorporate both the novelty (invention, direction, self-expression, etc.) introduced by particular individuals, as well as the normative constraints of communication and coordination, will end up producing the sort of unique historical trajectories that characterize cultural change.

Those of us interested in studying culture, especially in nonhumans, are thus faced with documenting differing patterns of change across populations and across time within one population. We need to look first to how species-specific constraints on perceptual and motor processes, as well as ecological resources and requirements, shape the range of an animal's repertoire. Among the "handy" primates, for example, manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and an emergent sensitivity to the laws of physical causality have fostered the use of objects as tools for extractive foraging. With the elaboration of these skills in humans, a vast "material culture" has come to shape our species' activities. But animate objects are also among the media of human cultures. Dexterity in gesture and articulation, for example, exercised in social situations, produces a wide array of more transient, but no less material, events of socio-ecological significance. Other socially complex species, also capable of behaving in accordance with subtle economies of obligation, competition, and collaboration, may likewise have developed consensual postures and vocalizations with which to sanction, negotiate, court, and teach. Observations of, especially, polyadic interactions involving reciprocity, deceptions, imitation, and attention direction, as well as individual displays of empathy, creativity, pretense, and self-restraint, should be expected in such a species. The organization of such activities into longer-term, arbitrary, but species-appropriate patters - changed, and shared, by a changing array of individuals - could provide rich cultural differences for study. In addition, I would argue that, in recognizing the formative role played, in any culture, by the capacity to monitor, impose, and adhere to group proprieties, we, as ethical observers, also accrue a responsibility to respect the prohibitions and entitlements that any such groups uphold among themselves.