“Semiotic and psychological foundations of mind and man: mindreading and mindsharing as the distinctive species-specific features”
During long time, to be human was linked to the most sophisticated cognitive abilities such as language, abstract conception and reasoning. Nowadays, after having detected some of these skills in other non-human primates (like the possibility of using symbols and composing them in different anthropoid apes, or their good performance in problem solving tasks), the experts turned to search the thin line between human and non-human somewhere else. The current research in developmental psychology of early childhood is focused not any more in those high-performance mental abilities, but in, preverbal social baby-adult interactions, considering that becoming human depends on this being-with-others platform upon which reflexive thought and abstraction will later develop. The ability to establish affective relationships with others and to connect with them even in a non-semantical way (a kind of communion that refers to nothing and only reveals an inmixing process between the participants) structures the human sensibility and prepares the cognitive device for its future normal development.