The sharing of attention and of intention is taken to be prior to language in evolutionary time and in an individual's lifetime, while conditioning language's acquisition through the parsing of joint attentional scenes into actors, objects, events and the like. More broadly, Tomasello sees the sharing of attention and of intention as the roots of human cultural world (the roots of conventions, of group identity, of institutions): ""Human reasoning, even when it is done internally with the self, is ... shot through and through with a kind of collective normativity in which the individuals regulate her actions and thinking based on the group's normative conventions and standards".