The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology – namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology – that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through (...) these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements. (shrink)

Tercera Cultura: #TheLibro es una introducción a las ciencias cognitivas -Psicología, Lingüística, Filosofía, Neurociencia, Antropología, Inteligencia Artificial- escrita en un lenguaje simple y claro, ilustrado con ejemplos de la cultura popular, dirigido a estudiantes y geeks de todas las edades.

How do people detect mental dysfunction? What is the influence of cultural models of dysfunction on this detection process? The detection process as such is not usually researched as it falls between the domains of cross-cultural psychiatry and anthropological ethno-psychiatry . I provide a general model for this “missing link” between behavior and cultural models, grounded in empirical evidence for intuitive psychology. Normal adult minds entertain specific intuitive expectations about mental function and behavior, and by implication they infer that specific (...) kinds of behavior are the result of underlying dysfunction. This suggests that there is a “catalogue” of possible behaviors that trigger that intuition, hence a limited catalogue of possible symptoms that feed into culturally specific folk-understandings of mental disorder. It also suggests that some mental dysfunctions, as they do not clearly violate principles of intuitive psychology, are “invisible” to folk-understandings. This perspective allows us to understand the cultural stability and spread of particular views of madness. It also suggests why certain types of mental disorder are invisible to folk-understandings. (shrink)

Composite beings (“monsters”) are those mythical creatures composed of a mix of different anatomical forms. There are several scholarly claims for why these appear in the imagery and lore of many societies, including claims that they are found near-universally as well as those arguments that they co-occur with particular sociocultural arrangements. In order to evaluate these claims, we identify the presence of composite monsters cross-culturally in a global sample of societies, the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. We find that composite beings are (...) not universal, and that their presence or absence co-varies most significantly with social stratification and transportation technology. This supports hypotheses that the cultural evolution of composite monsters is driven by human concerns with social distinctions within societies as well as increased contact with distant peoples. (shrink)

Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple flows of information. (Here we use “information” in a broad sense that includes not only the content of people’s knowledge, but also that of their beliefs, assumptions, fictions, rules, norms, skills, maps, images, and so on.) This information is materially realized in the mental representations of the people, and in their public productions, that is, their cognitively guided behaviors and the enduring material traces of these behaviors. Mentally represented (...) information is transmitted from individuals to individuals through public productions. Public representations such as speech, gestures, writing, or pictures are a special type of public productions, the function of which is to communicate a content. Public representations play a major role in information transmission. Much information, however, is communicated implicitly, that is, without being publicly represented. Information can also be transmitted without being properly speaking communicated, not even implicitly, as when one individual acquires a skill by observing and imitating the behavior of others. Most information transmitted among humans is about local and transient circumstances, and is not transmitted beyond these. Some information of more general relevance, however, is repeatedly transmitted, and propagates throughout the group. Talk of “culture” (whatever the preferred definition or theory of culture) is about this widely distributed information and about its material realizations inside people’s mind and in their common environment (see Sperber 1996). One can study cultural phenomena in two main ways. One can interpret them, that is, try and make their contents intelligible to people of another culture, or more intelligible to members of the culture in which these phenomena occurs, as do anthropologists and historians. One may also try and explain causally how these cultural phenomena emerge, stabilize and evolve.. (shrink)

Research in anthropology has shown that kin terminologies have a complex combinatorial structure and vary systematically across cultures. This article argues that universals and variation in kin terminology result from the interaction of (1) an innate conceptual structure of kinship, homologous with conceptual structure in other domains, and (2) principles of optimal, “grammatical” communication active in language in general. Kin terms from two languages, English and Seneca, show how terminologies that look very different on the surface may result from variation (...) in the rankings of a universal set of constraints. Constraints on kin terms form a system: some are concerned with absolute features of kin (sex), others with the position (distance and direction) of kin in “kinship space,” others with groups and group boundaries (matrilines, patrilines, generations, etc.). Also, kin terms sometimes extend indefinitely via recursion, and recursion in kin terminology has parallels with recursion in other areas of language. Thus the study of kinship sheds light on two areas of cognition, and their phylogeny. The conceptual structure of kinship seems to borrow its organization from the conceptual structure of space, while being specialized for representing genealogy. And the grammar of kinship looks like the product of an evolved grammar faculty, opportunistically active across traditional domains of semantics, syntax, and phonology. Grammar is best understood as an offshoot of a uniquely human capacity for playing coordination games. (shrink)

Research in the fields of complex problem solving (CPS) and dynamic decision making using microworlds has been mainly conducted in Western industrialized countries. This study analyzes the CPS process by investigating thinking‐aloud protocols in five countries. Participants were 511 students from Brazil, Germany, India, the Philippines, and the United States who worked on two microworlds. On the basis of cultural‐psychological theories, specific cross‐national differences in CPS strategies were hypothesized. Following theories of situatedness of cognition, hypotheses about the specific frequency of (...) problem‐solving strategies in the two microworlds were developed. Results of the verbal protocols showed (a) modification of the theoretical CPS model, (b) task dependence of CPS strategies, and (c) cross‐national differences in CPS strategies. Participants’ CPS processes were particularly influenced by country‐specific problem‐solving strategies. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose the expression cognitive twists for cognitive mechanisms that result from the coevolution of genes and learning. Evidence is available that at least some cultural learning mechanisms, such as imitation and language, have evolved genetically under the pressure produced by culture, even though they are mostly acquired through domain-general learning during development. Although the existence of these mechanisms is consistent with evolutionary theory, their importance has not been sufficiently emphasized by mind-centered accounts of human cognitive evolution, (...) namely evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary psychology. We provide concrete examples of cognitive twists, such as vocal imitation. Genetic changes in action-perception matching circuits suggest that human imitation and perhaps language are cognitive twists, namely plastic, learnable, yet genetically evolved cognitive mechanisms. We conclude that cognitive twists depict plausible evolutionary scenarios for the evolution of cognition in Homo sapiens. (shrink)

According to the dual inheritance theory, cultural learning in our species is a biased and highly efficient process of transmitting cultural traits. Here we define a model of cultural learning where social learning is integrated as a complementary element that facilitates the discovery of a specific behavior by an apprentice, and not as a mechanism that works in opposition to individual learning. In that context, we propose that the emergence of the ability to approve or disapprove of offspring behavior, orienting (...) their learning, transformed primate social learning into a cultural transmission system, like that which characterizes our species. Assessor teaching facilitates the replication and/or reconstruction of behaviors that are difficult to imitate and helps to determine which behaviors should be imitated. We also explore the form in which assessor teaching has conditioned the evolution of our abilities to develop cultures in the hominin line, converting us into individuals equipped with what we call a suadens psychology. Our main point is to defend the hypothesis that suadens psychology determines the stability and dynamics that affect the trajectories of many cultural characters. We compare our proposal with other theories about cultural evolution, specifically with dual inheritance theory and cultural attraction theory. (shrink)

Rules regulating social behavior raise challenging questions about cultural evolution in part because they frequently confer group-level benefits. Current multilevel selection theories contend that between-group processes interact with within-group processes to produce norms and institutions, but within-group processes have remained underspecified, leading to a recent emphasis on cultural group selection as the primary driver of cultural design. Here we present the self-interested enforcement (SIE) hypothesis, which proposes that the design of rules importantly reflects the relative enforcement capacities of competing parties. (...) We show that, in addition to explaining patterns in cultural change and stability, SIE can account for the emergence of much group-functional culture. We outline how this process can stifle or accelerate cultural group selection, depending on various social conditions. Self-interested enforcement has important bearings on the emergence, stability, and change of rules. (shrink)

The zone of latent solutions hypothesis provides an alternative approach to explaining cultural patterns in primates and many other animals. According to the ZLS hypothesis, non-human great ape cultures consist largely or solely of latent solutions. The current competing hypothesis for ape culture argues instead that at least some of their behavioural or artefact forms are copied through specific social learning mechanisms and that their forms may depend on copying. In contrast, the ape ZLS hypothesis does not require these forms (...) to be copied. Instead, it suggests that several social learning mechanisms help determine the frequency of these behaviours and artefacts within connected individuals. The ZLS hypothesis thus suggests that increases and stabilisations of a particular behaviour’s or artefact’s frequency can derive from socially-mediated form reinnovations. Therefore, and while genes and ecology play important roles as well, according to the ape ZLS hypothesis, apes typically acquire the forms of their behaviours and artefacts individually, but are usually socially induced to do so. The ZLS approach is often criticized—perhaps also because it challenges the current null hypothesis, which instead assumes a requirement of form-copying social learning mechanisms to explain many ape behavioural forms. However, as the ZLS hypothesis is a new approach, with less accumulated literature compared to the current null hypothesis, some confusion is to be expected. Here, we clarify the ZLS approach—also in relation to other competing hypotheses—and address misconceptions and objections. We believe that these clarifications will provide researchers with a coherent theoretical approach and an experimental methodology to examine the necessity of form-copying variants of social learning in apes, humans and other species. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have attributed the ubiquity of religious narratives partly to the favored recall of minimally counterintuitive concepts within those narratives. Yet, this memory bias is inconsistent, sometimes absent, and without a functional rationale. Here, we asked if MCI concepts are more fitness relevant than intuitive concepts, and if fitness relevance can explain the existence and variability of the observed memory bias. In three studies, participants rated the potential threat and potential opportunity afforded by agents with abilities that violated folk (...) psychology, physics, or biology. As in previous work, agents with MCI abilities were recalled better than those with intuitive abilities. Additionally, agents with MCI abilities were perceived as greater threats, and as providing greater opportunities, than agents with intuitive abilities, but this perceived fitness relevance only mediated the memory bias when MCI abilities were used to accomplish disproportionally consequential outcomes. Minimally counterintuitive abilities that violated folk psychology were rated more intuitive and more of an opportunity than violations of folk physics or biology, while folk physics violations were recalled best. Explanations for these effects and their relevance to the cognitive science of religion are discussed. (shrink)

Studies of primate cognition have conclusively shown that humans and apes share a range of basic cognitive abilities. As a corollary, these same studies have also focussed attention on what makes humans unique, and on when and how specifically human cognitive skills evolved. There is widespread agreement that a major distinguishing feature of the human mind is its capacity for causal reasoning. This paper argues that causal cognition originated with the use made of indirect natural signs by early hominins forced (...) to adapt to variable late Miocene and early Pliocene environments; that early hominins evolved an innate tendency to search for such signs and infer their causes; that causal inference required the existence of incipient working memory; and that causal relationships were stored through being integrated into spatial maps to create increasingly complex causal models of the world. (shrink)

I argue, with examples, that most human cognitive skills are neither instincts nor gadgets but mechanisms shaped both by evolved dispositions and by cultural inputs. This shaping can work either through evolved skills fulfilling their function with the help of cultural skills that they contribute to shape, or through cultural skills recruiting evolved skills and adjusting to them.

We argue that there is a continuum of cases without any demarcation between more individual and more cultural information, and that therefore “culture” should be viewed as a property that human mental representations and practices exhibit to a varying degree rather than as a type or a subclass of these representations and practices (or of “information”). We discuss the relative role of preservative and constructive processes in transmission. We suggest a revision of Richerson and Boyd’s classification of the forces of (...) cultural evloution. (shrink)

This article aims at a constructive and argumentative engagement between the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and philosophical and theological reflection on the imago Dei. The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner argued that the theological notion that humans were created in the image of God entails that there is a “point of contact” for revelation to occur. This article argues that Brunner's notion resonates quite strongly with the findings of the CSR. The first part will give a short overview of the (...) CSR. The second part deals with Brunner's idea of the imago Dei and the “point of contact.” The third and final part of the article outlines a model of revelation that is in line with Brunner's thought and the CSR. The aim of this article is to show how the naturalistic methodology of the CSR provides a fertile new perspective on several theological issues and thereby enriches theological reflection. (shrink)

Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the world; (...) why shamanism professionalizes early, often in the absence of other specialization; and how shifting social conditions affect the form or existence of shamanism. According to this theory, shamanism is a set of traditions developed through cultural evolution that adapts to people's intuitions to convince observers that a practitioner can influence otherwise unpredictable, significant events. The shaman does this by ostensibly transforming during initiation and trance, violating folk intuitions of humanness to assure group members that he or she can interact with the invisible forces that control uncertain outcomes. Entry requirements for becoming a shaman persist because the practitioner's credibility depends on his or her “transforming.” This contrasts with dealing with problems that have identifiable solutions, in which credibility hinges on showing results and outsiders can invade the jurisdiction by producing the outcome. Shamanism is an ancient human institution that recurs because of the capacity of cultural evolution to produce practices adapted to innate psychological tendencies. (shrink)

Numerous scholars from different fields ranging from history, political science, ethnic and cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology have discussed ethnic and racial identity issues in the People’s Republic of China. Most have noted that there are competing narratives regarding the conceptions of race and ethnicity. Much of the scholarship has been based on social constructivist orientations. This essay is directed towards a merger between social constructivist and cognitive science approaches on essentialism that may open the doors for further research and (...) investigation of this important topic. (shrink)

The two target articles agree that processes of cultural evolution generate richness and diversity in music, but neither address this question in a focused way. We sketch one way to proceed – and hence suggest how the target articles differ not only in empirical claims, but also in their tacit, prior assumptions about the relationship between cognition and culture.

Two complementary approaches to a naturalistic theory of culture are, on the one hand, mainstream cultural evolution research, and, on the other, work done under the banners of cultural attraction and the epidemiology of representations. There is much agreement between these two schools of thought, including in particular a commitment to population thinking. Both schools also acknowledge that the propagation of culture is not simply a matter of replication, but rather one of reconstruction. However, the two schools of thought differ (...) on the relative importance of this point. The cultural attraction school believes it to be fundamental to genuinely causal explanations of culture. In contrast, most mainstream cultural evolution thinking abstracts away from it. In this paper I make flesh a simple thought experiment that directly contrasts the effects that replication and reconstruction have on cultural items. Results demonstrate, in a simple and graphic way, that normal cultural propagation is not replicative, but reconstructive, and that these two different modes of propagation afford two qualitatively different explanations of stability. If propagation is replicative, as it is in biology, then stability arises from the fidelity of that replication, and hence an explanation of stability comes from an explanation of how and why this high-fidelity is achieved. If, on the other hand, propagation is reconstructive, then stability arises from the fact that a subclass of cultural types are easily re-producible, while others are not, and hence an explanation of stability comes from a description of what types are easily re-producible, and an explanation of why they are. I discuss two implications of this result for research at the intersection of evolution, cognition, and culture. (shrink)

Procedural metacognition is the set of affect-based mechanisms allowing agents to regulate cognitive actions like perceptual discrimination, memory retrieval or problem solving. This article proposes that procedural metacognition has had a major role in the evolution of communication. A plausible hypothesis is that, under pressure for maximizing signalling efficiency, the metacognitive abilities used by nonhumans to regulate their perception and their memory have been re-used to regulate their communication. On this view, detecting one’s production errors in signalling, or solving species-specific (...) trade-offs between informativeness, processing effort, clarity, or urgency depend on a form of procedural metacognition, called “metacommunication”. How does this view relate to Gricean theories of human communication? A parallel between procedural trade-offs and conversational maxims is discussed for its evolutionary implications. Rather than accepting radically discontinuist interpretations, in which mindreading operates a full reorganization of pragmatics, it is proposed that procedural forms of regulation are entrenched in all forms of human communication. According to contextual demands, humans adopt and monitor more or less demanding informational goals, such as factual updating, clarifying, explaining, proving, and reaching consensus in collective matters. Under time pressure, only part of these goals require adopting others’ viewpoint. Efficiency in collective decision-making, in particular, might have been considerably raised by an ability to interpret others’ intentions and motivations. (shrink)

Bering's argument that human beings are endowed with a cognitive system dedicated to forming illusory representations of psychological immortality relies on the claim that children's beliefs in the afterlife are not the result of religious teaching. We suggest four reasons why this claim is unsatisfactory.

Diskusní článek věnovaný textu Nikola Balaš, „Kdo je tu v pasti?“ Teorie vědy / Theory of Science 41, č. 1 : 133–49.

Cumulative technological culture (CTC) refers to the increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations. A fascinating question is to understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon. Because CTC is definitely a social phenomenon, most accounts have suggested a series of cognitive mechanisms oriented toward the social dimension (e.g., teaching, imitation, theory of mind, and metacognition), thereby minimizing the technical dimension and the potential influence of non-social, cognitive skills. What if we have failed (...) to see the elephant in the room? What if social cognitive mechanisms were only catalyzing factors and not thesufficient and necessaryconditions for the emergence of CTC? In this article, we offer an alternative, unified cognitive approach to this phenomenon by assuming that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills, namely technical-reasoning skills which enable humans to develop the technical potential necessary to constantly acquire and improve technical information. This leads us to discuss how theory of mind and metacognition, in concert with technical reasoning, can help boost CTC. The cognitive approach developed here opens up promising new avenues for reinterpreting classical issues (e.g., innovation, emulation vs. imitation, social vs. asocial learning, cooperation, teaching, and overimitation) in a field that has so far been largely dominated by other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

The present article tests counterintuitiveness theory and methodology in relation to religious dream imagery using data on religious dream content. The endeavor adopts a “fractionated” or “piecemeal” approach where supernatural agent (SA) cognition is held to be a pivotal building block of purportedly religious dreaming. Such supernaturalistic conceptualizations manifests in a cognitive environment of dream simulation processes, threat detection and violation of basic conceptual categorization characterized by counterintuitiveness. By addressing SA cognitions as constituents of allegedly religious dream imagery, additional theorizing (...) and supporting data is presented in a growing body of research in the Cognitive Science of Religion (e.g., Barrett, 2017; Barrett et al., 2009; Hornbeck and Barrett, 2013) and on religious dreaming (McNamara, 2016; McNamara and Bulkeley, 2015). The aim of the article is partly to map and align contemporary theorizing regarding counterintuitiveness and CI schemes with empirical qualification of the prosaic hypothesis about the predominance of supernaturalism in allegedly religious dreaming. This is done by (a) exploring the crucial topic of the pervasiveness of cognitive counterintuitiveness; (b) testing Barrett’s counterintuitiveness coding and quantifying scheme (CI scheme) for counterintuitiveness in the context of religious dreaming by assessing intercoder reliability; and (c) exploring the prevalence and base rate frequency of counterintuitiveness in dream reports. This undertaking aims to contribute to the methodology and understanding of religious dream cognition, as well as to establish the cross-cultural base rates of counterintuitiveness in dreams for future research. (shrink)

Several researchers have proposed that humans are predisposed to treat ethnic identities as stable and inherent. However, the ethnographic, historical, and genetic records attest to the ubiquity of inter-ethnic migrations across human history. These two claims seem to be at odds. In this article we compare three evolutionary accounts of how people reason about identity stability, and the effect that the cultural evolution of ethnic group boundaries may have on these beliefs. We test our hypotheses among Himba pastoralists in Namibia, (...) whose recent fission from the neighboring Herero makes them ideal for studying the effect of cultural distance on folk beliefs about identity stability. In a vignette experiment, we asked participants whether an individual born in one group who moved to another group would retain their original group membership and cultural characteristics or acquire those of the new group. Across vignette conditions we examine the importance of the direction of migration, parental social influence, and age at migration on perceptions of identity stability. We also compare participant responses to two out-groups, the Herero, and the more distantly related Damara. We find that participants seldom thought of identity as stable or fixed at birth. Furthermore, we show that cultural distance and endogamous preferences are independent of beliefs of identity stability. Himba believed the Damara character was more likely to change identity and cultural traits than was the Herero character, despite their greater cultural distance from the former group, and despite the fact that all participants expressed more anti-Damara than anti-Herero sentiment. (shrink)

Cultural forms are constrained by cognitive biases, and writing is thought to have evolved to fit basic visual preferences, but little is known about the history and mechanisms of that evolution. Cognitive constraints have been documented for the topology of script features, but not for their orientation. Orientation anisotropy in human vision, as revealed by the oblique effect, suggests that cardinal orientations, being easier to process, should be overrepresented in letters. As this study of 116 scripts shows, the orientation of (...) strokes inside written characters massively favors cardinal directions, and it is organized in such a way as to make letter recognition easier: Cardinal and oblique strokes tend not to mix, and mirror symmetry is anisotropic, favoring vertical over horizontal symmetry. Phylogenetic analyses and recently invented scripts show that cultural evolution over the last three millennia cannot be the sole cause of these effects. (shrink)

This discussion paper responds to two recent articles in Biology and Philosophy that raise similar objections to cultural attraction theory, a research trend in cultural evolution putting special emphasis on the fact that human minds create and transform their culture. Both papers are sympathetic to this idea, yet both also regret a lack of consilience with Boyd, Richerson and Henrich’s models of cultural evolution. I explain why cultural attraction theorists propose a different view on three points of concern for our (...) critics. I start by detailing the claim that cultural transmission relies not chiefly on imitation or teaching, but on cognitive mechanisms like argumentation, ostensive communication, or selective trust, whose evolved or habitual function may not be the faithful reproduction of ideas or behaviours. Second, I explain why the distinction between context biases and content biases might not always be the best way to capture the interactions between culture and cognition. Lastly, I show that cultural attraction models cannot be reduced to a model of guided variation, which posits a clear separation between individual and social learning processes. With cultural attraction, the same cognitive mechanisms underlie both innovation and the preservation of traditions. (shrink)

Human societies are examined as distinct and coherent groups. This trait is most parsimoniously considered a deeply rooted part of our ancestry rather than a recent cultural invention. Our species is the only vertebrate with society memberships of significantly more than 200. We accomplish this by using society-specific labels to identify members, in what I call an anonymous society. I propose that the human brain has evolved to permit not only the close relationships described by the social brain hypothesis, but (...) also, at little mental cost, the anonymous societies within which such alliances are built. The human compulsion to discover or invent labels to “mark” group memberships may originally have been expressed in hominins as vocally learned greetings only slightly different in function from chimpanzee pant hoots (now known to be society-specific). The weight of evidence suggests that at some point, conceivably early in the hominin line, the distinct groups composed of several bands that were typical of our ancestors came to be distinguished by their members on the basis of multiple labels that were socially acquired in this way, the earliest of which would leave no trace in the archaeological record. Often overlooked as research subjects, these sizable fission-fusion communities, in recent egalitarian hunter-gatherers sometimes 2,000 strong, should consistently be accorded the status of societies, in the same sense that this word is used to describe tribes, chiefdoms, and other cultures arising later in our history. The capacity of hunter-gatherer societies to grow sufficiently populous that not all members necessarily recognize one another would make the transition to larger agricultural societies straightforward. Humans differ from chimpanzees in that societal labels are essential to the maintenance of societies and the processes giving birth to new ones. I propose that anonymous societies of all kinds can expand only so far as their labels can remain sufficiently stable. (shrink)

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with (...) the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in “social cognitive neuroscience,” although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences. (shrink)

Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music – that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality – are incomplete or wrong. We argue instead that (...) music evolved as a credible signal in at least two contexts: coalitional interactions and infant care. Specifically, we propose that (1) the production and reception of coordinated, entrained rhythmic displays is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling coalition strength, size, and coordination ability; and (2) the production and reception of infant-directed song is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling parental attention to secondarily altricial infants. These proposals, supported by interdisciplinary evidence, suggest that basic features of music, such as melody and rhythm, result from adaptations in the proper domain of human music. The adaptations provide a foundation for the cultural evolution of music in its actual domain, yielding the diversity of musical forms and musical behaviors found worldwide. (shrink)

Imitation research has focused on turn‐taking contexts in which one person acts and one person then copies that action. However, people also imitate when engaging in joint actions, where two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time in order to achieve a shared goal. We discuss how the various constraints imposed by joint action modulate imitation, and the close links between perception and action that form the basis of this phenomenon. We also explore how understanding imitation in (...) the context of joint action yields new insights into cultural phenomena such as teaching and innovation. (shrink)

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential,autonoeticcharacter. Here, we offer a comprehensive characterization of episodic memory in representational terms and propose a novel functional account on this basis. We argue that episodic memory should be understood as a distinctive epistemic attitude taken toward an event simulation. In this view, episodic memory has a metarepresentational format and should not be equated with beliefs about the (...) past. Instead, empirical findings suggest that the contents of human episodic memory are often constructed in the service of the explicit justification of such beliefs. Existing accounts of episodic memory function that have focused on explaining its constructive character through its role in future-oriented mental time travel do justice neither to its capacity to ground veridical beliefs about the past nor to its representational format. We provide an account of the metarepresentational structure of episodic memory in terms of its role in communicative interaction. The generative nature of recollection allows us to represent and communicate the reasons why we hold certain beliefs about the past. In this process, autonoesis corresponds to the capacity to determine when and how to assert epistemic authority in making claims about the past. A domain where such claims are indispensable are human social engagements. Such engagements commonly require the justification of entitlements and obligations, which is often possible only by explicit reference to specific past events. (shrink)

The consensus in the cognitive science of religion is that some sort of hyperactive agency detection in the human mind is responsible for the origin and spread of beliefs in superhuman agents such as gods, spirits and ancestors among human populations. While it is expressed differently in different authors, they all agree that hyperactive agency detection is a basic function of human cognition. Most well known perhaps is the formulation of this by Justin Barrett as the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (...) or HADD. Problems, however, arise when we begin to consider the neural basis of this: It doesn't add up, or more precisely the HADD does not work that way. Like the magician pulling rabbits from the hat this explanation may be a "self"-conjuring trick, only for us the hat is a HADD and the rabbits are superhuman agents. This paper will try to point to a more parsimonious explanation. (shrink)

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind seeks to explain why it is difficult for liberals and conservatives to get along. His aim is not just explanatory but also prescriptive. Once we understand that the differences between disputants spring from distinct moral views held by equally sincere people, then we will no longer have reason for deep political animus. Conservatives and Liberals have distinct moral views and they understand human nature differently. He claims that these differences are best understood by consulting an (...) array of psychological studies, key genetic findings, and the theoretical underpinnings of sociobiology. After summarizing his arguments, we isolate and discuss the three most important and contentious issues in his book. We argue that although the project's motivation is noble and some of his findings are insightful, his key explanations, inferences, and prescriptions are wanting. We end by suggesting a way he could defend a weaker version of his view. (shrink)

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline‐based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5‐year‐olds could cluster knowledge (...) in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline‐based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

The target article proposes a theory uniting the anthropological study of kin terminology with recent developments in linguistics and cognitive science. The response to comments reaches two broad conclusions. First, the theory may be relevant to several current areas of research, including (a) the nature and scope of the regular, side of language, (b) the organization of different domains of conceptual structure, including parallels across domains, their taxonomic distribution and implications for evolution, and (c) the influence of conceptual structure on (...) social structure. Second, the theory compares favorably with alternatives, including (a) the theory that kin terminology is not really that complicated, (b) the theory that kin terms mirror social categories, (c) componential analysis, and (d) kinship algebra. If further research in anthropology, linguistics, and other fields supports the theory, and confirms the psychological reality of proposed mechanisms, then kinship may emerge as a model system for the study of important issues in cognition and social organization. (shrink)