The Co-Evolution of Concepts and Motivation

Annual Review of Psychology, 2013

Evolutionary psychology is the second wave of the cognitive revolution. The first wave focused on computational processes that generate knowledge about the world: perception, attention, categorization, reasoning, learning, and memory. The second wave views the brain as composed of evolved computational systems, engineered by natural selection to use information to adaptively regulate physiology and behavior. This shift in focus—from knowledge acquisition to the adaptive regulation of behavior—provides new ways of thinking about every topic in psychology. It suggests a mind populated by a large number of adaptive specializations, each equipped with content-rich representations, concepts, inference systems, and regulatory variables, which are functionally organized to solve the complex problems of survival and reproduction encountered by the ancestral hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended. We present recent empirical examples that illustrate how this approach has been used to di...

Choice Reviews Online, 2004

For roughly half a century philosophers of mind have gnawed and nibbled on the bones of folk psychology, the informal 'theory of mind' that we articulate in everyday terms: our lore about 'beliefs' and 'desires', 'intentions' and 'thoughts', 'pains' and 'pleasures' and the like. Meanwhile academic psychology has undergone several waves of shifting nomenclature and ideology, from various kinds of behaviorism to various kinds of cognitivism, with neuroscience and evolutionary biology being thrown into the mix-with mixed results. It is depressing to reflect on how little has been truly settled by all this activity. One cannot expect to use any particular vocabulary to describe 'the mind' (itself an embattled concept) without provoking a sizeable cohort of objectors prepared to marvel at the fact that one is still in the thrall of that deeply problematic way of describing things. And yet there has been progress. It has been won, I think, by the interactions between two more or less opponent processes: opportunistic theory-driven oversimplification on the one hand and hard-won, in-the-trenches, empirical fact-digging on the other. The phenomena are so complicated that breathtaking oversimplification looks like a winning opening strategy here, if only we can find one as fecund as the toy worlds of Galilean mechanics or Mendelian genes or Bohr atoms. Then we can get a bird's-eye view of the task ahead, knowing that further progress will consist largely in conceding, again and again, that things turn out to be much more complicated than that simple picture suggests. But which oversimplifications should we lean on for the time being? Not those of stimulus-response behaviorism, apparently, but

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2014

Studying human behavior in the light of evolutionary theory involves studying the comparative evolutionary history of behaviors (phylogeny), the psychological machinery that generates them (mechanisms), and the adaptive value of that machinery in past reproductive competition (natural selection). To show the value of a phylogenetic perspective, I consider the ethology of emotional expression and the cladistics of primate social systems. For psychological mechanisms, I review evidence for a pan-human set of conceptual building blocks, including innate concepts of things, space, and time, of number, of logic, of natural history, and of other minds and social life, which can be combined to generate a vast array of culture-specific concepts. For natural selection, I discuss the sexual selection of sex differences and similarities, and the social selection of moral sentiments and group psychology.

Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2014

Contextual behavioral perspectives on learning and behavior reside under the umbrella of evolution science. In this paper we briefly review current developments in evolution science that bear on learning and behavior, concluding that behavior is now moving to the center of evolution studies. Learning is one of the main ladders of evolution by establishing functional benchmarks within which genetic adaptations can be advantaged. We apply that approach to the beginning feature of human cognition according to Relational Frame Theory: derived symmetry in coordination framing. When combined with the idea that cooperation came before major advances in human cognition or culture, existing abilities in social referencing, joint attention, perspective-taking skills, and relational learning ensure that the behavioral subcomponents of symmetrical equivalence relations would be reinforced. When coordination framing emerged and came under arbitrary contextual control as an operant class, a template was established for the development of multiple relational frames and the emergence and evolutionary impact of human cognition as we know it. Implications of these ideas for translational research are briefly discussed.

Human evolution is a multidisciplinary problem, one of its aspects is the origin and development of distinctively human psychological features. Cognitive properties (language, symbolic thinking) are considered as such features and numerous authors hypothesize its evolution. We suggest that the most important human characteristic is connected with motivation rather than cognition; this is the ability to construct and maintain long-term goal-directed processes having no biological basis. Once emerged, this new ability determined evolution. Human language arose from the need to subserve group activities directed at achieving long-term goals. Abstract thinking resulted from the extraction of nonperceptual features through the regular and purposive usage of various objects. The comparison of this hypothesis against other evolutionary models is discussed.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2014

The theory of evolution by natural selection provides the only scientific explanation for the existence of complex adaptations. The design features of the brain, like any organ, are the result of selection pressures operating over deep time. Evolutionary psychology posits that the human brain comprises a multitude of evolved psychological mechanisms, adaptations to specific and recurrent problems of survival and reproduction faced over human evolutionary history. Although some mistakenly view evolutionary psychology as promoting genetic determinism, evolutionary psychologists appreciate and emphasize the interactions between genes and environments. This approach to psychology has led to a richer understanding of a variety of psychological phenomena, and has provided a powerful foundation for generating novel hypotheses. Critics argue that evolutionary psychologists resort to storytelling, but as with any branch of science, empirical testing is a vital component of the field, with hypotheses standing or falling with the weight of the evidence. Evolutionary psychology is uniquely suited to provide a unifying theoretical framework for the disparate subdisciplines of psychology. An evolutionary perspective has provided insights into several subdisciplines of psychology, while simultaneously demonstrating the arbitrary nature of dividing psychological science into such subdisciplines. Evolutionary psychologists have amassed a substantial empirical and theoretical literature, but as a relatively new approach to psychology, many questions remain, with several promising directions for future research.

Frontiers in psychology, 2014

Since evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology have much in common despite their using different objects for their study, one might expect these disciplines to share a common conceptual framework with associated definitions. Unfortunately, such agreement does not entirely exist. To address the problem, we propose a common, conceptual framework, the Adaptive Behavioral System (ABS), which organizes behavior within an evolutionary framework around an organism's life history tasks. An ABS includes strategies that use decision rules and employs tactics administered by a hypothesized construct, the Evolved Processing Unit (EPU). The ABS also includes observed or predicted behavior which can be tested experimentally -the ultimate test of construct validity. Use of the proposed framework should help the two disciplines focus on their common, core business of behavior and, ultimately, be to the benefit of both.

The Adapted Mind is an edited volume of original, commissioned papers centered on the complex, evolved psychological mechanisms that generate human behavior and culture. It has two goals: The first is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology to a wider scientific audience. Evolutionary psychology is simply psychology that is informed by the additional knowledge that evolutionary biology has to offer, in the expectation that understanding the process that designed the human mind will advance the discovery ofitsarchitecture. It unites modem evolutionary biology with the cognitive revolution in a way that has the potential to draw together all of the disparate branches of psychology into a single organized system of knowledge. The chapters that follow, for example, span topics from perception, language, and reasoning to sex, pregnancy sickness, and play. The second goal of this volume is to clarify how this new field, by focusing on the evolved information-processing mechanisms that comprise the human mind, supplies the necessary connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.