Culture, cognition, and evolution

Topics in Cognitive Science, 2013

Beller, Bender, and Medin rehearse an often repeated statement (challenge 1a): "Cognitive science is not on the right track" because it "never took some of the crucial dimensions of cognition seriously." Namely, "from the very beginning, they have excluded some fundamental dimensions of cognition from examination-affect, context, culture, and history […]" (p. 345). To overcome this criticism, I suggest promoting the following perspective on cognitive science. A cognitive approach to any phenomenon-action planning, face recognition, language, culture, arts, religion, etc.-views it as the product of the human brain/mind (or, as the emergent product of interacting brains/minds). The focus on the brain invites biological aspects, while studying the mind entails the computer metaphor. Bottom-up (neuron-to-phenomenon) and top-down (phenomenon-to-neuron) approaches together aim to understand how information flow in the brain produces the observable abilities of the mind. Indeed, many in the first generations of cognitive scholars decided to deny, ignore, put in parenthesis, or underplay the above-mentioned "fundamental dimensions of cognition." Yet I suggest viewing their decision as a-conscious or unconscious-research strategy, dealing first with (over)simplified cases. Imagine physics if Galilei and Newton had decided not to pursue their research for they could not satisfactorily account for drag and friction! Luckily, the above-mentioned dimensions are gradually reincorporated into cognitive science: not by throwing out the achievements of the earlier generations, but by developing them further. If cognitive science is about a biological/computational approach to functions of the brain/mind, then all such functions ought to interest cognitive science. Functions traditionally studied by humanities are not exceptions, and cognitive scientists must join Correspondence should be sent to Tam as Bir o, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication

Kronenfeld/A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology, 2011

2011

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012

Humans are unique among animals for both the diverse complexity of our cognition and our reliance on culture, the socially-transmitted representations and practices that shape experience and behavior. Adopting an evolutionary psychological approach, in this essay we consider four different facets of the relationship between cognition and culture. We begin with a discussion of two well-established research traditions, the investigation of features of mind that are universal despite cultural diversity, and the examination of features of mind that vary across cultures. We then turn to two topics that have only recently begun to receive attention, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of cultural information, and the effects of features of cognition on culture.

Around the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene in southwest Asia, human skills in cultural niche construction were qualitatively upgraded in order to support the formation of large, permanently co-resident communities and regional interaction networks with new and sophisticated forms of sym- bolic action and representation. The transition from small, mobile forager bands to networks of large permanent communities that occurred between 22,000 and 8500 years ago was enabled by the signif- icant development of what Merlin Donald has called‘theoretic culture’, communicated and stored in systems of‘external symbolic storage’. The over-arching role of symbolic culture became the highly developed core of what we may call the cognitive-cultural niche, within which and by means of which children learned and adults understood and expressed their identity and their place in the world. The extraordinary plasticity of the modern human brain and its developmental responsiveness to context meant that individuals formed their identity through a long process of enculturation within a cognitively powerful cultural niche. While we are accustomed to literacy and dependence on written sources, they were more adept with other media, particularly ceremonies and rituals, and the making of memory in monuments, artistic representations, signs and systems of

In a provocative and important recent article Anthony Marsella (1998) makes an eloquent plea for the forging of a new metadiscipline of psychology that he labels global-community psychology. Marsella argues that we need a radical rethinking of the fundamental premises of psychology, rooted as they are in Western cultural traditions. Features of an emergent global-community psychology include an emphasis on multicultural and multidisciplinary approaches to human behavior that draw attention to the importance of context and meaning in human lives. Marsella's call for a global-community psychology reflects, in part, a growing body of literature that demonstrates the importance of cultural factors in a diversity of psychological domains such as cognition, emotion, social behavior, and psychopathology.

Annual Review of Sociology, 2021

Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences-cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy-significantly reshaping sociologists' approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece-research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.

The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 2017

In humans and other animals, the individuals’ ability to adapt efficiently and effectively to the niches they have actively contributed to construct relies heavily on an evolved psychology which has been shaped by biological, social, and cultural processes over evolutionary time. As expected, although many of the behavioral and cognitive components of this evolved psychology are widely shared across species, many others are species-unique. Although many animal species are known to acquire group-specific traditions (or cultures) via social learning, human culture is unique in terms of its contents and characteristics (observable and unobservable products, cumulative effects, norm conformity, and norm enforcement) and of its cognitive underpinnings (imitation, instructed teaching, and language). Here we provide a brief overview of some of the issues that are currently tackled in the field. We also highlight some of the strengths of a biological, comparative, non-anthropocentric and ev...