Cognitive FYSM1607B Science
Week 6a: Evolutionary Psychology
October 8, 2008
Attention
Last class
Theories of attention More discussion of assignment 1
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History I
1950s: Classical ethology (Konrad Lorenz & Nikolass Tinbergen)1 (stronger in Europe than North America: nature vs. nurture) Biological study of (animal) behaviour. Compared behavioural patterns (e.g. mating) across species Importance of natural selection for contextualization. Animals behaviourslike its physical characteristicsare adapted to its environment Fixed Action Patterns (sphex wasp)
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Shared Nobel Prize in 1973.
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Ethology (cont.)
Ethologists almost all sought to apply their ndings about animals to humans. What might this look like? Reexes: infact suckling as a xed action pattern (tickling of lip triggers behaviour) Social signaling as IRM: babys smile elicits social play from mother, babys cry elicits caregiving behaviour. Tinbergens four questions:
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Function: whats the behaviours impact on reproduction & survival? Cause: What are the stimuli (innate releasing mechanisms) that elicit the behaviour? Ontogeny: (how) Does the behaviour change with age? (critical period?) Phylogeny: How does behaviour compare with similar species & how might it arise evolutionarily?
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History II
1970s: Sociobiology (E.O. Wilson & Richard Dawkins) Application of ethological concepts to social behavior across species. Key claim: (many) social behaviours are shaped by nature selection for reproductive success e.g. altruism. Naive view (viz. human behaviour X maximizes biological tness) is implausible. Must differentiate proximate and distal causes. Proximate causes somehow involve mind and culture here-and-now, while distal causes look at the reasons underlying the relation between a behaviour and its proximate cause (e.g. fast food) Criticisms: biological determinism, evolutionary signicance of behaviour,
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Evolutionary
Q: does it make sense to try to explain contemporary human behaviours as resulting from adaptive evolution? Maybe not. Consider the timescales over which evolution happens. Todays environment is so radically different from that in which homo sapiens sapiens. Evo tries to retrodict behaviours that would have been adaptive in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and consider how these might look through the lter of a modern setting. More importantly, it does explains behaviours as products of psychological mechanisms (sociobiology eschewed internal
Similar stuff)
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Evolutionary formal tools as sociobiology: population genetics and evolutionary game theory. View of the mind has changed (cf. Pinker 1997). Massive modularity is the buzzword du jour ; mind contains few (no?) domain-general capacities, but has evolved several specialized modules with innate (i.e. evolved) properties: cheater-detection, incest-avoidance, LAD2 , etc. Information-processing metaphor is shared with mainstream cognitive /science. Typically no statements about neurophysiological underpinnings, since selection operates on behaviours, which are computational-level.
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vs. reading/writing, for example
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Core premises
Version 1 (David Buss):
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Manifest behavior depends on underlying psychological mechanisms, information processing devices housed in the brain, in conjunction with the external and internal inputs that trigger their activation. Evolution by selection is the only known causal process capable of creating such complex organic mechanisms. Evolved psychological mechanisms are functionally specialized to solve adaptive problems that recurred for humans over deep evolutionary time. Selection designed the information processing of many evolved psychological mechanisms to be adaptively inuenced by specic classes of information from the environment. Human psychology consists of a large number of functionally specialized evolved mechanisms, each sensitive to particular forms of contextual input, that get combined, coordinated, and integra...