The cultural evolution of teaching.

Teaching is an important process of cultural transmission. Some have argued that human teaching is a cognitive instinct - a form of 'natural cognition' centred on mindreading, shaped by genetic evolution for the education of juveniles, and with a normative developmental trajectory driven by the unfolding of a genetically inherited predisposition to teach. Here, we argue instead that human teaching is a culturally evolved trait that exhibits characteristics of a cognitive gadget.

Rethinking Norm Psychology.

Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue.

Fearfulness: An important addition to the starter kit for distinctively human minds.

Grossmann's impressive article indicates that - along with attentional biases, expansion of domain-general processes of learning and memory, and other temperamental tweaks - heightened fearfulness is part of the genetic starter kit for distinctively human minds. The learned matching account of emotional contagion explains how heightened fearfulness could have promoted the development of caring and cooperation in our species.

Mnemicity: A Cognitive Gadget?

Episodic representations can be entertained either as "remembered" or "imagined"-as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribution should be distinguished from other metacognitive operations (such as reality monitoring) and propose that this attribution is a "cognitive gadget"-a distinctively human ability made possible by cultural learning.

Social overshadowing: Revisiting cue-competition in social interactions.

In a large variety of contexts, it is essential to use the available information to extract patterns and behave accordingly. When it comes to social interactions for instance, the information gathered about interaction partners across multiple encounters (e.g.

Bifocal stance theory: An effort to broaden, extend, and clarify.

The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution has prompted a wide-ranging discussion with broadly three aims: to apply the theory to novel contexts; to extend the conceptual framework; to offer critical feedback on various aspects of the theory. We first discuss BST's relevance to the diverse range of topics which emerged from the commentaries, followed by a consideration of how our framework can be supplemented by and compared to other theories. Lastly, the criticisms that were raised by a subset of commentaries allow us to clarify parts of our theory.

Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution.

Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission.

Building better theories.

In this My word, Press et al. tackle the 'theory crisis' in cognitive science. Using examples of good and not-so-good theoretical practice, they distinguish theories from effects, predictions, hypotheses, typologies, and frameworks in a self-help checklist of seven questions to guide theory construction, evaluation, and testing.

What Happened to Mirror Neurons?

Ten years ago, published the Mirror Neuron Forum, in which authors debated the role of mirror neurons in action understanding, speech, imitation, and autism and asked whether mirror neurons are acquired through visual-motor learning. Subsequent research on these themes has made significant advances, which should encourage further, more systematic research. For action understanding, multivoxel pattern analysis, patient studies, and brain stimulation suggest that mirror-neuron brain areas contribute to low-level processing of observed actions (e.

The cultural evolution of cultural evolution.

What makes fast, cumulative cultural evolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis: cultural evolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents began to spread because bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (or Cultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom).

Imitation.

Since antiquity, the term 'imitation' has been used promiscuously in biology and everyday life. Anything that makes some individuals look or act like others has been called imitation, from the evolutionary process that makes edible butterflies look like their inedible cousins (better known as Batesian mimicry), to the rag-bag of psychological processes that make people wear similar clothes, eat in the same restaurants, and use the same gestures for communication.

Culture.

If you are not sure what 'culture' means, you are not alone. In 1952, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn identified 164 definitions of culture and there has been growth rather than rationalisation in the ensuing 70 years. In everyday English, culture is the knowledge and behaviour that characterises a particular group of people.

Sinking In: The Peripheral Baldwinisation of Human Cognition.

The Baldwin effect is a hypothetical process in which a learned response to environmental change evolves a genetic basis. Modelling has shown that the Baldwin effect offers a plausible and elegant explanation for the emergence of complex behavioural traits, but there is little direct empirical evidence for its occurrence. We highlight experimental evidence of the Baldwin effect and argue that it acts preferentially on peripheral rather than on central cognitive processes.

Beliefs and desires in the predictive brain.

Bayesian brain theories suggest that perception, action and cognition arise as animals minimise the mismatch between their expectations and reality. This principle could unify cognitive science with the broader natural sciences, but leave key elements of cognition and behaviour unexplained.

Knowing Ourselves Together: The Cultural Origins of Metacognition.

Metacognition - the ability to represent, monitor and control ongoing cognitive processes - helps us perform many tasks, both when acting alone and when working with others. While metacognition is adaptive, and found in other animals, we should not assume that all human forms of metacognition are gene-based adaptations. Instead, some forms may have a social origin, including the discrimination, interpretation, and broadcasting of metacognitive representations.

Cognition blindness and cognitive gadgets.

Responding to commentaries from psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and anthropologists, I clarify a central purpose of Cognitive Gadgets - to overcome "cognition blindness" in research on human evolution. I defend this purpose against Brunerian, extended mind, and niche construction critiques of computationalism - that is, views prioritising meaning over information, or asserting that behaviour and objects can be intrinsic parts of a thinking process. I argue that empirical evidence from cognitive science is needed to locate distinctively human cognitive mechanisms on the continuum between gadgets and instincts.

What is cognition?

Eleven authors with disparate relevant backgrounds give their view on what is meant by the word "cognition".

Empathy is not in our genes.

In academic and public life empathy is seen as a fundamental force of morality - a psychological phenomenon, rooted in biology, with profound effects in law, policy, and international relations. But the roots of empathy are not as firm as we like to think. The matching mechanism that distinguishes empathy from compassion, envy, schadenfreude, and sadism is a product of learning.

Enquire within: cultural evolution and cognitive science.

Cultural evolution and cognitive science need each other. Cultural evolution needs cognitive science to find out whether the conditions necessary for Darwinian evolution are met in the cultural domain. Cognitive science needs cultural evolution to explain the origins of distinctively human cognitive processes.

Mirroring 'meaningful' actions: Sensorimotor learning modulates imitation of goal-directed actions.

Imitation is important in the development of social and technological skills throughout the lifespan. Experiments investigating the acquisition and modulation of imitation (and of its proposed neural substrate, the mirror neuron system) have produced evidence that the capacity for imitation depends on associative learning in which connections are formed between sensory and motor representations of actions. However, evidence that the development of imitation depends on associative learning has been found only for non-goal-directed actions.

Apes Submentalise.

Making subtle and extensive use of eye-tracking technology, Krupenye and colleagues showed that, like human infants, great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans - can accurately anticipate the goal-directed behaviour of an agent that holds a false belief. How do they do it, by mentalising or by submentalising?

Imitation: Not in Our Genes.

A powerful longitudinal study has failed to find any evidence that newborn babies can imitate facial gestures, hand movements or vocalisations. After 40 years of uncertainty, these findings indicate that humans learn to imitate; this capacity is not inborn.