A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes: Implications for Philosophy

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront

Sizing Up Relations: Dimensions on Which Stimuli Vary Affect Likelihood ofAdults’ Relational Processing

Relational reasoning is central to much of human-unique cognition including artistic metaphor, scientific analogy. Whilemuch research has addressed the process of relational reasoning, the conditions under which relational reasoning is en-gaged in at all remains under-explored.This work examines the relationship between dimensions on which stimuli vary and the likelihood that these stimuli willbe processed relationally by adults. We use a modified relational-match-to-sample paradigm: One of the two choicescontains a relational match with the target, the other contains a partial object match. Changing dimensions on which thestimuli vary dramatically effects the likelihood that adults process them relationally (i.e. make relational matches) - from56% when stimuli vary on shape and color to 98% when stimuli vary on size alone. This is despite the relational contentof the task remaining identical throughout.We discuss implications of these results for designing stimuli, and for theories of relational reasoning generally

Beyond Newton: why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them

Cognitive science is a study of human universals. This assumption, which we will refer to as the Newtonian principle (NP), explicitly or implicitly pervades the theory, methods, and prose of most cognitive research. This is despite at least half a century of sustained critique by cross-cultural and anthropologically oriented researchers and glaring counterexamples such as the study of literacy. We argue that a key reason for this intransigence is that the NP solves the boundary problem of cognitive science. Since studying the idiosyncratic cognitive features of an individual is not a generalizable scientific enterprise, what scale of generalization in cognitive science is legitimate and interesting? The NP solution is a priori—only findings generalizing to all humans are legitimate. This approach is clearly flawed; however, critiques of the NP fail to provide any alternative solution. In fact, some anti-NP branches of research have abandoned generalizability altogether. Sailing between the scylla and charybdis of NP and hermeneutics, we propose an explicit, alternative solution to the boundary problem. Namely, building on many previous efforts, we combine cultural-evolutionary theory with a newly defined principle of articulation. This framework requires work on any given cognitive feature to explicitly hypothesize the universal or group-specific environments in which it emerges. Doing so shifts the question of legitimate generalizability from flawed, a priori assumptions to being a target of explicit claims and theorizing. Moreover, the articulation framework allows us to integrate existing findings across research traditions and motivates a range of future directions

The Importance of Inference in (Human-Unique) Relational Reasoning: Relational Match to Sample as a Case Study

Data and stimuli from Kroupin & Care

Why Would ’Same’ Go With ’Same’? Exploring New Factors Required ForRelational Reasoning

Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) is a common test of relational reasoning involving matching cards based onthe relations “same” and “different”. Children below the age of five fail RMTS, even with corrective feedback. Given thatsuccess on RMTS depends on the ability to represent and compare ”same” and ”different”, such failure has been interpreted asindicative of the absence of these abilities (Penn, Holyoak & Povinelli, 2008; Hochmann, Mody & Carey, 2016).In the current studies three, four and five-year-old children were provided explicit instructions on RMTS. Results showsuccess in all groups, including three-year-olds - two years earlier than previous work. This suggests the ability to representand compare ”same” and ”different” emerges significantly earlier than spontaneous success on RMTS, undermining previousinterpretations. More generally, this work begins to explore the nature of the development which allows existing relationalreasoning capacities to be spontaneously deployed in RMTS