Determining the fundamental cognitive abilities underlying human high-level cognition remains elusive. An examination of the main activities of our first Homo sapiens ancestors offers a normative approach. Because shelter building was critical for a nomadic hunter-gatherer and required comprehension and manipulation of the knowledge for … Continue reading
This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of … Continue reading
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful … Continue reading
Research into social learning (learning from others) has expanded significantly in recent years, not least because of productive interactions between theoretical and empirical approaches. This has been coupled with a new emphasis on learning strategies, which places social learning within … Continue reading
Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping one’s mind, most cognitive studies focus … Continue reading
A central debate in cognitive science concerns the nativist hypothesis, the proposal that universal features of behavior reflect a biologically determined cognitive substrate: For example, linguistic nativism proposes a domain-specific faculty of language that strongly constrains which languages can be … Continue reading
People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the two. These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation. … Continue reading
What is thought and how does one come to study and understand it? How does the mind work? Does cognitive science explain all the mysteries of the brain? This collection of fourteen original essays from some of the top sociologists … Continue reading
Most previous research on human cognition has focused on problem-solving and has confined its investigations to the laboratory. As a result, it has been difficult to account for complex mental processes and their place in culture and history. In this … Continue reading
A large body of research documents cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. Westerners tend to be more analytic and East Asians tend to be more holistic. These findings have often been explained as being due to corresponding differences in … Continue reading
