Conversation, cognition and cultural evolution

The cultural evolution of cognition

As humans, we share most of our biological make-up with our closest primate relatives, yet we stand out not just from them but from all other species with respect to our cultural diversity, our capacity for language, and particularly our cognitive skills. While of prime interest for the field of cognitive science, the still-open question of which factors gave rise to human uniqueness has rarely...

The cultural evolution of socially situated cognition

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how change accumulates de...

Cultural Cognition and Public Policy

Cultural commons and cultural evolution

Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary perspective, with a focus on the implications of group definition for the coexistence of different cultures. A model of cultural evolution is presented wher...

Cognition is … Fundamentally Cultural

A prevailing concept of cognition in psychology is inspired by the computer metaphor. Its focus on mental states that are generated and altered by information input, processing, storage and transmission invites a disregard for the cultural dimension of cognition, based on three (implicit) assumptions: cognition is internal, processing can be distinguished from content, and processing is indepen...