Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology1 Evolutionary cognitive psychology

Traditional cognitive psychology, the study of the information processing mechanisms underlying human thought and behavior, is problematic from an evolutionary viewpoint: Humans were not directly selected to process information, nor to store it, learn it, attend to it, represent it—nor even, in fact, to think. All of these capacities, the core topics of cognitive psychology, can be seen as epiphenomena arising over the course of evolution from the need to get the central jobs done: survival and reproduction. Moreover, while the subtasks of those two main goals—finding food, maintaining body temperature, selecting a mate, negotiating status hierarchies, forming cooperative alliances, fending off predators and conspecific competitors, raising offspring, etc.—surely relied on gathering and processing information, meeting the challenges of each of these domains would only have been possible by in each case gathering specific pieces of information and processing it in particular ways. This suggests that to best study the faculties of memory, or attention, or reasoning, we should take a taskand domain-specific approach that focuses on the use of each faculty for a particular evolved function, just the approach exemplified by the other chapters in this handbook.