Aspects of language, such as accent, play a crucial role in the formation and categorization of one’s cultural identity. Recent work on accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent also serves as a meaningful indicator of an ethnic category. In this article, we investigate whether the accent of an interaction partner, as a marker...

We provide evidence that cooperation is a cultural category, and that what it means to cooperate is culturally conditioned. We use a cultural consensus model analysis to assess which types of situations people categorize as cooperation and whether these categorizations are consistent within and across China and the United States. The data support revisiting the role of cognition in mediating co...

Human language has unusual structural properties that enable open-ended communication. In recent years, researchers have begun to appeal to cultural evolution to explain the emergence of these structural properties. A particularly fruitful approach to this kind of explanation has been the use of laboratory experiments. These typically involve participants learning and interacting using artifici...

From the word "mimeme" of Greek origin, Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book on "The Selfish Gene" [1]. He defined it as being "the basic unit of cultural transmission or imitation". These days, the monosyllabic word "meme" that is an analog of the word "gene" has since taken flight to become one of the most successful metaphorical ideologies in computational intelligence. The new sc...

In this paper, we argue that cultural robotics should be grounded in a critical approach that acknowledges the co-construction of culture and scientific practice and technology design, as well as the dynamic nature of culture and its role in shaping human cognition and social interaction. We suggest this can be done in two ways: 1) by making the robot design process more culturally reflexive an...

The diversity of opinion and approaches exemplified by the articles in this special issue attest to the need for an organizing framework for studying cognitive sex differences. Any such framework must allow for a consideration of cognitive sex differences from multiple levels, ranging from broad evolutionary and cultural influences at the most general level, to differences in the ways in which ...

This symposium revisits a classic controversy in psychological anthropology: The suggested universality (or, alternatively, cultural relativity) of color categorization across individuals from the same ethnolinguistic group, and across different ethnolinguistic societies. Presentations will survey new findings and innovative multidisciplinary advances in the area. Recently the controversy’s deb...

Meta-analytic procedures were used to test the effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, empathy/desensitization, and prosocial behavior. Unique features of this meta-analytic review include (a) more restrictive methodological quality inclusion criteria than in past meta-analyses; (b) cross-cultural comparisons; (c) lo...

According to contemporary theories of cognition, the process of metaphorical interpretation is conceived of as a 'mapping' from a source domain to a target domain. The author of this paper believes, in contrast, that this process of mapping does not take place in a vacuum, but rather is influenced by both agentive and contextual factors. By the agentive factors of metaphorical cognition, she re...

Humans and other species have biologically endowed abilities for discriminating quantities. A widely accepted view sees such abilities as an evolved capacity specific for number and arithmetic. This view, however, is based on an implicit teleological rationale, builds on inaccurate conceptions of biological evolution, downplays human data from non-industrialized cultures, overinterprets results...