Research suggests that music, like language, is both a biological predisposition and a cultural universal. While humans naturally attend to and process many of the psychophysical cues present in musical information, there is a great - and often culture-specific - diversity of musical practices differentiated in part by form, timbre, pitch, rhythm, and other structural elements. Musical interact...

The study of cognition across cultures offers a useful approach to both identifying bottlenecks in information processing and suggesting culturespecific strategies to alleviate these limitations. The recent emphasis on applying cognitive neuroscience methods to the study of culture further aids in specifying which processes differ cross-culturally. By localizing cultural differences to distinct...

Video and transcripts of two architectural design meetings are presented in an analysis of a specific design process. The focus of the analysis presented here is the social and cultural aspects of cognition in design. The argument begins with a discussion of the parallels in design studies and cognitive science as each has begun to consider the importance of environmental influences on how we d...

—Cultural differences in cognition are important during multinational commercial, military, and humanitarian operations. The Rosetta Project addresses definition and measurement of key cognitive dimensions. Six potential diagnostic measures related to Analytic–Holistic reasoning were assessed: the Exclusion Task, the Attribution Complexity Scale, the Syllogism Task, Categorization, the Framed L...

With the increase of international cultural exchange, training and strengthening college students’ cultural cognitive ability is a burgeoning research subject in today’s foreign language teaching profession of colleges and universities. Cross-cultural communication skills and cultural cognition abilities have become an important measure of the ability of the modern language talents. This paper ...

The cultural intelligence hypothesis (CIH) claims that humans' advanced cognition is a direct result of human culture and that children are uniquely specialized to absorb and utilize this cultural experience (Tomasello, 2000). Comparative data demonstrating that 2.5-year-old human children outperform apes on measures of social cognition but not on measures of physical cognition support this cla...

Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary adapt...

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking-perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursiv...

This review describes some recent, unexpected findings concerning variation in spatial language across cultures, and places them in the context of the general anthropology of space on the one hand, and theories of spatial cognition in the cognitive sciences on the other. There has been much concern with the symbolism of space in anthropological writings, but little on concepts of space in pract...

Conformist social learning can have a pronounced impact on the cultural evolution of human societies, and it can shape both the genetic and cultural evolution of human social behavior more broadly. Conformist social learning is beneficial when the social learner and the demonstrators from whom she learns are similar in the sense that the same behavior is optimal for both. Otherwise, the social ...