Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives On Cognition And .
PS64CH08-CosmidesARIANNUALREVIEWS11 November 2012FurtherAnnu. Rev. Psychol. 2013.64:201-229. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.orgAccess provided by 70.191.81.91 on 08/21/16. For personal use only.Click here for quick links toAnnual Reviews content online,including: Other articles in this volume Top cited articles Top downloaded articles Our comprehensive search8:40Evolutionary Psychology:New Perspectives onCognition and MotivationLeda Cosmides1 and John Tooby21Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Center for Evolutionary Psychologyand 2 Department of Anthropology and Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara, California 93106; email: cosmides@psych.ucsb.edu,tooby@anth.ucsb.eduAnnu. Rev. Psychol. 2013. 64:201–29KeywordsThe Annual Review of Psychology is online atpsych.annualreviews.orgmotivation, domain-specificity, evolutionary game theory, visualattention, concepts, reasoningThis article’s doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131628c 2013 by Annual Reviews.Copyright All rights reservedAbstractEvolutionary psychology is the second wave of the cognitive revolution. The first wave focused on computational processes that generate knowledge about the world: perception, attention, categorization,reasoning, learning, and memory. The second wave views the brainas composed of evolved computational systems, engineered by natural selection to use information to adaptively regulate physiology andbehavior. This shift in focus—from knowledge acquisition to the adaptive regulation of behavior—provides new ways of thinking about everytopic in psychology. It suggests a mind populated by a large number ofadaptive specializations, each equipped with content-rich representations, concepts, inference systems, and regulatory variables, which arefunctionally organized to solve the complex problems of survival and reproduction encountered by the ancestral hunter-gatherers from whomwe are descended. We present recent empirical examples that illustratehow this approach has been used to discover new features of attention,categorization, reasoning, learning, emotion, and motivation.201
PS64CH08-CosmidesARI11 November 20128:40INTRODUCTIONContentsAnnu. Rev. Psychol. 2013.64:201-229. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.orgAccess provided by 70.191.81.91 on 08/21/16. For personal use only.INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .VISUAL ATTENTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Animal Monitoring: An Appendixin Visual Attention? . . . . . . . . . . . . .Automatic Regulation of Attentionby High-Level Social Cues . . . . . .SPATIAL COGNITION ANDNAVIGATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Spatial Specializationsfor Foraging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .EVOLUTIONARY GAME THEORYAND THE ANALYSIS OFSOCIAL BEHAVIOR . . . . . . . . . . . . .The Evolution of Two-PartyCooperation: Constraints fromGame Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Collective Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .CONCEPTS ANDCATEGORIZATION . . . . . . . . . . . . .Concepts for Collective Action:Free Riders VersusCooperators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .REASONING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Conditional Reasoning andSocial Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Investigations with the WasonSelection Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .MOTIVATION: THE ROLE OFEVOLVED REGULATORYVARIABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Internal Regulatory Variables . . . . . . .Genetic Relatedness andMotivation: Siblings, Incest,and Altruism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .A Kin Detection System . . . . . . . . . . . .EMOTION AND THERECALIBRATION OFREGULATORY VARIABLES . . . . .Welfare Trade-Offs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Anger and the Recalibration ofWelfare Trade-Off Ratios . . . . . . .CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13215215216218218219219222223223224Both before and after Darwin, a commonview among philosophers and scientists hasbeen that the human mind resembles a blankslate, virtually free of content until writtenon by the hand of experience. Over the years,the technological metaphor used to describethe structure of the human mind has beenconsistently updated, from blank slate toswitchboard to general-purpose computer, butthe deeper assumption remained. The implications are wide ranging. According to thisview, the mechanisms that produce learningoperate in the same way, whether they areacquiring the grammar of a language, a fear ofsnakes, or an aversion to sex with siblings. Themechanisms that produce reasoning deploythe same procedures, whether they are makinginferences about the trajectory of a billiardball, the beliefs and desires of another person,or what counts as cheating in social exchange.The same goes for attention, categorization,memory, motivation, and decision making.This perspective grants that evolution mayhave equipped the mind with a few primary reinforcers that have hedonic value (food, water,pain avoidance, sex). But it assumes that theneurocomputational systems that collect andprocess experiences are largely content free anddomain general, designed to operate uniformlyon information drawn from any stimulus class(cf. Herrnstein 1977, Gallistel 1995).A very different picture of the human mind isemerging from evolutionary psychology, an approach to the cognitive sciences that integratesevolutionary biology, psychology, informationtheory, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience,and allied fields (for reviews, see Barkow et al.1992, Buss 2005). In this view, human nature—the species-typical information-processingarchitecture of the human brain—is packedwith content-rich adaptive problem-solvingsystems. Like expert systems (in artificial intelligence), each is designed to deploy differentconcepts, principles, inference procedures,regulatory variables, and decision rules whenactivated by cues of its proper domain. Why?
Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2013.64:201-229. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.orgAccess provided by 70.191.81.91 on 08/21/16. For personal use only.PS64CH08-CosmidesARI11 November 20128:40From this perspective, the cognitive andevolutionary sciences are connected as follows:1. Each organ in the body evolved to servea function: the intestines digest, the heartpumps blood, the liver detoxifies poisons.The brain is also an organ, and its evolvedfunction is to extract information fromthe environment and use that informationto generate behavior and regulate physiology. From this perspective, the brainis a computer, that is, a physical systemthat was designed to process information.Its programs were designed not by an engineer, but by natural selection, a causalprocess that retains and discards designfeatures on the basis of how well theysolved problems that affect reproduction(Williams 1966, Dawkins 1982).The fact that the brain processes information is not an accidental side effect of some metabolic process: The brainwas designed by natural selection to be acomputer. Therefore, if you want to describe its operation in a way that captures its evolved function, you need tothink of it as composed of programsthat process information. The questionthen becomes, what programs are to befound in the human brain? What are thereliably developing, species-typical programs that, taken together, constitute thehuman mind?2. These programs were sculpted overevolutionary time by the ancestralenvironments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers fromwhom we are descended. Each evolvedprogram exists because it producedbehavior that promoted the survival andreproduction of our ancestors betterthan alternative programs that aroseduring human evolutionary history.Evolutionary psychologists emphasizehunter-gatherer life because it takes along time for natural selection to builda computational adaptation of any complexity. Simple, quantitative traits canchange faster, but it takes thousands ofyears (i.e., many human generations) fornatural selection to assemble a complexprogram composed of many different,functionally integrated parts (Tooby &Cosmides 1990a).3. Although the behavior our evolved programs generate would, on average, havebeen adaptive (i.e., reproduction promoting) in the ancestral environments that selected for their design (their environmentof evolutionary adaptedness), there is noguarantee that it will be so now (Tooby& Cosmides 1990b, Symons 1992). Modern environments differ importantly fromancestral ones, particularly when it comesto social behavior. We no longer live insmall, face-to-face societies, in seminomadic bands of 25–200 men, women, andchildren, many of whom were close relatives. Yet our cognitive programs weredesigned for that social world.4. Perhaps most importantly, the brain mustbe composed of many different programs,each specialized for solving a differentadaptive problem our ancestors faced.Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were,in effect, on a camping trip that lasteda lifetime, and they had to solve manydifferent kinds of problems well tosurvive and reproduce under thoseconditions: hunting, evaluating plantresources, cooperating with others,avoiding predators, dividing resourcesamong kin, selecting fertile mates, deterring sexual rivals, avoiding infectiousdiseases, detecting alliances, avoidingincest, learning grammar, negotiatingdominance hierarchies, and managingaggression, for example. When naturalselection was reconceptualized as replicator dynamics and combined with gametheory (Williams 1966, Dawkins 1982,Maynard Smith 1982), it became possibleto derive powerful (and nonintuitive)inferences about what counts as adaptivebehavior in these domains.Results from evolutionary game theoryand data about ancestral environmentswww.annualreviews.org Evolutionary PsychologyComputationaladaptations: evolvedsystems designed (bynatural selection) tomonitor informationand use it tofunctionally regulatebehavior or physiologyEnvironment ofEvolutionaryAdaptedness: theseries of ancestral environments/selectionpressures that sculptedthe design of anadaptationReplicator dynamics:how genes change infrequency in apopulation203
ARI11 November 20128:40can be used to identify and dissect adaptive information-processing problems, tosee what properties programs capable ofsolving them would need. This exerciseoften reveals that what counts as a solution differs radically and incommensurably for different adaptive problems.Consider, for example, food choice versusmate choice. The computational structure of programs that are well engineeredfor choosing nutritious foods will fail toproduce adaptive behavior unless theygenerate different preferences and tradeoffs than programs designed for choosing fertile sexual partners. Similarly, machinery that reliably and efficiently learnswhich local organisms are predators andthe best way to respond to each (freeze?run? climb a tree?) lacks properties thatwill cause the reliable and efficient acquisition of grammar (and vice versa).Evolutionary psychologists thereforeexpect (and find) that the human mindcontains a large number of informationprocessing devices that are functionallyspecialized and therefore domain specific, with different devices activated bydifferent kinds of content (snakes versussmiles, food versus mates, cues of socialexchange versus cues of aggression). Noone doubts that the mind contains someadaptive specializations that execute (relatively) domain-general computations(e.g., Brase et al. 1998, Rode et al. 1999,Gallistel & Gibbon 2000, Gigerenzer & Selten 2001). But these cannotproduce adaptive behavior unless theyinteract with a large number of expertsystems that are domain specialized andcontent rich (e.g., Pinker 1997, 2010;Cosmides & Tooby 2001; Cosmides et al.2010). True blank slates—architecturesthat are content free except for a fewhedonic reinforcers—lack the computational properties necessary to producebehavior that tracks fitness (Cosmides& Tooby 1987, Tooby et al. 2005).(For comprehensive introductions to theAnnu. Rev. Psychol. 2013.64:201-229. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.orgAccess provided by 70.191.81.91 on 08/21/16. For personal use only.PS64CH08-Cosmides204Cosmides·Toobyconceptual foundations of evolutionarypsychology, which include detailedarguments for each point listed above,along with controversies and responses,see Tooby & Cosmides 1992, 2005.)Knowing that natural selection producescomputational systems that solve adaptiveproblems reliably, quickly, and efficiently allows evolutionary psychologists to approachthe study of the mind like an engineer. Onestarts with a good specification of an adaptive information-processing problem and doesa task analysis of that problem. This allows oneto see what properties a program would have tohave in order to solve that problem well. Thisapproach generates testable hypotheses aboutthe structure of the programs that composethe mind—a point we hope to illustrate in thisreview.From the earliest days of the field, evolutionary psychologists have used sexual selectiontheory to explore the psychology of mating relationships in humans and other animals (Trivers1972, Symons 1979, Daly & Wilson 1988, Buss1989). They have already produced a massiveliterature on this topic, opening up an area ofstudy that had been neglected by the psychological sciences (for recent reviews, see Buss 2005,part III, and Roney 2009).It is less obvious how knowledge andprinciples from evolutionary biology canguide research in more traditional areas of thecognitive sciences. So we have chosen examples from visual attention, spatial cognition,categorization, reasoning, learning, and motivation. In each case, the theoretical frameworkprovided by evolutionary psychology led tonew questions and surprising results—onessuggesting the existence of content-specializedprocedures. Through these cases, we hope toillustrate key features of evolutionary psychology: the importance of considering ancestralenvironments; how hunter-gathe
Keywords motivation, domain-specificity, evolutionary game theory, visual attention, concepts, reasoning Abstract Evolutionary psychology is the second wave of the cognitive revolu-tion. The first wave focused on computational processes that gener-ate knowledge about the world: perception, attention, categorization, reasoning, learning, and .
NATURE OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE Leda Cosmides* and John Tooby* EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the de- sign of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology and human evolutionary
other evolutionary forces on human psychology. This is evidenced by greater emphasis on evolutionary theories in leading handbooks of personality psychology (Buss, 2009; Buss & Penke, 2015) and social psychology (Buss & Ken-rick, 1998; Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, 2010), special issues dedicated to an evolutionary approach to the psycho-
evolutionary biology. From this point of view, some authors have tried to extend the Darwinian theory universally beyond the domain of evolutionary biology (Cf. Dawkins, 1983), using the three principles of evolutionary theory (inheritance or retention, variation, and adaptation) as a heuristic for evolutionary economic theorizing (Campbell, 1965).
data into studies of eco-evolutionary dynamics can provide a better mechanistic understanding of the causes of phenotypic change, help elucidate the mechanisms driving eco-evolutionary dynamics and lead to more accurate evolutionary predictions of eco-evolutionary dynamics in nature (Fig. 2). What genomic data can reveal about
1.1.3 Evolutionary Design by Computers So it is clear that evolutionary design in nature is capable of generating astonishingly in-novative designs. This book demonstrates how evolutionary design by computers is also cap-able of such innovation. To achieve this, the highest achievers in evolutionary design have
Prologue: The Story of Psychology 3 Prologue: The Story of Psychology Psychology’s Roots Prescientific Psychology Psychological Science is Born Psychological Science Develops. 2 4 Prologue: The Story of Psychology Contemporary Psychology Psychology’s Big Debate .
Evolutionary psychology is a hybrid discipline that draws insights from modern evolutionary theory, biology, cogni-tivepsychology, anthropology, economics,computerscience, and paleoarchaeology. The discipline rests on a foundation of D. M. Buss (*) Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA e-mail: dbuss@psy.utexas.edu
Algae: Lectures -15 Unit 1: Classification of algae- comparative survey of important system : Fritsch- Smith-Round Ultrastructure of algal cells: cell wall, flagella, chloroplast, pyrenoid, eye-spot and their importance in classification. Structure and function of heterocysts, pigments in algae and Economic importance of algae. Unit 2: General account of thallus structure, reproduction .
