Cecilia Heyes (Oxford): “Cognitive Gadgets”

Abstract: Evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts – organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts.  Research in psychology and neuroscience – involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans – now suggests that genetic evolution has merely tweaked the human mind, making us more friendly than our pre-human ancestors, more attentive to other agents, and giving us souped-up, general-purpose mechanisms of learning, memory and cognitive control. Using these resources, our special-purpose organs of thought – including our capacity to ascribe mental states – are built in the course of development through social interaction. They are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution, cognitive gadgets rather than cognitive instincts.

Cecilia Heyes is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences, All Souls College, University of Oxford. Her work concerns the evolution of cognition. It explores the ways in which natural selection, learning, developmental and cultural processes combine to produce the mature cognitive abilities found in adult humans.