Evolution of Human Cognition

(1)  Do Nootropics and Promnestics Enhance Human Cognition and Creative Thought?
(2)  Origins of Human Cognition and Creative Thought
(3) Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Motor and Movement Disorders
(4) Psychological Persuasion and the Mass/Social Media

Data on how Stone Age communities conceived domestic and utilitarian structures are limited to a few examples of schematic and non-accurate representations of various-sized built spaces. Here, we report the exceptional discovery of the up-to-now oldest realistic plans that have been engraved on stones. These engravings from Jordan and Saudi Arabia depict ‘desert kites’, humanmade archaeological mega-traps that are dated to at least 9,000 years ago for the oldest. The extreme precision of these engravings is remarkable, representing gigantic neighboring Neolithic stone structures, the whole design of which is impossible to grasp without seeing it from the air or without being their architect (or user, or builder). They reveal a widely underestimated mental mastery of space perception, hitherto never observed at this level of accuracy in such an early context. These representations shed new light on the evolution of human discernment of space, communication, and communal activities in...

The authors, an astronomer/priest and an anthropologist/biologist, describe their use of the dramatic arts at the INSAP VIII meeting in their performance of two short skits on the sighting of a supernova in AD 1054 (creating the beautiful Crab Nebula) and a future "Rho Cas" stellar explosion in the constellation Cassiopeia, in AD 3054. They speculate on the emergence of science, religion, and art as bona fide adaptations, responding to natural selection, which served early hominins well in their struggle for existence. They draw parallels to the continued functions of science, religion, and art in modern society.

This paper aims to provide a conceptual investigation over exploring the emergent processes and explanations formulated by a capacity to think, especially when extending reasoning abilities over an AI prompt, such as ChatGPT. These emergencies conceptualize special pathways, forcing human-like frameworks and processes of thought to be instanced, often covering personal qualifiers, in addition to motivations and other personal and emotional idiosyncrasies. Investigating and calling such processes thought whilst pulling for this instance human-like cognitive and behavioral articulation can provide us not only with an interesting standpoint counter to standard platonic maneuvers in cognitive science and AI but can also be utilised and reappraising to more useful and socio-culturally molar notions of optimization, embeddedness, intelligence, soft consciousness, and learning processes.

What If Evolution Was Always About Cognition? This article introduces the Five Basic Adaptive Tasks-a new model that redefines cognition not as a trait exclusive to humans or brains, but as a universal evolutionary mechanism present across life. From bacteria to mammals, all organisms face recurring challenges: how to secure energy, stay safe, and reproduce. To do so, they must solve adaptive tasks-each tied to a distinct domain of meaning and behavior change.

Advancing AGI and Human-Like AI and The New Architecture of Cognition We stand on the brink of a new understanding of life-a vision that transcends centuries of fragmented perspectives. For decades, the field of cognition has grappled with a perplexing reality: we lack a universal definition of cognition, an architecture to describe its structures, and a coherent methodology to study it. For too long, cognition has been constrained by narrow definitions, limited to brainbearing organisms and hierarchical notions of intelligence. These gaps have been deftly avoided in many scientific disciplines, but the dawn of General and Human-Like Artificial Intelligence demands answers. The urgency has never been greater-without understanding cognition-its essence, architecture, and evolutionary trajectory-we cannot hope to replicate it on artificial carriers. It's time to challenge these boundaries and embrace a more inclusive, universal framework: Behavior Change (BC). Behavior Change is the unifying thread of all life. It is the language through which organisms-from the simplest microbe to the most complex human-address their adaptive tasks. BC is more than movement or reaction; it is the dynamic process of recognizing, calculating, and choosing responses to environmental challenges. This process is essential for maintaining energy, safety, and reproduction-the three pillars of species survival.

The evolution of cooperation is a major question in the biological and behavioral sciences. While most theoretical studies model cooperation in the context of an isolated interaction (e.g., a Prisoner’s Dilemma), humans live in heterogeneous social environments, characterized by large variations in fitness interdependence—the extent to which one’s fitness is affected by others. Theoretical and experimental work indicates that humans can infer, and respond to, variations in interdependence. In a heterogeneous ancestral environment, these psychological mechanisms to infer fitness interdependence could have provided a selective advantage, allowing individuals to maximize their fitness by deciding when and with whom to cooperate. Yet, to date, the link between cognitive inference, variation in fitness interdependence, and cooperation remains unclear. Here we introduce a theoretical framework to study the evolution of inference and cooperation in heterogeneous social environments, where individuals experience interactions with varying levels of corresponding interests. Using a combination of evolutionary game theory and agent-based modeling, we model the evolution of adaptive agents, who incur a cost to infer interdependence, in populations of fixed-behavior agents who always cooperate or defect. Our results indicate that natural selection could promote the evolution of psychological mechanisms to infer fitness interdependence, provided that there is enough variation in fitness interdependence to offset the cost of inference. Under certain conditions, the fixation of adaptive agents results in higher levels of cooperation. This depends crucially on the type of inference performed and the features of the interdependence landscape.

As humans, we are the only species that reflects consciously on our existence and how we came to be. Such musings have led us to formulate many different scenarios that see us as coming into existence through a creative act by forces outside of ordinary experience. However, within the domain of scientific reasoning, any appeal to such extraordinary forces is excluded. We therefore seek a natural account of how a species as complex as ours, capable of formulating and realizing the widely diverse forms of social systems that we know, could have arisen. Such an account must be embedded in the Darwinian paradigm for evolution, which has been fundamental to our understanding of the way in which biological reproduction can drive change from simpler to more complex biological forms. The Darwinian evolutionary argument owes its success to Darwin’s realization that the engine of reproduction – necessary for the continuation of life forms – is both the location of innovation in the traits tha...

The human brain represents a pinnacle of evolutionary innovation, characterized by its remarkable size relative to body mass, complex neural connectivity, and unparalleled cognitive abilities. Understanding the evolutionary trajectory of the human brain requires a comparative analysis of brain structure and function across species. This review explores the evolutionary milestones of brain development, with an emphasis on primates, early hominins, and modern humans. Drawing on fossil, genetic, and neurobiological evidence, we investigate the selective pressures driving brain expansion and specialization, and the implications for human behavior, cognition, and neurodegenerative diseases. Additionally, we discuss recent discoveries, including geneculture coevolution and the influence of epigenetic factors, providing a broader context for understanding the evolutionary uniqueness of the human brain.

Proponents of the dominant paradigm in evolutionary psychology argue that a viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be heritable and "quasi-independent" from other heritable traits, and that these requirements are best satisfied by innate cognitive modules. We argue here that neither of these are required in order to describe and explain how evolution shaped the mind.

Proponents of the dominant paradigm in evolutionary psychology argue that a viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be heritable and "quasi-independent" from other heritable traits, and that these requirements are best satisfied by innate cognitive modules. We argue here that neither of these are required in order to describe and explain how evolution shaped the mind.

With findings from cognitive science, neuroscience, information science, and paleoanthropology, an anthropologist and astronomer-priest team take a new look at the nature of morality, and suggest parameters that are often very different from the philosophical and theological literatures. They see morality as a biologically-based arbitration mechanism that works along a timeline with a valence of good to bad. It is rational, purposeful, social, and affected by emotion but not dominated by it. The authors examine the age and sex structure, family roles, environment, cognition, and lifeway of Homo erectus, an early hominin who arose 1.9 million years ago, and propose that he had a rudimentary moral system that his biology and culture enabled – but only after he learned to control fire. Hearths gave rise to an intense, social, emotional, experiential context where belief systems could be learned by youth before they achieved adult cognition.

Intrigued by Robinson and Southgate's 2010 work on “entering a semiotic matrix,” we expand their model to include the juxtaposition of all signs, symbols, and mental categories, and to explore the underpinnings of creativity in science, religion, and art. We rely on an interdisciplinary review of human sentience in archaeology, evolutionary biology, the cognitive science of religion, and literature, and speculate on the development of sentience in response to strong selection pressure on the hominin evolutionary line, leaving us the “lone survivors” of complex, multiple lines of physical and cultural evolution. What we call Matrix Thinking—the creative driver of human sentience—has important cognitive and intellectual features, but also equally important characteristics traced to our intense sociability and use of emotionality in vetting rational models. Scientist, theologian, and artist create new cultural knowledge within a social context even if alone. They are rewarded by em...

Big History understands change in the Universe as a continual process, and complex, named epochs seem less useful lately. Nevertheless, higher levels of organizational complexity do emerge. One of the latest levels is sentience on the hominin evolutionary line. Psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians explore the nature of human sentience, which includes consciousness, self-awareness, desire, will, ethics, personality, intelligence, and ‘sensibility’, or social sensitivity, empathy, sympathy, insight about others, and a special kind of ability we call ‘Matrix Thinking’. Do religious and scientific thought have common roots and ongoing connections? Is scientific thinking enhanced by a capacity for religious and artistic thought? Within a Big History framework, we explore the emergence of religious thought as a major foundation of sentience. As an anthropologist and a Catholic priest, we explore religious thought as an evolutionary adaptation with cognitive, emoti...

With findings from cognitive science, neuroscience, information science, and paleoanthropology, an anthropologist and astronomer-priest team take a new look at the nature of morality, and suggest parameters that are often very different from the philosophical and theological literatures. They see morality as a biologically-based arbitration mechanism that works along a timeline with a valence of good to bad. It is rational, purposeful, social, and affected by emotion but not dominated by it. The authors examine the age and sex structure, family roles, environment, cognition, and lifeway of Homo erectus, an early hominin who arose 1.9 million years ago, and propose that he had a rudimentary moral system that his biology and culture enabled – but only after he learned to control fire. Hearths gave rise to an intense, social, emotional, experiential context where belief systems could be learned by youth before they achieved adult cognition.

Intrigued by Robinson and Southgate's 2010 work on “entering a semiotic matrix,” we expand their model to include the juxtaposition of all signs, symbols, and mental categories, and to explore the underpinnings of creativity in science, religion, and art. We rely on an interdisciplinary review of human sentience in archaeology, evolutionary biology, the cognitive science of religion, and literature, and speculate on the development of sentience in response to strong selection pressure on the hominin evolutionary line, leaving us the “lone survivors” of complex, multiple lines of physical and cultural evolution. What we call Matrix Thinking—the creative driver of human sentience—has important cognitive and intellectual features, but also equally important characteristics traced to our intense sociability and use of emotionality in vetting rational models. Scientist, theologian, and artist create new cultural knowledge within a social context even if alone. They are rewarded by em...

In the preceding article in this section, F. LeRon Shults responds to our article preceding his, "Semiotics as a Metaphysical Framework for Christian Theology." We respond here to his criticisms of our proposal. We discuss his concerns about the concept of "vestiges of the Trinity in creation" and argue that this does not undermine the absolute ontological difference between God and creation. We offer a clarification of our idea that the Incarnation may be understood, in terms of Peirce's taxonomy of signs, as a qualisign of God's being. Finally, we discuss the idea that all symbols "break on the infinite."

Only our lineage has ever used trackways reading to find unseen and unheard targets. All other terrestrial animals, including our great ape cousins, use scent trails and airborne odors. Because trackways as natural signs have very different properties, they possess an information-rich narrative structure. There is good evidence we began to exploit conspecific trackways in our deep past, at first purely associatively, for safety and orienteering when foraging in vast featureless wetlands. Since our own old trackways were recognizable they were selfmirroring, triggering memories of what we had been up to in the past. Using them to find our way back to the band when temporarily lost or to re-find a resource-rich area discovered the day before enabled optimal foraging. Selection for daily reiteration of one's own old trackways therefore triggered the evolution of what is distinctive about human cognition: the autobiographical or narrative (episodic) faculty for imaginative self-projection. This faculty enabled us to glean useful social information from the stories ''told'' by other band members' old trackways, and created spin-off capacities for fast-track social learning. Resultant increases in socioecological complexity then created positive selective feedback loops for further entrenchment. Incrementally we became the ultra-social narrative-minded ape, capable of creating cumulative culture.

At the core of the Max Weber project on Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations lies a keen interest in the ascription of value to different life forms relating to city and civic life, that is urbanity. Yet such valorisations do not necessarily presuppose one's physical presence in a city. One may live a perfectly happy life in a villa rustica at a safe distance from interactions with the 'masses', but nevertheless-and presumably for that very reason-attributing urbanity to one's own

In this thesis I present a new paradigm in human evolutionary theory: the relevance of track-ways reading (TWR) to the evolution of human cognition, culture and communication. Evidence is presented that strongly indicates hominins were exploiting conspecific track-ways 4 million years ago. For a non-olfactory ape that was a specialized forager in open, featureless wetland environments, they were the only viable natural signs to exploit for safety, orienteering, and recognizable social markers. Due to the unique cognitive demands of reading track-ways, as compared to scenttrails all other animals use to find each other and preferred prey species, social TWR triggered the evolution of a unique faculty for narrative elsewhere-and-when cognition in the hominin mind. Two million years later, this narrative faculty was entrenched enough to enable the rather sudden "explosion" of cooperative Oldowan Lithic Culture that began at 2.6mya. This cultural adaptation was a highly successful response to catastrophic environmental change. Thereafter selection for encephalization to increase neural capacity to store and cooperatively exploit socio-ecological knowledge gained from the hominin narrative faculty (via co-evolving, increasingly efficient modes of intentional communication) drove all further biological and cultural developments in the hominin trajectory towards H.sapiens and behavioural modernity.

Data on how Stone Age communities conceived domestic and utilitarian structures are limited to a few examples of schematic and non-accurate representations of various-sized built spaces. Here, we report the exceptional discovery of the up-to-now oldest realistic plans that have been engraved on stones. These engravings from Jordan and Saudi Arabia depict ‘desert kites’, humanmade archaeological mega-traps that are dated to at least 9,000 years ago for the oldest. The extreme precision of these engravings is remarkable, representing gigantic neighboring Neolithic stone structures, the whole design of which is impossible to grasp without seeing it from the air or without being their architect (or user, or builder). They reveal a widely underestimated mental mastery of space perception, hitherto never observed at this level of accuracy in such an early context. These representations shed new light on the evolution of human discernment of space, communication, and communal activities in...

Data on how Stone Age communities conceived domestic and utilitarian structures are limited to a few examples of schematic and non-accurate representations of various-sized built spaces. Here, we report the exceptional discovery of the up-to-now oldest realistic plans that have been engraved on stones. These engravings from Jordan and Saudi Arabia depict 'desert kites', humanmade archaeological mega-traps that are dated to at least 9,000 years ago for the oldest. The extreme precision of these engravings is remarkable, representing gigantic neighboring Neolithic stone structures, the whole design of which is impossible to grasp without seeing it from the air or without being their architect (or user, or builder). They reveal a widely underestimated mental mastery of space perception, hitherto never observed at this level of accuracy in such an early context. These representations shed new light on the evolution of human discernment of space, communication, and communal activities in ancient times.

The past 50 years have seen an accumulation of evidence suggesting that associative learning depends on high-level cognitive processes that give rise to propositional knowledge. Yet, many learning theorists maintain a belief in a learning mechanism in which links between mental representations are formed automatically. We characterize and highlight the differences between the propositional and link approaches, and review the relevant empirical evidence. We conclude that learning is the consequence of propositional reasoning processes that cooperate with the unconscious processes involved in memory retrieval and perception. We argue that this new conceptual framework allows many of the important recent advances in associative learning research to be retained, but recast in a model that provides a firmer foundation for both immediate application and future research.

Did Neanderthals marry? Did they possess avoidance rules and did they recognize inter-personal relationships, both vertically (descent) and horizontally (generation), that form the axes for kinship? The questions are more interesting than just speculating about the time-depth of human institutions. They raise the issue of how recognition and possession of rules and relationships might have occurred when opinion is still divided about the antiquity both of spoken language and of the symbolic codes that organized social life and its cultural transmission. Currently it is much easier to argue that Neanderthals did not marry because we can then analyse them through links to wider systems of animal kinship. Here the language of the genes speaks volumes, at least in the mathematical demonstration of mate choice and sacrifice for close kin, but at the expense of socio-cultural phenomena such as symbolism. Anthropologists have generally resisted such approaches, arguing that kinship is culturally constructed and only in the blood because consanguinity is a cultural rather than biological concept. Kinship is about the setting up of categories of relatedness through mutually structured activities, both economic and 'symbolic', but, as James explains in the introduction above, 'crucially including a framework of approved and prohibited mating links into which newborn persons are accommodated' (p. 40). Incest taboos, for example, are less to do with preserving the integrity of the gene pool than starting at home with the principle of exogamy enunciated so clearly by Tylor, long before genetics was formalized, as 'marry out or die out'. Marriage is about social and economic relationships and kinship has to be reckoned accordingly. The importance of marriage lies less in the gaining of a wife than, as Mead (1935: 84) pointed out some seventy years ago, in the gaining of a brother-in-law. The recruitment of affines to alliances, both social and economic, is central to the process. My purpose in this chapter is to raise interdisciplinary issues rather than provide an origins account of marriage and kinship rules. My vehicle is the social brain hypothesis (Dunbar 1998, 2003), which suggests our social lives

Data on how Stone Age communities conceived domestic and utilitarian structures are limited to a few examples of schematic and non-accurate representations of various-sized built spaces. Here, we report the exceptional discovery of the up-to-now oldest realistic plans that have been engraved on stones. These engravings from Jordan and Saudi Arabia depict 'desert kites', humanmade archaeological mega-traps that are dated to at least 9,000 years ago for the oldest. The extreme precision of these engravings is remarkable, representing gigantic neighboring Neolithic stone structures, the whole design of which is impossible to grasp without seeing it from the air or without being their architect (or user, or builder). They reveal a widely underestimated mental mastery of space perception, hitherto never observed at this level of accuracy in such an early context. These representations shed new light on the evolution of human discernment of space, communication, and communal activities in ancient times.

Resumo Sob uma perspectiva evolutiva, as interações sexuais entre indivíduos do mesmo sexo foram por muito tempo consideradas um grande paradoxo. Isso por terem persistido no decorrer das gerações apesar de supostamente não oferecerem benefícios reprodutivos diretos, reduzindo, aparentemente, a aptidão individual. Apesar disso, são comuns em muitas espécies animais. Neste artigo, revisaremos algumas das hipóteses funcionais que tentam resolver esse quebra-cabeça evolutivo. Algumas dessas hipóteses consideram essas interações adaptativas, o que significa que trariam benefícios para os indivíduos. Outras as consideram neutras, derivadas de características realmente vantajosas. Por fim, existem as que consideram essas interações como não-adaptativas e potencialmente prejudiciais aos indivíduos. Ao final, abordaremos uma hipótese revolucionária que, de forma inédita, questiona se as interações sexuais envolvendo exclusivamente indivíduos de sexos diferentes seriam realmente o estado bas...

Recent years have seen a burgeoning of discussion over so-called evolutionary debunking arguments of morality, but the fact that different debunking arguments have very different conclusions has allowed confusion to prosper. Sharon Street’s well-known argument (2006), for example, has the conclusion that moral realism is probably false; thus critics often talk of “debunking arguments against moral realism.” My own efforts, by contrast (see Joyce 2006, 2016b), aim for the conclusion that moral judgments are epistemically unjustified. That the judgments of a certain discourse lack justification, however, is consistent with these judgments being both true and mind-independently so; therefore my own debunking argument is entirely consistent with the truth of moral realism. I shall leave other would-be debunkers to fight their own street battles; in what follows I will focus on the epistemological debunking argument. The preceding chapters of part 1 of this book—by Justin ClarkeDoane, To...

Intrigued by Robinson and Southgate's 2010 work on "entering a semiotic matrix," we expand their model to include the juxtaposition of all signs, symbols, and mental categories, and to explore the underpinnings of creativity in science, religion, and art. We rely on an interdisciplinary review of human sentience in archaeology, evolutionary biology, the cognitive science of religion, and literature, and speculate on the development of sentience in response to strong selection pressure on the hominin evolutionary line, leaving us the "lone survivors" of complex, multiple lines of physical and cultural evolution. What we call Matrix Thinking-the creative driver of human sentience-has important cognitive and intellectual features, but also equally important characteristics traced to our intense sociability and use of emotionality in vetting rational models. Scientist, theologian, and artist create new cultural knowledge within a social context even if alone. They are rewarded by emotional validation from group members, and guided by the ever present question, "Does it feel right?"

Die Vollendung von Goethes Metamorphosenlehre durch Rudolf Steiner »Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen, Als dass sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare? Wie sie das Feste lässt zu Geist verrinnen, Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre.« 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Anthroposophie ist eine Wissenschaft des Geistigen. Sie liefert eine Fülle neuer Begriffe und Ideen, die vollkommen transpa rent miteinander zusammenhängen. Auch stellte Rudolf Steiner seine Forschungsmethode immer wieder dar. Und schließlich ist die Anthroposophie empirisch. Sie macht ihre Beobachtungen jedoch nicht in der sinnlichen Welt, sondern im Seelischen und Geistigen. Allerdings unterscheidet sie sich von den gängigen Wissenschaften durch ihre Forderung, das Erkennen und damit sich selbst als Mensch weiterzuentwickeln. Durch meditative Selbstschulung können drei höhere Erkenntnisstufen, die man als »Imagination«, »Inspiration« und »Intuition« bezeichnet, aus gebildet werden. Einen Ansatz zur imaginativen Erkenntnis fand Steiner bereits bei Goethe, die inspirative und intuitive entwik kelte er selbst. Am Beispiel der Erkenntnis von Pflanzen, Tieren und Menschen soll diese stufenweise Erkenntnisvertiefung hier nachgezeichnet werden. Von seinem 21. bis zu seinem 36. Lebensjahr war Rudolf Steiner Herausgeber von Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften. Bereits im ersten, 1884 erschienenen Band seiner

The Stone Age constitutes a substantially and symbolically decisive era of human development. Substantially, since it informs us of the ways our archaic ancestors perceived and treated the natural environment. Symbolically, since primordialism is considered by many to be the stage of human purity and uncorrupted expression of human psyche. An investigation of the Upper Palaeolithic period leads us to question the “ecocentric” thesis, that is, the alleged stage of harmony between primitive homo sapiens sapiens and nature. Instead, by distinguishing between natureas-resources and nature-as-symbolism, and by stressing the open-ended nature of human bio-psychology, we arrive at the tentative conclusions that palaeolithic egalitarianism facilitated a “prosopocentric” (person-centred) Cosmic Order characterized by the conflation of subject and object. It was not ecologically sensitive and thus it did not prevent economic exploitation and environmental damage. During the Neo-lithic period ...

Cooperation 1 is at the core of human social life. In this context, two major challenges face research on humanrobot interaction: the first is to understand the underlying structure of cooperation, and the second is to build, based on this understanding, artificial agents that can successfully and safely interact with humans. Here we take a psychologically grounded and human-centered approach that addresses these two challenges. We test the hypothesis that optimal cooperation between a naïve human and a robot requires that the robot can acquire and execute a joint plan, and that it communicates this joint plan through ecologically valid modalities including spoken language, gesture and gaze. We developed a cognitive system that comprises the human-like control of social actions, the ability to acquire and express shared plans and a spoken language stage. In order to test the psychological validity of our approach we tested 12 naïve subjects in a cooperative task with the robot. We experimentally manipulated the presence of a joint plan (vs. a solo plan), the use of task-oriented gaze and gestures, and the use of language accompanying the unfolding plan. The quality of cooperation was analyzed in terms of proper turn taking, collisions and cognitive errors. Results showed that while successful turn taking could take place in the absence of the explicit use of a joint plan, its presence yielded significantly greater success. One advantage of the solo plan was that the robot would always be ready to generate actions, and could thus adapt if the human intervened at the wrong time, whereas in the joint plan the robot expected the human to take his/her turn. Interestingly, when the robot represented the action as involving a joint plan, gaze provided a highly potent nonverbal cue that facilitated successful collaboration and reduced errors in the absence of verbal communication. These results support the cooperative stance in human social cognition, and suggest that cooperative robots should employ joint plans, fully communicate them in order to sustain effective collaboration while being ready to adapt if the human makes a midstream mistake.

This paper defends a gestural origins hypothesis about the evolution of enhanced communication and language in the hominin lineage. The paper shows that we can develop an incremental model of language evolution on that hypothesis, but not if we suppose that language originated in an expansion of great ape vocalization. On the basis of the gestural origins hypothesis, the paper then advances solutions to four classic problems about the evolution of language: (i) why did language evolve only in the hominin lineage? (ii) why is language use an evolutionarily stable form of informational cooperation, despite the fact that hominins have diverging evolutionary interests? (iii) how did stimulus independent symbols emerge? (iv) what were the origins of complex, syntactically organized symbols? The paper concludes by confronting two challenges: those of testability and of explaining the gesture-to-speech transition; crucial issues for any gestural origins hypothesis

One of the defining characteristics of human cognition is our outstanding capacity to cooperate. A central requirement for cooperation is the ability to establish a "shared plan"-which defines the interlaced actions of the two cooperating agents-in real time, and even to negotiate this shared plan during its execution. In the current research we identify the requirements for cooperation, extending our earlier work in this area. These requirements include the ability to negotiate a shared plan using spoken language, to learn new component actions within that plan, based on visual observation and kinesthetic demonstration, and finally to coordinate all of these functions in real time. We present a cognitive system that implements these requirements, and demonstrate the system's ability to allow a Nao humanoid robot to learn a non-trivial cooperative task in real-time. We further provide a concrete demonstration of how the real-time learning capability can be easily deployed on different platform, in this case the iCub humanoid. The results are considered in the context of how the development of language in the human infant provides a powerful lever in the development of cooperative plans from lower-level sensorimotor capabilities.

Cooperation 1 is at the core of human social life. In this context, two major challenges face research on humanrobot interaction: the first is to understand the underlying structure of cooperation, and the second is to build, based on this understanding, artificial agents that can successfully and safely interact with humans. Here we take a psychologically grounded and human-centered approach that addresses these two challenges. We test the hypothesis that optimal cooperation between a naïve human and a robot requires that the robot can acquire and execute a joint plan, and that it communicates this joint plan through ecologically valid modalities including spoken language, gesture and gaze. We developed a cognitive system that comprises the human-like control of social actions, the ability to acquire and express shared plans and a spoken language stage. In order to test the psychological validity of our approach we tested 12 naïve subjects in a cooperative task with the robot. We experimentally manipulated the presence of a joint plan (vs. a solo plan), the use of task-oriented gaze and gestures, and the use of language accompanying the unfolding plan. The quality of cooperation was analyzed in terms of proper turn taking, collisions and cognitive errors. Results showed that while successful turn taking could take place in the absence of the explicit use of a joint plan, its presence yielded significantly greater success. One advantage of the solo plan was that the robot would always be ready to generate actions, and could thus adapt if the human intervened at the wrong time, whereas in the joint plan the robot expected the human to take his/her turn. Interestingly, when the robot represented the action as involving a joint plan, gaze provided a highly potent nonverbal cue that facilitated successful collaboration and reduced errors in the absence of verbal communication. These results support the cooperative stance in human social cognition, and suggest that cooperative robots should employ joint plans, fully communicate them in order to sustain effective collaboration while being ready to adapt if the human makes a midstream mistake.

This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, where...

One of the defining characteristics of human cognition is our outstanding capacity to cooperate. A central requirement for cooperation is the ability to establish a "shared plan"-which defines the interlaced actions of the two cooperating agents-in real time, and even to negotiate this shared plan during its execution. In the current research we identify the requirements for cooperation, extending our earlier work in this area. These requirements include the ability to negotiate a shared plan using spoken language, to learn new component actions within that plan, based on visual observation and kinesthetic demonstration, and finally to coordinate all of these functions in real time. We present a cognitive system that implements these requirements, and demonstrate the system's ability to allow a Nao humanoid robot to learn a non-trivial cooperative task in real-time. We further provide a concrete demonstration of how the real-time learning capability can be easily deployed on different platform, in this case the iCub humanoid. The results are considered in the context of how the development of language in the human infant provides a powerful lever in the development of cooperative plans from lower-level sensorimotor capabilities.

One particular concern of the 2010 Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behaviour was the degree to which the behaviours of human and nonhuman animals might be interpreted as the result of the same cognitive mechanisms. Here, we examine three examples in rats (causal-reasoning, sensitivity to the absence of stimuli, and the relationship between effort and reward) where higherorder mental processes might be invoked as explanations of the observed behaviour. In each case we argue that alternative accounts, based on "lower" mental processes, are also consistent with the observed data. On the basis of the principle of parsimony, enshrined as a grounding assumption of comparative psychology in C. Lloyd Morgan's Canon, the existence of such alternative accounts means that the available evidence does not licence the conclusion that non-human animals display evidence of human-like cognitive processes in these areas.

Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, that is, cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, we also argue that the success of cognitive archaeology doesn't necessarily require well-developed cognitive theories: success might instead lead to them.