The Evolution Of Cognitive Psychology

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Psychology - Cognition, grade: 1, Egerton University, language: English, abstract: This essay will give an overview of the evolution of cognitive psychology. It will discuss the emergence of cognitive psychology and its interdisciplinary perspective. It will also assess the effects of the decline of behaviorism on the discipline of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is one of the core branches of psychology that is concerned with the study of mental processes. It deals with mental processes involving the use of the brain in problem-solving, memory and language. Cognitive psychology attempts to explain the correlation between the biological functions of the brain and the human mind in understanding the ambient environment. As such, it explains how individuals diagnose life issues, understand and solve problems in the day-to-day lives through their mental processes, which plays the principal role of mediating between stimulus from the environment and the response. Ordinarily, human beings exhibit several psychological manifestations. For instance, people possess the thinking ability, which enables them to reason out on diverse aspects of life, and they are also able to remember past events in their lives. They also portray perception on new happenings in life in an attempt to construct a realistic way of reasoning to unravel mysterious phenomena. Moreover, human beings have the ability to learn new skills from their day-to-day experiences and keep the memory of different episodes. From a psychological perspective, these are all the works of cognition. Ideally, cognition refers to thinking, a mental process through which people learn; reason and solve problems. So cognitive psychologists focus on how human beings acquire information from the environment, especially in the form of a stimulus and process it through mental cognitive processes. The processed information is then stored to keep the memory of life events. Cognitive psychology tends to focus on biology more than psychology; thus, it shows a significant lack of the behaviorism aspect of classical psychology.

In the last decade, "evolutionary psychology" has come to refer exclusively to research on human mentality and behavior, motivated by a nativist interpretation of how evolution operates. This book encompasses the behavior and mentality of nonhuman as well as human animals and a full range of evolutionary approaches. Rather than a collection by and for the like-minded, it is a debate about how evolutionary processes have shaped cognition. The debate is divided into five sections: Orientations, on the phylogenetic, ecological, and psychological/comparative approaches to the evolution of cognition; Categorization, on how various animals parse their environments, how they represent objects and events and the relations among them; Causality, on whether and in what ways nonhuman animals represent cause and effect relationships; Consciousness, on whether it makes sense to talk about the evolution of consciousness and whether the phenomenon can be investigated empirically in nonhuman animals; and Culture, on the cognitive requirements for nongenetic transmission of information and the evolutionary consequences of such cultural exchange. ContributorsBernard Balleine, Patrick Bateson, Michael J. Beran, M. E. Bitterman, Robert Boyd, Nicola Clayton, Juan Delius, Anthony Dickinson, Robin Dunbar, D.P. Griffiths, Bernd Heinrich, Cecilia Heyes, William A. Hillix, Ludwig Huber, Nicholas Humphrey, Masako Jitsumori, Louis Lefebvre, Nicholas Mackintosh, Euan M. Macphail, Peter Richerson, Duane M. Rumbaugh, Sara Shettleworth, Martina Siemann, Kim Sterelny, Michael Tomasello, Laura Weiser, Alexandra Wells, Carolyn Wilczynski, David Sloan Wilson

The field of evolutionary cognitive psychology has stimulated considerable interest and debate among cognitive psychologists and those working in related areas. In this collection, leading experts evaluate the status of this new field, providing a critical analysis of its most controversial hypotheses. These hypotheses have far reaching implications for cognition, including a modular view of the mind, which rejects, in its extreme form, any general learning or reasoning abilities. Some evolutionary psychologists have also proposed content-dependent accounts of conditional reasoning and probability judgements, which in turn have significant, and equally controversial, implications about the nature of human reasoning and decision making. The contributions range from those that are highly critical of the hypotheses to those that support and develop them. The result is a uniquely balanced, cutting-edge evaluation of the field that will be of interest to psychologists, philosophers and those in related subjects who wish to find out what evolutionary considerations can, and cannot, tell us about the human mind.

An essential reference for the new discipline of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience that defines the field's approach of applying evolutionary theory to guide brain-behavior investigations. Since Darwin we have known that evolution has shaped all organisms and that biological organs—including the brain and the highly crafted animal nervous system—are subject to the pressures of natural and sexual selection. It is only relatively recently, however, that the cognitive neurosciences have begun to apply evolutionary theory and methods to the study of brain and behavior. This landmark reference documents and defines the emerging field of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience. Chapters by leading researchers demonstrate the power of the evolutionary perspective to yield new data, theory, and insights on the evolution and functional modularity of the brain. Evolutionary cognitive neuroscience covers all areas of cognitive neuroscience, from nonhuman brain-behavior relationships to human cognition and consciousness, and each section of Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience addresses a different adaptive problem. After an introductory section that outlines the basic tenets of both theory and methodology of an evolutionarily informed cognitive neuroscience, the book treats neuroanatomy from ontogenetic and phylogenetic perspectives and explores reproduction and kin recognition, spatial cognition and language, and self-awareness and social cognition. Notable findings include a theory to explain the extended ontogenetic and brain development periods of big-brained organisms, fMRI research on the neural correlates of romantic attraction, an evolutionary view of sex differences in spatial cognition, a theory of language evolution that draws on recent research on mirror neurons, and evidence for a rudimentary theory of mind in nonhuman primates. A final section discusses the ethical implications of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience and the future of the field. Contributors: C. Davison Ankney, Simon Baron-Cohen, S. Marc Breedlove, William Christiana, Michael Corballis, Robin I. M. Dunbar, Russell Fernald, Helen Fisher, Jonathan Flombaum, Farah Focquaert, Steven J.C. Gaulin, Aaron Goetz, Kevin Guise, Ruben C. Gur, William D. Hopkins, Farzin Irani, Julian Paul Keenan, Michael Kimberly, Stephen Kosslyn, Sarah L. Levin, Lori Marino, David Newlin, Ivan S. Panyavin, Shilpa Patel, Webb Phillips, Steven M. Platek, David Andrew Puts, Katie Rodak, J. Philippe Rushton, Laurie Santos, Todd K. Shackelford, Kyra Singh, Sean T. Stevens, Valerie Stone, Jaime W. Thomson, Gina Volshteyn, Paul Root Wolpe

Cognitive Evolution provides an in-depth exploration of the history and development of cognition, from the beginning of life on Earth to present-day humans. Drawing together evolutionary and comparative research, this book presents a unique perspective on the evolution of human cognition. Adopting an information processing perspective – that is, from inputs to outputs, with all the mental processes in between, Boles provides a systematic overview of the evolutionary development of cognition and of its sensation, movement, and perception components. The book is supported by long-established evolutionary theories and backed up by a wealth of recent research from the growing field of cognitive evolution and cognitive neuroscience to provide a comprehensive text on the subject. Cognitive Evolution is an essential read for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of cognitive and evolutionary psychology.

How do animals perceive the world, learn, remember, search for food or mates, communicate, and find their way around? Do any nonhuman animals count, imitate one another, use a language, or have a culture? What are the uses of cognition in nature and how might it have evolved? What is the current status of Darwin's claim that other species share the same "mental powers" as humans, but to different degrees? In this completely revised second edition of Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior, Sara Shettleworth addresses these questions, among others, by integrating findings from psychology, behavioral ecology, and ethology in a unique and wide-ranging synthesis of theory and research on animal cognition, in the broadest sense--from species-specific adaptations of vision in fish and associative learning in rats to discussions of theory of mind in chimpanzees, dogs, and ravens. She reviews the latest research on topics such as episodic memory, metacognition, and cooperation and other-regarding behavior in animals, as well as recent theories about what makes human cognition unique. In every part of this new edition, Shettleworth incorporates findings and theoretical approaches that have emerged since the first edition was published in 1998. The chapters are now organized into three sections: Fundamental Mechanisms (perception, learning, categorization, memory), Physical Cognition (space, time, number, physical causation), and Social Cognition (social knowledge, social learning, communication). Shettleworth has also added new chapters on evolution and the brain and on numerical cognition, and a new chapter on physical causation that integrates theories of instrumental behavior with discussions of foraging, planning, and tool using.

In The Evolution of Mind, outstanding figures on the cutting edge of evolutionary psychology follow clues provided by current neuroscientific evidence to illuminate many puzzling questions of human cognitive evolution. With contributions from psychologists, ethologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, the book offers a broad range of approaches to explore the mysteries of the mind's evolution - from investigating the biological functions of human cognition to drawing comparisons between human and animal cognitive abilities.

Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the adaptive problems early humans faced in ancestral human environments, the nature of psychological mechanisms natural selection shaped to deal with those ancient problems, and the ability of the resulting evolved psychological mechanisms to deal with the problems people face in the modern world. Evolutionary psychology is currently advancing our understanding of altruism, moral behavior, family violence, sexual aggression, warfare, aesthetics, the nature of language, and gender differences in mate choice and perception. It is helping us understand the relationship between cognitive science, developmental psychology, behavior genetics, personality, and social psychology. Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology provides an up-to-date review of the ideas, issues, and applications of contemporary evolutionary psychology. It is suitable for senior undergraduates, first-year graduate students, or professionals who wish to become conversant with the major issues currently shaping the emergence of this dynamic new field. It will be interesting to psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anyone using new developments in the theory of evolution to gain new insights into human behavior.