Evolution and Cognitive Development

Abstract

The purpose of brain and mind is to allow the individual to attend to, process, and guide behavioral responses to the types of information and conditions that have covaried with survival or reproductive prospects during the species’ evolutionary history (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994; Gallistel, 2000; Geary, 2004). These conditions include information patterns generated by the body shape and movement of conspecifics (Blake, 1993; Downing, Jiang, Shuman, & Kanwisher, 2001) and by species of predator and prey (Barton & Dean, 1993), as well as by environmental features (e.g., star patterns) used in navigation (Gallistel, 1990), among many other conditions. As emphasized by many evolutionary psychologists, when such information patterns are consistent from one generation to the next, then modular brain and cognitive systems that identify and process these restricted forms of information should evolve, as illustrated by the invariant end of the continuum in Figure 4.1. The systems may also include implicit (below the level of conscious awareness) decision-making heuristics (e.g., Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001). These are cognitive “rules of thumb” that represent evolved behavioral responses to evolutionarily significant conditions. In some species of bird, as an example, parental feeding of chicks can be described as a simple heuristic, “Feed the smallest, if there is plenty of food; otherwise, feed the largest.” Davis and Todd (1999) demonstrated how these implicit and simple