Coevolution Of Cognition Research Articles

Analogy as a Catalyst for Cumulative Cultural Evolution.

Analogies, broadly defined, map novel concepts onto familiar concepts, making them essential for perception, reasoning, and communication. We argue that analogy-building served a critical role in the evolution of cumulative culture by allowing humans to learn and transmit complex behavioural sequences that would otherwise be too cognitively demanding or opaque to acquire. The emergence of a protolanguage consisting of simple labels would have provided early humans with the cognitive tools to build explicit analogies and to communicate them to others. This focus on analogy-building can shed new light on the coevolution of cognition and culture and addresses recent calls for better integration of the field of cultural evolution with cognitive science.

Ritual explained: interdisciplinary answers to Tinbergen's four questions.

Convergent developments across social scientific disciplines provide evidence that rituals are a psychologically prepared and culturally inherited behavioural hallmark of our species. The dramatic diversity of ritual practices ranges from simple greetings to elaborate religious ceremonies, from the benign to life-threatening. Yet our scientific understanding of this core human trait remains limited. Explaining the universality, functionality and diversity of ritual requires insight from multiple disciplines. This special issue integrates research from anthropology, archaeology, biology, primatology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies and demography to build an interdisciplinary account of ritual. The objective is to contribute to an integrative explanation of ritual by addressing Tinbergen's four key questions. These include answering ultimate questions about the (i) phylogeny and (ii) adaptive functions of ritual; and proximate questions about the (iii) mechanisms and (iv) ontogeny of ritual. The intersection of these four complementary lines of inquiry yields new avenues for theory and research into this fundamental aspect of the human condition, and in so doing, into the coevolution of cognition and culture. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.

Thinking Fast and Slow on Networks: Co-evolution of Cognition and Cooperation in Structured Populations

Spatial structure is one of the most studied mechanisms in evolutionary game theory. Here, we explore the consequences of spatial structure for a question which has received considerable empirical and theoretical attention in recent years, but has not yet been studied from a network perspective: whether cooperation relies on intuitive predispositions or deliberative self-control. We examine this question using a model which integrates the “dual-process” framework from cognitive science with evolutionary game theory, and considers the evolution of agents who are embedded within a social network and only interact with their neighbors. In line with past work in well-mixed populations, we find that selection favors either the intuitive defector strategy which never deliberates, or the dual-process cooperator strategy which intuitively cooperates but uses deliberation to switch to defection in Prisoner’s Dilemma games. We find that sparser networks (i.e., smaller average degree) facilitate the success of dual-process cooperators over intuitive defectors, while also reducing the level of deliberation that dual-process cooperators engage in; and that these results generalize across different kinds of networks. These observations demonstrate the important role that spatial structure can have not just on the evolution of cooperation, but on the co-evolution of cognition and cooperation.

Plio-Pleistocene Foundations of Hominin Musicality: Coevolution of Cognition, Sociality, and Music

Today, music is ubiquitous, highly valued in all known cultures, playing many roles in human daily life. The ethnographic study of the music of extant human foragers makes this quite apparent. Moreover, music is ancient. Sophisticated bird-bone and ivory flutes dated from 40 kya reveal an even earlier musical-technological tradition. So is music likely to be an entrenched feature of human social life during the long passage to behavioral modernity—say, by 150 kya—or earlier? In this article I sketch an evolutionary model that focuses on hominin vocal musicality and communication in the Pleistocene, tracking between series of phenotypes and changes in ecological, social, cognitive, and informational contexts. The model links musicality and protomusic to a bigger picture of hominin socio-cognitive evolution, making some connections clearer, motivating further theorizing and the search for new evidence.

On the Coevolution of Cognition and Consciousness

In this article it is argued that an evolutionary perspective leads to the view that adaptation and learning is a widespread and old property of living organisms, even as old as life itself. Cognition, defined as knowledge processing mediated by a centralised nervous system, is suggested mainly to be based on the same principles as non-neural adaptive processes. The emergence of conscious cognition, however, is seen as a major transition in the evolution of life, although it appears in different degrees and at various stages in evolution. Both cognition and consciousness depend on the organisation and complexity of the organism, primarily with regard to the nervous system. Computational and neurophysiological approaches are discussed, in particular some experimental attempts to determine anatomical, physiological and physical correlates to consciousness. It is argued that an evolutionary perspective suggests an interactionistic solution to the mind-brain problem, i.e. the question of subjective experience. In an interactionistic perspective consciousness can be understandable as a biological phenomenon. It can be regarded as a driving force in evolution, amplifying and improving the adaptive and cognitive processes of an organism.

Spatial evolutionary game theory: Hawks and Doves revisited

We consider a spatial generalization of evolutionary game theory in which strategies are distributed over a spatial array of sites. We assume that the strategy corresponding to a given site has local interactions with the strategies sitting on neighbouring sites, and that the strategies change if neighbouring strategies are doing better. After briefly setting the stage with a formal definition of spatial evolutionary game theory, we consider the spatial extension of the Hawk-Dove game, and we show that the results are qualitatively different from those obtained from classical evolutionary game theory. For example, the proportion of Hawks in the population is in general lower in the spatial game than in the classical one. We also consider spatial generalizations of the extensions of the Hawk-Dove game obtained by including strategies such as Retaliator and Bully. Here, too, the results from the spatial game are very different from the classical results. In particular, with space Retaliator is a much more successful strategy than one would expect from classical considerations. This suggests that, in general, spatial structure may facilitate the evolution of strategies such as Retaliator, which do not necessarily prosper classically, and which are reminiscent of the \`nice', \`provokable' and `forgiving' strategies which seem to play a central role in the evolution of cooperation. The results indicate that including spatial structure in evolutionary game theory is a fruitful extension.