Origins Of Human Cognition Research Articles

Recent Development of Brain Organoids for Biomedical Application.

Over the years, scientists have studied the behavior and anatomy of many animals to understand the own species. However, despite the continuous efforts, it is often difficult to know for certain how the brain works due to the differences between the brains of animals and the human brain. While the use of animal models for research continues, the origin of human cognition and neurological disorders needs further elucidation. To that end, in vitro organoids that exhibit in vivo characteristics of the human brain have been recently developed. These brain-like organoids enable researchers to dive deeper into understanding the human brain, its neurological structures, and the causes of neurological pathologies. This paper reviews the recent developments in the regeneration of brain-like organoids using Matrigel and other alternatives. Further, gel-free methods that may enhance the regeneration process of organoids are discussed. Finally, the vascularized brain organoid growth and development in both in vitro and in vivo conditions are detailed.

English language teachers’ appropriation of tools in the Singapore classrooms: a socio-cultural analysis

ABSTRACT Teacher education research continues to show a gulf between teaching practices advocated in teacher preparation and practices adopted by beginning teachers in schools. Informed by the sociocultural perspective on teacher learning that foregrounds the social origin of human cognition, this article reports a qualitative study to investigate the sociocultural influences on the teaching of three beginning teachers in Singapore secondary schools. The findings demonstrate the need to take into account the role of larger structures in the talk and actions of teachers in order to understand their classroom practices. The article concludes with a consideration of some implications for teacher education.

Investigating Behaviour and Face Encoding in a Hypothetical Real-World Social Contract: Handwashing in Hazardous Health Settings

Investigations into the evolutionary origins of human cognition has shown that individuals’ memory for others is influenced by the latter’s behaviour in social contracts. Such research is primarily based on hypothetical or more abstract forms of social contracts, whereas an application of this knowledge to everyday health behaviours can be of great value. To address this, the current study investigated whether participants who were asked to imagine themselves in a hypothetical hazardous health scenario showed differential response sensitivity (d’) and latency (RT) to faces of hospital staff tagged with contrasting hand hygiene before touching patients: clean hands, dirty hands, or unknown hand-washing behaviour (control). The test used a two alternative forced-choice (2AFC: “old/new”) face recognition paradigm. The findings showed that d’ to dirty and clean hands was similar, but higher than for controls. Moreover, d’ was not affected by the occupation of hospital staff (nurses vs porters). The absence of memory gains towards clean or dirty hands points to the need for new strategies to remind patients to observe (and remember) the hand hygiene of others when exposed to hazardous health environments.

(No) Empathy for the Monkey? Book Review of “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition”

About ninety years ago, Lev Vygotsky stated that most of our higher mental functions are culturally derived, and therefore that the uniqueness of humanity was in our ability to create history (Vygotsky, 1934/1997). Although he was more interested by how phylogeny and culture merge during ontogeny, he nevertheless left us with one important question: what happened in the evolution of the human race that allowed the development of culture, and our inscription into history? In 1999, Michael Tomasello presented in his book ‘The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition’ more than ten years of research he did on the subject, comparing young children’s cognition and the abilities of great apes. He came to the conclusion that the only significant cognitive difference is our capacity to share and understand intentions – or at least our willingness to do so (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005), a capacity that is essential for the development of cumulative cultural evolutioni. However, it will be argued here that Tomasello overlooked important findings in the mechanisms of evolution as well as in the cognition and socialisation of great apes, making his theory stand on arguable foundations. By understating the social skills of other hominids and simplifying the relation between culture and theory of mind, the importance of other cognitive abilities in this debate is often forgotten.

Ascetic Aesthetics

Ascetic Aesthetics Coby Dowdell Tony C. Brown, The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Pp. xxi + 278. $82.50. Gordon Campbell, The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Pp. xiv + 257. $29.95. Timothy M. Costelloe , The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013 ). Pp. x + 350 . $95.00 . Timothy Costelloe usefully characterizes the unique constellation of ideas canvassed by these three studies of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and practice as “a search for some common feature or quality in the nature of things and/or the [End Page 117] structure of human beings, which, once discovered, might unlock the door to understanding aesthetic experience” (131). While recent years have witnessed a flurry of monographs dedicated to both eighteenth-century aestheticism and Enlightenment philosophy, few have thoughtfully attended to the transdiscursive circulation of aesthetic categories in contiguous areas such as republican politics, imperialist expansion, and leisure practice. Taken collectively, the three works considered here make a substantive contribution to such interdisciplinary developments, framing investigations of aesthetic experience within larger eighteenth-century epistemological questions concerning the origin of human cognition and the structural limits of human thought. Unlike some studies in the past, Gordon Campbell’s The Hermit in the Garden, Tony Brown’s The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage, and Timothy Costelloe’s The British Aesthetic Tradition refuse generalized homological connections between aestheticism and related knowledges, insisting instead on a rigorous attention to the specific argumentative parameters governing aesthetic theory and Enlightenment philosophy. The result is a bevy of suggestive and, indeed, dazzling observations on eighteenth-century modes of thought. Taken together, these texts delineate what we might identify as an aesthetics of ascetics, an understanding of aesthetic experience as a conceptual bridge suturing humanity’s engagement with the precognitive world that is grounded in the uniquely liminal status of the eighteenth-century hermit. Campbell offers a fascinating account of the garden hermit from late antiquity to the present day. Placing an especial stress on the tradition of the Georgian hermit in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the initial chapters trace the ubiquity of the figure from Queen Caroline’s Richmond hermitage and Cobham’s Stowe hermitage in the early part of the century through to the hermit’s decline in the early part of the nineteenth century. In chapter three, Campbell extends his scope to provide evidence of not only imaginary hermits, whose “presence was indicated by furnishings, and temporary absence by objects such as eyeglasses or a book left on the table,” but also “corporeal hermits,” men hired to fill the requisite role by landowners whose artificial hermitages remained yet in desuetude (56). Aside from the novelty of such outlandish examples, what will be of particular interest to scholars of eighteenth-century cultural history are Campbell’s observations on the provenance of the garden hermit. That said, coupling Campbell’s genealogy with Brown’s suggestive discussion of the primitive and Costelloe’s meticulous accounting of the British aesthetic tradition does find The Hermit in Garden reluctant to address a much larger set of cultural questions posed by these eremitical icons. While the theoretical register of The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage will invariably alienate certain readers (couched as it is in a fairly rigorous poststructuralist framework), Brown’s book offers an all too rare example of contemporary critical theory brought to bear on a meticulously historicized account of how eighteenth-century thinkers, confronted with the troubling difference of putatively New World cultures, sought to conceptualize non-European communities. Such a task presents the inescapable figure of the primitive as an epistemological aporia that breaches the “anthropological security,” or stable sense of self-in-the-world, of European subjectivity (xii). Over the course of his first three chapters, Brown explains how the challenge posed by thinking the primitive occasions the aesthetic, which is in turn acted out through the figure of the savage (xvii). Focusing on what he calls in his subtitle “An Enlightenment Problematic,” Brown laudably moves discussion of self–other relations beyond the strictly demarcated realms of race, nation, and culture into that...

The Analogical Peacock Hypothesis: The Sexual Selection of Mind-Reading and Relational Cognition in Human Communication

This integrative review presents a novel hypothesis as a basis for integrating two evolutionary viewpoints on the origins of human cognition and communication, the sexual selection of human mental capacities, and the social brain hypothesis. This new account suggests that mind-reading social skills increased reproductive success and consequently became targets for sexual selection. The hypothesis proposes that human communication has three purposes: displaying mind-reading abilities, aligning and maintaining representational parity between individuals to enable displays, and the exchange of propositional information. Intelligence, creativity, language, and humor are mental fitness indicators that signal an individual's quality to potential mates, rivals, and allies. Five features central to the proposed display mechanism unify these indicators, the relational combination of concepts, large conceptual knowledge networks, processing speed, contextualization, and receiver knowledge. Sufficient between-mind alignment of conceptual networks allows displays based upon within-mind conceptual mappings. Creative displays communicate previously unnoticed relational connections and novel conceptual combinations demonstrating an ability to read a receiver's mind. Displays are costly signals of mate quality with costs incurred in the developmental production of the neural apparatus required to engage in complex displays and opportunity costs incurred through time spent acquiring cultural knowledge. Displays that are fast, novel, spontaneous, contextual, topical, and relevant are hard-to-fake for lower quality individuals. Successful displays result in elevated social status and increased mating options. The review addresses literatures on costly signaling, sexual selection, mental fitness indicators, and the social brain hypothesis; drawing implications for nonverbal and verbal communication.

Monkey See, Monkey Read

Baboons can distinguish between written words and nonwords.

Methodologische Überlegungen zu tierischen Überzeugungen

A theory of the beliefs of non-human animals is not closed to us, only because we do not have beliefs of their kind. Starting from a theory of human beliefs and working on a building block model of propositional attitudes a theory of animal beliefs is viable. Such a theory is an example of the broader conception of a heterophenomenological approach to animal cognition. The theory aims at outlining the crucial differences between human and animal beliefs as well as the relations between these attitudes and theories of them. By this it contributes both to a theory of human cognition and to a theory of the evolutionary origin of human cognition. The capacities of animals can thus be appreciated without making animals minor humans. Human cognition can be seen in its uniqueness without cutting the ties to its evolutionary origin.

An Eastern View of Apes and Monkeys

Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior . T. Matsuzawa, Ed. Springer, Tokyo, 2001. 599 pp. $129, €119, ¥9,500. ISBN 4-431-70290-3. In a volume that highlights Japanese contributions to primatology, Matsuzawa and his colleagues explore a broad range of topics from the fields of behavioral ecology, psychology, and cognitive science.

The cultural origins of human cognition

The cultural origins of human cognition

Et tu Homo sapiens ?

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition . Michael Tomasello. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999. 254 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-674-00070-6. Tomasello examines how, and why, humans differ from other species, particularly other primates. He argues that the we are distinguished by our unique capacity to put ourselves into the minds of others, which has allowed us to learn by imitation and inform by teaching.