In praise of neuroscience (for once)

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Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Wednesday, 01 July 2009 14:16

Written by Nicolas Baumard

Here, at ICCI, we are used to being skeptical about the contributions of neurosciences to the understanding of culture (see the posts on reading and religion, or Mixing Memories's post on colour categorisation). Indeed, very often, neuroscientific studies of cultural phenomena do not do more than replicating psychological experiments and showing that cultural phenomena involve the brain (in case you were thinking that people use their stomach to think of the novel they are reading, now you have good evidences that actually they use their brain...).

This skepticism does not mean that the neurosciences are irrelevant for anthropology. Far from it.

For instance, people find it doubtful that culture could be shaped by innate cognitive dispositions. They notice that cultural objects such as mathematics or writing systems are recent, variable, and acquired by learning. No selective pressure could have shaped the human brain to facilitate reading or high-level mathematics. From this valid premise, several authors have jumped to the conclusion that the cultural competence of the human species must have arisen from the novel emergence of a vastly flexible domain-general learning capacity. This hypothesis, indeed, lies at the heart of the ‘‘standard social sciences model'' (Tooby and Cosmides 1992) or the "blank slate model" (Pinker, 2002). Homo sapiens would therefore no longer owe its main dispositions to its biological architecture. Thanks to its plasticity, the human brain, more than that of any other animal species, would be capable of absorbing essentially any form of culture. It would be meaningless to investigate the cognitive constraints on culture.

However, parts of the human cortex are specialized for some cultural domains such as reading and arithmetic. Representations of letter strings and of numbers occupy reproducible locations within large-scale macromaps, respectively in the left occipito-temporal and bilateral intraparietal cortex. Furthermore, recent fMRI studies reveal a systematic architecture within these areas. Take the case of reading.

Read more: In praise of neuroscience (for once)

Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation

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Category: Publications

Published on Wednesday, 01 July 2009 07:37

Written by Dan Sperber

From the Language and Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen: Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., Gertie Hoymann, Federico Rossano, Jan Peter de Ruiter, Kyung-Eun Yoon and Stephen C. Levinson  (2009). "Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation." PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.)  June 30, 2009 vol. 106 no. 26 10587-10592. The whole text is freely availalble here.

Abstract: Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.

Daniel Nettle on cultural variation as an evolved characteristic

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Category: Publications

Published on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 11:31

Written by Dan Sperber

In the JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) Volume 15 Issue 2 (June 2009), an interesting article by Daniel Nettle entitled: "Beyond nature versus culture: cultural variation as an evolved characteristic"

Abstract: There is a perceived dichotomy between evolutionary explanations for behaviour and social or cultural ones. In this essay, I attempt to dissolve this dichotomy by pointing out that organisms are susceptible to social or cultural influence because they have evolved mechanisms that make them so. I review two classes of evolutionary explanation for cultural variation, 'evoked' and 'transmitted' culture, and argue that these two classes of mechanism enrich and strengthen existing social science accounts, as well as making new predictions. I suggest a high degree of mutual compatibility and potential gains from trade between the social and biological sciences.

The article is followed by comments by W.G. Runciman, Robin Dunbar and Robert Layton. The article and the comments are freely available here.

Wine in mind

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Category: Initiatives

Published on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 08:29

Written by Olivier Morin

Two new websites dedicated to the psychology and philosophy of wine are born this month ! Wine Psych is the creation of psychologist and wine consultant Miles Thomas. Wine Mind is the brainchild of our fellow cognitionandculture blogger Ophelia Deroy, and philosopher Barry Smith. Both websites will offer you scientific material (don't miss Wine Mind's excellent bibliography), but will also guide you through wine classes and degustations in London, New York and (for Wine Mind) Paris. Both have started a blog.

Cognition and Culture readers will appreciate Wine Psych's recent post on the cross-cultural psychology of wine tasting (for some cross-cultural psychology of food, see here). Is there any such thing as an "Asian palate", or are intra-cultural variations too important to generalize ? Will the day come when a mellow Chardonnay, with mineral undertones and notes of butter, will be compared to "wakame seaweed, jackfruit and egg custard" ? Meanwhile, at Wine Mind, Ophelia has an hilarious video to remind us of the fact that our perceptions of (French!) wine always had a lot to do with perceived or fantasized cultural differences...

Three cheers to those websites, and to the psychology of wine !

Inverse correlation between norms and behaviour?

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Sunday, 28 June 2009 08:43

Written by Dan Sperber

We know, of course, that people don't strictly abide by the norms they publicly express: the flesh is weak, and so on, but, from an anthropological point of view, it would be surprising to see a complete disconnect between norms and behaviour. Even more surprising would be to see a reverse correlation, that is to have people who insist, "don't do A!" (for instance, don't commit adultery) do A more often than other people who have no strong objection to A. This, however, is exactly what is happening with American conservatives, according to Charles M. Blow (a New York Times's columnist with a blog about all things statistical and their visual expressions) who published on June 27 an op-ed with a fascinating chart (reproduced below) to prove it.

Read more: Inverse correlation between norms and behaviour?

Abstract numbers: Culture or innate core knowledge?

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Category: Publications

Published on Friday, 26 June 2009 14:24

Written by Dan Sperber

"Do abstract numerical concepts depend on language or culture, or do they form a part of humans' innate, core knowledge?" ask Véronique Izard, Coralie Sann, Elizabeth Spelke and Arlette Streri in "Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers" (PNAS June 23, 2009 vol. 106 no. 25 10382-10385).

Abstract : Although infants and animals respond to the approximate number of elements in visual, auditory, and tactile arrays, only human children and adults have been shown to possess abstract numerical representations that apply to entities of all kinds (e.g., 7 samurai, seas, or sins). ... Here we show that newborn infants spontaneously associate stationary, visual-spatial arrays of 4-18 objects with auditory sequences of events on the basis of number. Their performance provides evidence for abstract numerical representations at the start of postnatal experience.

David Sloane Wilson on Evolutionary Psychology

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Category: Publications

Published on Thursday, 25 June 2009 14:37

Written by Dan Sperber

Evolutionary psychology under attack

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 15:34

Written by Dan Sperber

The article in Newsweek, with the telltale title "Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves" is a pathetic misrepresentation of evolutionary psychology, mentioning only work on mate choice and reproduction, giving pride of place to Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer's book on rape, and presenting the controversial claim that human rape is an adaptation as a central dogma of evolutionary psychology as a whole when not even Palmer agrees with it. Cultural diversity is presented as proving evolutionary psychologists wrong, as if, somehow, they had been unaware of it and had had nothing to contribute to its study. Behavioural ecology is represented as diametrically opposed to evolutionary psychology. And so forth. I assume that most readers of this blog are familiar enough with evolutionary psychology not to be misled by such poor reporting (or else Cosmides and Tooby's "Evolutionary psychology: A primer" is still a good place to start) .

Read more: Evolutionary psychology under attack

Interviews with psychologists at Edge.org

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Category: Publications

Published on Sunday, 21 June 2009 15:00

Written by Dan Sperber

In the past few days, Edge.org has posted two interviews of cognition-and-culture interest:

- With Lera Boroditsky on "How does our language shape the way we think?" She says: "For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity."

- With John Bargh, a video interview entitled "The simplifier". He says: "We discovered a new vein of research - the relation between physical and social or psychological concepts - that we came to by taking evolutionary principles seriously and applying them to psychology. We weren't using evolutionary psychology, which has largely been focused on mating and reproduction. Our focus, rather, was in terms of evolutionary biology and the basic principles of natural selection: and that field makes clear that humans must have had these kinds of mechanisms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness."

Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior

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Category: Publications

Published on Monday, 15 June 2009 20:47

Written by Dan Sperber

In Science, 5 June 2009 (Vol. 324. no. 5932, pp. 1298 - 1301)
"Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior"
by Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, Mark G. Thomas

Here is the UCL press release: Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science. High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world.

Read more: Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior

In memoriam: Nicola Knight

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Friday, 12 June 2009 12:35

Written by Dan Sperber

We mourn Nicola Knight who died this Tuesday, June 9, at the age of 33, from a heart attack. He was an active member of this Institute, a friend, a colleague, and a former student of many of us. The day before his death, he sent a new post for this blog, which we publish below.

Nicola was a lecturer and a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford. He held a BSc in Social Anthropology from LSE, an MSc in Human evolution and behaviour from UCL, and a dual PhD in Anthropology and Psychology from the University of Michigan. He had been visiting researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and at the Centre for philosophy of natural and social science, LSE. He had published important articles on normativity, on religion, and on the epistemology of anthropology in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, Cognitive Science, the JRAI, and in several edited volumes. We all felt he would be a major contributor to the development of research in the area of cognition and culture in the years to come.

Our thoughts are with his wife, Maria Doglioli, and his family.

How to bother a pigeon

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Category: Nicola's blog

Published on Tuesday, 09 June 2009 11:17

Written by Nicola Knight

Let me give an illustration of the kind of behaviour I am thinking of. At the bottom of the garden is a large tree. Among the species that occasionally rest on their branches are wood pigeons (similar the common city pigeon, but displaying fewer deformities thanks to a diet that does not entirely consist of cigarette ends). I talk about pigeons not because they are interesting in some relevant respect, but simply because they are fairly heavy birds. The relevance of this fact will become apparent soon.

I have repeatedly observed the following behaviour. One individual, 'A' in the (rather crude - sorry) picture below, is resting on a branch.

After a while, another individual, 'B', lands on the same branch but further away from the trunk. I don't know whether pigeons' folk physics include principles of leverage, but what inevitably happens is that upon B's landing the branch flexes and A loses balance and starts wildly flapping its wings in an attempt to regain it. Pigeon B does not appear to have chosen the branch in order to interact with A. On no occasion have I seen A expressing its displeasure to B through aggressive displays, although I am no expert in this field and may be missing important behavioural cues; for argument's sake, let us assume that A does not remonstrate.

My question is: what does A make of B's behaviour?

Read more: How to bother a pigeon

Anthropology in crisis - what, still?

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Category: Harvey Whitehouse's blog

Published on Sunday, 07 June 2009 20:50

Written by Harvey Whitehouse

Fifteen years ago, Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart declared that "anthropology has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember" (here). Has anything really changed? Today, anthropology remains a discipline riddled with rival paradigms, ferocious disputes, and fleeting fashions. Few basic principles of theory and method are agreed upon and even the general nature of anthropological knowledge is continually being contested. Cumulative theory building is rare and difficult to sustain. Why?

Perhaps part of the answer is that humans are not naturally adept at reasoning about complex social morphology. As our societies have grown in size and complexity, we have witnessed the emergence of a vast plethora of specialized offices and corporate groups based on a broad range of sorting principles: kinship, descent, rank, caste, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Categories of office, coalition, and class are no more than idealized models of how the social world is organized, rather than precise descriptions of how it operates on the ground but they provide robust schemas for individual behaviour, cumulatively instantiating patterns that people reciprocally interpret in terms of those schemas. These schemas, however, are a relatively modern and potentially dispensable accretion to human thinking, too recent in our evolutionary history to have led to specialized cognitive skills for reasoning about social complexity. The same could not be said of human reasoning in many other domains.

As part of our evolutionary endowment, we possess dedicated intuitive machinery for reasoning about physical properties (such as solidity and gravity), biological properties (such as essentialized differences between natural kinds), and psychological properties (such as a capacity to empathize with suffering). Our intuitive physics, intuitive biology, and intuitive psychology may have to be substantially revised in light of the discoveries ofscientific physics/ biology/ psychology but our intuitions often also deliver useful reference points and pedagogic tools. For instance, while our intuitions about the discreteness and stability of natural kind taxonomies are inconsistent with the diachronic character of evolutionary processes, nevertheless they provide a convenient on-the-hoof framework within which to conceptualize speciation.

Problems arise, however, when some of our intuitively grounded ontological commitments also serve as markers of identity.

Read more: Anthropology in crisis - what, still?

The evolution of laughter

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Category: Publications

Published on Friday, 05 June 2009 10:21

Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in Current Biology: "Reconstructing the Evolution of Laughter in Great Apes and Humans" by Marina Davila Ross, Michael J Owren, & Elke Zimmermann

Summary: Human emotional expressions, such as laughter, are argued to have their origins in ancestral nonhuman primate displays. To test this hypothesis, the current work examined the acoustics of tickle-induced vocalizations from infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, as well as tickle-induced laughter produced by human infants. Resulting acoustic data were then coded as character states and submitted to quantitative phylogenetic analysis. Acoustic outcomes revealed both important similarities and differences among the five species. Furthermore, phylogenetic trees reconstructed from the acoustic data matched the well-established trees based on comparative genetics. Taken together, the results provide strong evidence that tickling-induced laughter is homologous in great apes and humans and support the more general postulation of phylogenetic continuity from nonhuman displays to human emotional expressions. Findings also show that distinctively human laughter characteristics such as predominantly regular, stable voicing and consistently egressive airflow are nonetheless traceable to characteristics of shared ancestors with great apes.

Attribution

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Category: Brian's blog

Published on Wednesday, 03 June 2009 13:11

Written by Brian Malley

Some of the most enduring kinds of cultural traditions have been interpretive in nature.  My research has focused on the interaction of cognition and culture surrounding the Christian Bible, but in this series I am explore a broader general model of interpretive traditions.  This is the fourth post in the series: interested readers may find the rest of the posts in "Brian's blog."

Recently I have been reading about Shaolin traditions of kungfu, chigung, and meditation, and I have repeatedly encountered the claim that Buddhist meditators centuries ago intuited the structure of the universe as it has been revealed by modern cosmology and quantum mechanics.  These sorts of claims are not uncommon in scriptural traditions, and it is easy to find similar Muslim or Christian claims that their scriptures anticipated modern scientific discoveries and technological achievements.  Of course, such claims are plausible principally to people who already subscribe to tradition, and outsiders looking at the same text are seldom impressed.

There are a couple of different processes involved in this phenomenon, but the critical one for my present purpose is the attribution of a representation to an interpretand, in this case, a religious text.

As I define it, an interpretation is a mental representation of the form [interpretand] says/means/teaches [interpretive representation].  This relationship says/means/teaches I call attribution, because it involves the attribution of a concept or statement or impression to the interpretand.  (My use of interpretation is unusual in that it includes the attribution as part of an interpretation along with the interpretive representation.)  In this post I will attempt to circumscribe and, to some degree, characterize the relationship of attribution, and to point out what I think is significant about it.

Read more: Attribution

Cross-cultural differences in argumentation

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Category: Hugo's blog

Published on Tuesday, 02 June 2009 23:00

Written by Hugo Mercier

Richard Nisbett and his collaborators have carried out an extensive program of experimental cross-cultural psychology, mostly aimed at establishing differences between the ways of thinking of Easterners and Westerners. Some of the differences they have studied pertain to the domain of argumentation: Easterners are supposed not to be really bothered by contradiction (making arguing tricky) and to frown upon the debates and discussions that threaten social harmony. These claims are based partly on a survey of the anthropological, sociological and historical literature, partly on some experimental results. I have attempted to reinterpret some of these data in order to show that the situation is somewhat more complicated than could be thought at first (for more detail, see my submitted paper). Recent scholarship shows that the ancient Chinese were in fact skilled arguers, and that debates and dissension were rife during both Chinese and Japanese history. The experimental data is also open to weaker reinterpretations, highlighting the commonalities between Eastern and Western style of thoughts, as well as the extreme context-dependency of cognitive mechanisms.

Han Fei, the Chinese Cicero                       Cicero, the Roman Han Fei

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PhD Studentship to study Facebook social norms

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Category: Jobs

Published on Tuesday, 02 June 2009 08:41

Written by Dan Sperber

Read more: PhD Studentship to study Facebook social norms

Is language a replicator?

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Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog

Published on Sunday, 31 May 2009 23:00

Written by Nicolas Claidière

In a recent review Mark Pagel argues that language is a culturally transmitted replicator (Pagel, 2009).

Pagel starts by offering a useful update on phylogenetic methods and then uses a comparison between genetics and language phylogenetic trees to reveal similarities between cultural and biological evolution. He argues that borrowing and corruption, which could in principle be very important in the case of languages and make phylogenetic reconstruction difficult if not impossible, are, in fact, very limited. Pagel notes: "If languages are not the ‘closed shop’ to outside influences that we have come to expect of eukaryotic organisms with sequestered germ lines, the strength of descent with modification in language trees shows that the cultural processes of language teaching and learning that transmit language from one generation to the next can have a surprisingly high fidelity and can show resistance to outside effects." To put it briefly, phylogenetic trees show, or so it is claimed, that languages are faithfully reproduced from one generation to the next.

Figure 1: The phylogenetic tree of Indo-European languages, based on the Swadesh list of 200 words.

Read more: Is language a replicator?

Truth among the...

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Saturday, 30 May 2009 23:30

Written by Dan Sperber

(Ten year ago or so, Maurice Bloch and I started discussing a basic issue in folk-epistemic, the variety of notions of truth across cultures, and we ran several workshops in Paris with psychologists, historians, and anthropologists on the theme. I would like to revive the discussion, maybe in the form of an online workshop, but first, let me raise the issue on this blog.)

Do considerations of "truth" play a role in human intellectual and social practices in all cultures? Are diverse notions of truth involved both across and within cultures? Are implicit notions of truth involved, and, if so, how do they relate to explicit notions? In which cultural practices and domains of discourse is a notion of truth invoked? Are there institutions and social positions which entertain a privileged relationship with "truth"?

There is a rich philosophical, philological, and historical literature relevant to the issue and concerning literate, and more specifically, scholarly traditions (Ancient Greece, Buddhism, judicial practices, modern science - to mention just two examples, Marcel Détienne's The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, and Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England) . Anthropological literature hardly ever directly addesses the issue (Pascal Boyer's Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse being a notable exception), even if it often contains relevant data collected from a different perspective.

Read more: Truth among the...

Is the left hemisphere more Whorfian than the right one?

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Thursday, 21 May 2009 13:30

Written by Dan Sperber

In the May 19, 2009 issue of PNAS, an article by Wai Ting Siok, Paul Kay, William S. Y. Wang, Alice H. D. Chana, Lin Chen, Kang-Kwong Luk and Li Hai Tan shows that "Language regions of brain are operative in color perception" (article freely available here). It is nice to see how far we are, in this classical area of anthropological debate, from the old nature/nurture all-or-nothing: It turns out the left hemisphere is more Whorfian than the right one!

Here is the abstract: 

Read more: Is the left hemisphere more Whorfian than the right one?

Cultural Attraction among birds

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Category: Hugo Viciana's blog

Published on Tuesday, 19 May 2009 20:43

Written by Hugo Viciana

If we could rewind the tape of cultural history and play it again, would it look like it does today ? Well, this is exactly what Olga Feher and collaborators at the Ofer Tchernichovski lab have tried to find out about zebra finches songs. Their Nature article shows the results of two ingenious series of experiments in cultural transmission. Their work nicely illustrates the phenomenon of attraction in social learning dynamics- a phenomenon that may have more weight in the animal cultures than has been recognized until now. They also provide a rather precise quantification procedure for the study of a multigenerational cultural trait (song learning) under a controlled setting- certainly something that until now you can afford more easily with zebra finches than with human subjects.

Read more: Cultural Attraction among birds

Lectureship at Goldsmiths College, London

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Category: Jobs

Published on Monday, 18 May 2009 22:27

Written by Dan Sperber

The Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, London, a thriving centre of research and teaching with around 450 undergraduates, 100 postgraduates and 30 staff, is seeking an excellent researcher and teacher whose work will complement ongoing research within one of its 6 research clusters: cognition and culture, neurodevelopmental disorders, individual differences and psychopathology, social relationships, cognition, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology plus work psychology. You will have a PhD and a track record of relevant research, published in international peer-reviewed journals, plus evidence of, or clear plans for developing, an externally-funded research programme. You will demonstrate the enthusiasm and skills to teach students, and supervise their research, at all levels of our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. For further information: www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/jobs . Closing date: Monday 8 June 2009.

The Art Instinct : Denis Dutton replies to Roberto Casati

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Category: Roberto's blog

Published on Monday, 11 May 2009 23:00

Written by Denis Dutton

(Editor's note) Denis Dutton is kind enough to reply at length to Roberto Casati's skeptical review of his book, The Art Instinct. The review has sparked a heated debate between Duttonites and Casatites on this blog.

Like most authors, I appreciate any thoughtful analysis of my work, and for me that includes Roberto Casati’s review of my book. I won’t take up all Casati’s provocative points, but just a few, and not in the order he presents them.

Intimidation

At the close of his remarks, Casati says that my “intimidating name-dropping occasionally gets tiresome – "the Iliad, the Cathedral at Chartres, Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, Breughel's Hunters in the Snow, Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" etc. The list he refers to here is in the book’s introduction, where I am describing my intention in the last chapter to discuss the what I take to be Clive Bell’s “cold white peaks of art,” the summits of artistic achievement. The list is therefore to give the reader examples of the what I regard as greatest art in history. It does not, as Casati claims, “go on and on,” but has four further items: Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Schubert’s Winterreise, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Beethoven’s Sonata op. 111.

Where is the intimidation here? Most people are taught about the Iliad, or will have seen a movie based on it, will often know “Tintern Abbey,” if they have studied English poetry, will have seen that Breughel painting, will know something about Chartres, and will have seen “The Wave,” the most famous of all Japanese woodcuts, even if they don’t know that it forms part of Hokusai’s series. Yes, maybe Winterreise is a bit obscure, and a lot of people don’t know the Opus 111. I’m not sure about the Leonardo choice; I was avoiding the Mona Lisa, a great painting but also, alas, a cliché. Again: that list is intended to denote examples of the highest of high art, and yet be familiar enough that most readers will recognize a couple of items on it.

Casati continues: “If I want to learn something about the arts, I need to know what is it that makes Schubert's Winterreise a masterpiece, and it is not by enlisting it along other masterpieces and adding that “their nobility and grandeur ... flow from their ability to address deep human instincts” that we'll make progress in understanding.” But that is what is discussed in the last chapter, as promised in the introduction. And by the way, I stand by the phrase “nobility and grandeur.” If anyone finds such notions corny, or Victorian, or embarrassing, so be it.

Intimidation? Excuse me, but that is something that art theorists, especially those of a poststructuralist stripe, have been inflicting on readers for the last forty years or more – talking down to their audiences with obscure jargon and esoteric references.

Read more: The Art Instinct : Denis Dutton replies to Roberto Casati

Cumulative culture in the lab and chimpanzees

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Category: Helen De Cruz's blog

Published on Thursday, 07 May 2009 17:11

Written by Helen De Cruz

At the recent EHBEA conference held April 6-8 at Saint Andrews, I saw presentations by both Andrew Whiten (a primatologist who specializes on nonhuman cultural traditions, especially in chimpanzees) and Christine Caldwell (who examines cumulative cultural evolution in the lab). It was interesting to see the question of cumulative cultural evolution from these two very diverging perspectives.

It is now generally established that nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, macaques and a variety of bird species, display a socially transmitted behaviors, which in humans are termed cultures. However, to date the evidence for cumulative cultural evolution in nonhumans remains sporadic. For example, in the case of nut-cracking chimpanzees in the Taï forest, there is little variation in how nuts are being processed, i.e., cracked by means of a hammer and anvil, and whereas some individuals have learned to use auxilliary stones to stabilize the anvil, this innovation has not spread to the entire population. The question is: why not?

Andrew Whiten recently co-authored a study in which chimpanzees were confronted with an optimal and cumulatively built technique for extracting honey from an artificial device. Whereas the individuals learned the simple 'dipping' technique with ease, they did not master the more complex 'probing' technique, which built on elements of the dipping technique they already mastered. The chimpanzees thus got 'stuck' at a simple but suboptimal technique, although control tests showed that the more difficult technique was not beyond their cognitive capacities. Why would this be? Whiten tentatively suggested in the paper that chimpanzees may be 'conservative', unwilling to try a new technique if the one they already knew was good enough.

Another line of reasoning, which has garnered much attention, is that of Tomasello.

Read more: Cumulative culture in the lab and chimpanzees

"Mind and Culture": Rutgers / Siena Workshop in Siena

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Category: Events

Published on Thursday, 07 May 2009 10:29

Written by Lucien Dontask

The Ph.D. Course in Cognitive Sciences of Siena University and the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Sciences (RUCCS) organize the Joint Workshop Rutgers-Siena "Mind and Culture". The workshop will be held at the Certosa di Pontignano (Siena) on June 1-2, 2009 and will provide the opportunity to debate new issues and directions of research in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive sciences. Among the others, the workshop will host contributions by the cognitive philosopher Jerry Fodor, who laid the groundwork for the concept of modularity of mind and the language of thought hypothesis, and the psychologist Zenon Pylyshyn, who developed the Visual Indexing Theory, assuming a preconceptual mechanism responsible for individuating the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes.

The programme of the workshop can be downloaded here : Further information are available at the workshop website.

The participation to the workshop is free.

The interpretive process

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Category: Brian's blog

Published on Wednesday, 06 May 2009 14:41

Written by Brian Malley

One of the things people do with texts is read them. This is certainly not the only thing people do with texts, nor, I would argue, is it the primary thing people do with texts, but it is one of the more fundamental things, and even when texts are used for other purposes-such as when one saves a cash register receipt in case one might need to return a purchased item-these other actions are carried out with an eye to the possibility, at least, of someone reading the text.

Scholarly approaches to the reading and interpretation of texts tend to fall into one of two broad tendencies. The first is the classic model of literary interpretation wherein the reader uses clues from the text to form ideas about what the text says. This model of reading tends to envision the single reader in isolation with the text and to focus on the features of the text that guide-well, should guide-the reader to the author's intended interpretation. This model tends to be highly normative, and I do not think was ever really intended to be a description of how people actually read.

The reaction to the classical model was a whole variety of reader-response theories that emphasize the active role of the reader in creating meaning. In some of these theories the text is almost entirely incidental. The anthropological versions of these theories have tended to emphasize discourse around texts, and to see reading as just a variety of social interaction. In these theories the text does nothing more than provide an occasion for interpretation, and the structure of the text is seldom discussed at all.

I've never been comfortable with either approach.

Read more: The interpretive process

Cross-cultural variation in creationism

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Category: Helen De Cruz's blog

Published on Monday, 04 May 2009 17:09

Written by Helen De Cruz

There is substantial cultural variation in the prevalence of creationism, i.e., the view that the Bible (or other religious writings) provides a historically accurate account of how living things came into being. In some countries, like Iceland or Japan, the view that species arose through a gradual process that is characterized by random variation, selective retention and modification through descent, is almost universally accepted. By contrast, and to the chagrin of scientists and philosophers of science in the USA, only 40 - 50 % of US citizens accept evolutionary theory. In this respect, the USA only does slightly better than Turkey, which ranks lowest on the list of Miller et al.'s study in Science (2006, vol. 313). Where does this variability come from?

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The Social Self - Summer School in Alghero

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Category: Events

Published on Thursday, 30 April 2009 12:21

Written by Dan Sperber

The Social Self

Application deadline: June 30, 2009

The Faculty of Architecture of the University of Sassari , the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milano, the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Parma organize a one week summer school on contemporary research on philosophical and psychological models as well as neural mechanisms underlying the sense of Self shaped trouhg the intersubjective experience.

Read more: The Social Self - Summer School in Alghero

Success or Prestige? Hunters' cultural biases

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Wednesday, 29 April 2009 23:00

Written by Dan Sperber

Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson have identified two biases, one based on success, the other on prestige, that might influence which individual is most imitated. If you were living in a foraging society, would you rather imitate prestigious hunters or successful ones? Successful ones, you say? It may not be so easy or so argue Kim Hill and Keith Kintigh in "Can Anthropologists Distinguish Good and Poor Hunters? Implications for Hunting Hypotheses, Sharing Conventions, and Cultural Transmission" by  (in Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 3, June 2009) available here.

Here is the Abstract:

Numerous articles examine the relationship between men's hunting skill and other important biological and social traits. We analyzed more than 14,000 hunter days during 27 years of monitoring the Ache of Paraguay by using resampling methods to demonstrate that large sample sizes are generally required in order to distinguish individual men by hunting skill. A small published study on !Kung hunters shows that large‐game hunters are even more difficult to distinguish by individual skill level. This is a serious problem because regressions using noisy hunting data as the independent variable systematically underestimate the association of hunting ability with other biosocial traits. The analysis suggests that some coresidents in many small‐scale societies will be unable to accurately distinguish hunters by skill level, possibly favoring groupwide meat‐sharing conventions and biased cultural transmission that emphasizes prestige rather than perceived hunting skill.

Interviews with some Great Ancestors

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Category: Initiatives

Published on Wednesday, 29 April 2009 08:39

Written by Lucien Dontask

via Savage Minds : Alan MacFarlance has put online an impressive collection of video-recorded interviews with famous anthropologists ( Fredrick Barth, Mary Douglas, Meyer Fortes, Ernest Gellner, Jack Goody, Edmund Leach, Sydney Mintz, and many others). Enjoy !