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ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗

Average audio length:
43 minutes
Video podcast
English
United Kingdom
11 episodes
since Aug. 22, 2011
episodic

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In primates and humans alike, the number of social relationships an individual can have is constrained in part by its social cognitive competences and in part by the time available to invest in face-to-face interaction. I will show that time, in particular, has a significant effect on the quality a…

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Tooby and deVore argued that hominin evolution hinged on the exploitation of a unique 'cognitive niche'. We propose that a diversity of evidence indicates this was fundamentally a socio-cognitive niche. Analysis of hunter-gatherer ethnologies confirms unprecedented levels of egalitarian behaviour, …
I will review recent research in neuroimaging and computation neuroscience, and present a new paradigm for studying decision making in pairs. Results from this paradigm demonstrate that discussion between the partners is necessary and sufficient for creating an advantage for the group decision and …
The evolutionary relationship between human linguistic capacity and humans' emotional make-up has not, as yet, received focused attention. Was the evolution of language in our lineage possible because early hominines were emotionally different from their ancestors, and, if so, in what ways? Has lan…
The evolution of language is a long-standing puzzle for many reasons. One is that its very virtues as a system of communication seem to open the door to ruinous free-riding and deception. This paper will locate and partially solve that problem within a framework explaining the evolution of honest s…
A very wise person of our acquaintance once said, 'Read old books to get new ideas'. Here, we pursue the ideas presented in old books by Lev Vygotsky and George Herbert Mead as a means to account for the differences in social life between human and non-human primates and, by extension, their cognit…
Biologists interested in cognitive evolution have focussed on the dramatic expansion of the forebrain, particularly the neocortex, in lineages such as primates. Another structure, however - the cerebellum - contains four to five times more neurons than the neocortex, is massively and reciprocally i…
In their classic 1969 paper Hodos and Campbell bemoaned the absence of appropriate evolutionary theory in comparative psychology. In this talk I will argue that despite the advent of Evolutionary Psychology the situation has changed only a little today. In fact, some Evolutionary Psychologists go s…
Human demographic and ecological success is frequently attributed to our capacity for cumulative culture, which allows human knowledge and technology to build up and improve over time. Yet it remains a mystery why other animals might possess socially learned traditions but lack this capacity for cu…
It is widely acknowledged that the cumulative cultural inheritance of technological skills and social practices has played a major role in shaping the ways of life of modern humans. The term 'cultural learning' refers to the psychological processes that make cultural inheritance possible. Curiously…
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