Animal Cognition
Animal cognition comprises the mental mechanisms through which animals acquire, process, and use information to generate adaptive responses. Typically, researchers use animals’ observable behavior to infer their mental processes. A basic function of cognition is to enable animals to use information
Animal Culture
Culture can be defined as all knowledge and skills acquired through some form of social learning—learning influenced by social input—and usually transmitted across generations. Its prominent role in generating the variation in time and space in human behavior and values has long been recognized and
Cognitive Artifacts
A cognitive artifact is any artificial device designed to aid some mental process. Cognitive artifacts are everywhere; they are used all the time in everyday life for many different purposes. You are most likely using a cognitive artifact right now, by reading this entry on a computer or a tablet sc
Cooperation
Cooperation, defined as an action in which an individual incurs a cost to benefit others, is seen in many human activities such as food sharing, childcare, infrastructure building, resource defense, and warfare. Cooperation presents an evolutionary conundrum because helping someone at a personal cos
Cultural Attractors
Cultural traits are ideas, practices, or artifacts that propagate and remain relatively stable in a population over time. The stability of a trait can be secured not only through faithful copying but also through cultural attraction. Even if a trait is transformed every time it is transmitted, it ma
Cultural Evolution
Cultural evolution is the idea that cultural change constitutes an evolutionary process. As such, we can use evolutionary tools, concepts, and methods to study cultural change and diversity in humans and other species. Culture is here typically defined broadly as any socially learned information, en
Cultural Universals
Music, language, ownership, and the use of fire are all cultural universals, or traits expressed in all known human populations. Spanning behaviors, technologies, affective states, institutions, and linguistic patterns, cultural universals are of interest to cognitive scientists, because they help e
Cumulative Culture
Cumulative culture refers to the process by which cultural traits improve over time through the gradual accumulation of innovations across individuals and generations. This process gives rise to cultural traits that no single individual could invent alone, highlighting the importance of cultural tra
Imitation
Imitation is when an observer copies a model’s body movement, and as such, it is a type of social interaction. Imitation is crucial for learning culture-specific gestures, such as facial expressions and dance movements, and it may also help us learn technical skills. In the 20th century, imitation w
Information and Misinformation
For scientists whose primary interest is in policy or sociology, there is an important distinction between information (which is true), misinformation (which is false but thought by the information provider to be true), and disinformation (which is false and known to be false by the provider). For c
Language Evolution
The study of language evolution aims to uncover why language is the way it is and how it came to be that way. Answering these questions is difficult because the typical methods for studying the evolution of a trait—by tracing anatomical changes in the fossil record or by comparing the behavior of li
Language Socialization
Language socialization concerns the role language plays in a person becoming a member of a social group and how a learner is guided, overtly or covertly, to use language(s) as a cultural competency. Children’s early utterances and gestures are not primarily produced for referential purposes but rath
Niche Construction
Niche construction is an evolutionary process by which organisms actively modify, or construct, aspects of their own environments and, in doing so, alter the natural selection pressures to which they are subject. Examples of niche construction can be found across all biological kingdoms and include
Normativity
Our lives are permeated by thinking about right or wrong, good or bad, and the like. Normativity is a pervasive and intricate part of human social being. In a broad sense, we deal with normativity whenever we apply standards of judgment or evaluation to some states of affairs. For instance, biologic
Numerical Cognition
Number is everywhere in human cognition, behavior, and culture. In a glance, a human observer can tell whether a stadium contains more fans for the home team or the visitors. When we want to be precise, we can count or use written numerals to express exact number. Number even gets expressed grammati
Self
You are a self: the kind of thing that is a who, with all the dignity and responsibility afforded by that status, the kind of thing that has a distinctive perspective on events—on your past as you remember it, your future as you anticipate it, and your present as you experience it. Your grasp of the
Shared Intentionality
Humans do many things together collaboratively as joint agents or in groups as collective agents. It turns out that these ways of operating together as a “we” have a number of special properties as compared with the cooperative interactions of other animal species. Most important are humans’ special
Signaling
In the forests of the Indian subcontinent, a tiger rears up to scratch marks high on a tree trunk, letting other tigers know the individual claiming this territory is a big one. Over in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, a dominant female baboon grunts to a subordinate female as she approaches, assuagi
Social Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge and related phenomena, such as attitudes (e.g., belief, understanding, trust), attributes of these attitudes (e.g., justification, warrant, reliability), and traits (e.g., intellectual humility, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and their opposed vices suc
Social Identity
Social identity is defined as the part of an individual’s self-concept that they derive from their membership in social groups. Unlike personal identity, which emphasizes those aspects of self that are unique to the individual, social identity focuses on the collective aspect of self—as derived from
Social Learning
Social learning broadly refers to learning that occurs through the learner’s social experiences, such as observing or interacting with others. In contrast, asocial or individual learning refers to learning that takes place in the absence of social input, such as through the exploration of one’s phys
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
The extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) is a 21st century version of evolutionary theory according to which developmental processes, including memory and learning, play a crucial role in heredity and evolution alongside processes of Darwinian selection. The role of the activities of organisms and
The Interaction Engine
The interaction engine is a label for the specialized capacities involved in human social interaction. The interaction engine comprises a suite of specific abilities that enable communication, for example, the capacity for rapid conversational turn-taking using multimodal signals, with systematic co
Transformative Experience
Transformative experiences are revelatory and life changing. They provide new knowledge that you could not gain without having the experience, and this new knowledge changes you profoundly: your core preferences, your values, and your priorities and goals in life. Examples of transformative experien