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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
In this text, Maclean highlights a point that is relevant to an important point brought him in lecture, when he discusses why it is necessary to consider questions of phylogenetic history and function in order to understand our cognitive abilities. Maclean points out that directing our questions as such is potentially helpful in understanding how and when species such as humans evolved to differ cognitively. With this, he emphasizes that despite particular hypotheses and inferential methods used in comparative or evolutionary psychology, it is essentially impossible to test why we evolved our cognitive abilities. I believe this relates nicely to the points addressed in lecture discussion on the nature of both the easy and the hard problem in cognition. The easy problem, primarily focused on how and what humans are able to do all the things we can do, could benefit from questions framed around phylogenetic history and function of cognitive abilities. By contrast, the hard problem is of the “why” type, hence, aimed at uncovering the purpose of our cognitive abilities. The hard problem in this evolutionary context is considered to be an adaptive why, as to why we evolved our cognitive abilities. Maclean’s point on the inability to test this is evident in the fact that this question requires considerations of the possible consequences evoked by the removal of these cognitive abilities.
ReplyDelete“Now more than ever animal studies have the potential to test hypotheses regarding how cognition evolves. Comparative psychologists have developed new techniques to probe the cognitive mechanisms underlying animal behavior, and they have become increasingly skilful at adapting methodologies to test multiple species.”
ReplyDeleteThis was the first time I encounter the term “phylogenetic” but after reading this article I have a better understanding of animal comparison models and how we look at our closest ancestors in order to understand more about human behavior and in this case cognition. Although there is a strong relation between our closest ancestors and humans there is still the problem of correlation does not imply causation. Furthermore, the article claims that humans have evolved cognitively because we are in situations of more social complexity, which could be a problem if we look at animal models in order to understand our evolution. Since we don’t know if animals have theory of mind, a soul, and the ability to think; there are dangers in comparing their cognition to the ones of humans. Although this is a plausible method to study cognition there are still risks and comparative psychology should take this into consideration.