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Merlin Wilfred Donald (born November 17, 1939) is an emeritus Canadian professor of psychology, neuroanthropology, and cognitive neuroscience, [1] at Case Western Reserve University, and in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. [2] He is noted for the position that evolutionary processes need to be considered in determining how the mind deals with symbolic information and language. In particular, he suggests that explicit, algorithmic processes (the computational theory of mind) may be inadequate to understanding how the mind works. [3]
He is also known as the proponent of the mimetic theory of speech origins. [4]
He received his degrees in Canada, culminating in his Ph.D. in neuropsychology from McGill University in 1968. Following three years on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine, he joined the faculty of Queen's University at Kingston in 1972 and is still professor emeritus at Queen's. [5] In the fall of 2005, Donald became the founding chair of the cognitive science department at Case Western Reserve University. [6] He has since retired as the chair of that department and is currently an adjunct professor within the university. [7]
Merlin Donald is widely known as the author of two books on human cognition, Origins of the Modern Mind and A Mind So Rare.
His central thesis across these works is that the human capacity for symbolic thought arises not from the evolution of a language-specific mental module, but out of evolutionary changes to the prefrontal cortex affecting the executive function of the primate brain. The enhanced attentional, metacognitive, and retrieval capacities that resulted from these changes made hominids immensely more capable of dealing with social complexity than their ancestors. He concludes that what drove brain expansion was not the cognitive demands of toolmaking or spatial mapping of the environment, but the growth in the size of the social group, that imposed greater demands on memory. [8] [9]
In Donald's account, these changes amounted to the evolution of a completely novel cognitive strategy: a symbiosis between brain and culture. The human brain, he argues, is adapted to function expressly in a complex symbolic culture; it cannot realize its potential unless it is immersed in a complex network of communication and symbolic representation. This inextricable relationship between biology and culture also, he proposes, has interesting ramifications for the future of human cognitive development in light of the continuing development of technologies that support and change our relationship with symbolic thought and culture.
Origins of the Modern Mind proposes a three-stage development of human symbolic capacity through culture:
Donald suggests that the increasing reliance on external memory media in this third stage, which applies in varying degrees to most people in the developed world, may have profound effects on our cognitive development and behavior:
The externalization of memory was initially very gradual, with the invention of the first permanent external symbols. But then it accelerated, and the numbers of external prepresentational devices now available has altered how humans use their biologically given cognitive resources, what they can know, where that knowledge is stored, and what kinds of codes are needed to decipher what is stored.... When we study literate English-speaking adults living in a technologically advanced society, we are looking at a subtype that is not any more typical of the whole human species, than, say, the members of a hunter-gatherer group. What would our science look like if it had been based on a very different type of culture? The truth is, we don't know, but it would profit us greatly to find out, because the human cognitive system, down to the level of its internal modular organization, is affected not only by its genetic inheritance, but also by its own peculiar cultural history. (Donald 1997, pp. 362-363)
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Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge to discover new knowledge.
Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions. However, different definitions of "module" have been proposed by different authors. According to Jerry Fodor, the author of Modularity of Mind, a system can be considered 'modular' if its functions are made of multiple dimensions or units to some degree. One example of modularity in the mind is binding. When one perceives an object, they take in not only the features of an object, but the integrated features that can operate in sync or independently that create a whole. Instead of just seeing red, round, plastic, and moving, the subject may experience a rolling red ball. Binding may suggest that the mind is modular because it takes multiple cognitive processes to perceive one thing.
Ray Jackendoff is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition.
Terrence William Deacon is an American neuroanthropologist. He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Pascal Robert Boyer is an American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist of French origin, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch TV, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Cognitive archaeology is a theoretical perspective in archaeology that focuses on the ancient mind. It is divided into two main groups: evolutionary cognitive archaeology (ECA), which seeks to understand human cognitive evolution from the material record, and ideational cognitive archaeology (ICA), which focuses on the symbolic structures discernable in or inferable from past material culture.
Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis introduced by Julian Jaynes who argued human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but as the consequences of actions of gods external to themselves. The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.
Christopher Donald Frith FRS, FMedSci, FBA, FAAAS is a British psychologist and professor emeritus at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. He is also an affiliated research worker at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, an honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.
Neuroanthropology is the study of the relationship between culture and the brain. This field of study emerged from a 2008 conference of the American Anthropological Association. It is based on the premise that lived experience leaves identifiable patterns in brain structure, which then feed back into cultural expression. The exact mechanisms are so far ill defined and remain speculative.
Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought, theory, and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive sciences. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
Charles Ransom Gallistel is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. He is an expert in the cognitive processes of learning and memory, using animal models to carry out research on these topics. Gallistel is married to fellow psychologist Rochel Gelman. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty he held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chair of the psychology department and Bernard L. & Ida E. Grossman Term Professor, and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Deep social mind is a concept in evolutionary psychology; it refers to the distinctively human capacity to 'read' the mental states of others while reciprocally enabling those others to read one's own mental states at the same time. The term 'deep social mind' was first coined in 1999 by Andrew Whiten, professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at St. Andrews University, Scotland. Together with closely related terms such as 'reflexivity' and 'intersubjectivity', it is now well-established among scholars investigating the evolutionary emergence of human sociality, cognition and communication.
In evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary linguistics, the mimetic theory of speech origins is an analysis of the factors leading to the evolution of language in human ancestors, typically during the Homo erectus era.
Neuroarchaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology that uses neuroscientific data to infer things about brain form and function in human cognitive evolution. The term was first suggested and thus coined by Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris.
