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Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The information that is copied is called the replicator, and genes are the replicator for biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme," citing examples such as musical tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts while others are more like viruses.
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett FRS was a British psychologist and the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge. He was one of the forerunners of cognitive psychology as well as cultural psychology. Bartlett considered most of his own work on cognitive psychology to be a study in social psychology, but he was also interested in anthropology, moral science, philosophy, and sociology. Bartlett proudly referred to himself as "a Cambridge psychologist" because while he was at the University of Cambridge, settling for one type of psychology was not an option.
Evolutionary anthropology, the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and of the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates, builds on natural science and on social science. Various fields and disciplines of evolutionary anthropology include:
In psychology and cognitive science, a schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information, such as a mental schema or conceptual model. Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit. Schemata have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory information. Schemata can help in understanding the world and the rapidly changing environment. People can organize new perceptions into schemata quickly as most situations do not require complex thought when using schema, since automatic thought is all that is required.
Pascal Robert Boyer is a Franco-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He studied at université Paris-Nanterre, and 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.
Collective memory refers to the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925).
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.
Memory has the ability to encode, store and recall information. Memories give an organism the capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences as well as build relationships. Encoding allows a perceived item of use or interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from long-term memory. Working memory stores information for immediate use or manipulation, which is aided through hooking onto previously archived items already present in the long-term memory of an individual.
Animal culture can be defined as the ability of non-human animals to learn and transmit behaviors through processes of social or cultural learning. Culture is increasingly seen as a process, involving the social transmittance of behavior among peers and between generations. It can involve the transmission of novel behaviors or regional variations that are independent of genetic or ecological factors.
Ecological systems theory is a broad term used to capture the theoretical contributions of developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. Bronfenbrenner developed the foundations of the theory throughout his career, published a major statement of the theory in American Psychologist, articulated it in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developing it in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. A primary contribution of ecological systems theory was to systemically examine contextual variability in development processes. As the theory evolved, it placed increasing emphasis on the role of the developing person as an active agent in development and on understanding developmental process rather than "social addresses" as explanatory mechanisms.
Reconstructive memory is a theory of memory recall, in which the act of remembering is influenced by various other cognitive processes including perception, imagination, motivation, semantic memory and beliefs, amongst others. People view their memories as being a coherent and truthful account of episodic memory and believe that their perspective is free from an error during recall. However, the reconstructive process of memory recall is subject to distortion by other intervening cognitive functions and operations such as individual perceptions, social influences, and world knowledge, all of which can lead to errors during reconstruction.
Cultural group selection is an explanatory model within cultural evolution of how cultural traits evolve according to the competitive advantage they bestow upon a group. This multidisciplinary approach to the question of human culture engages research from the fields of anthropology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, sociology, and psychology.
Culture and social cognition is the relationship between human culture and human cognitive capabilities. Cultural cognitive evolution proposes that humans’ unique cognitive capacities are not solely due to biological inheritance, but are in fact due in large part to cultural transmission and evolution. Modern humans and great apes are separated evolutionarily by about six million years. Proponents of cultural evolution argue that this would not have been enough time for humans to develop the advanced cognitive capabilities required to create tools, language, and build societies through biological evolution. Biological evolution could not have individually produced each of these cognitive capabilities within that period of time. Instead, humans must have evolved the capacity to learn through cultural transmission. This provides a more plausible explanation that would fit within the given time frame. Instead of having to biologically account for each cognitive mechanism that distinguishes modern humans from previous relatives, one would only have to account for one significant biological adaptation for cultural learning. According to this view, the ability to learn through cultural transmission is what distinguishes humans from other primates. Cultural learning allows humans to build on existing knowledge and make collective advancements, also known as the “ratchet effect”. The ratchet effect simply refers to the way in which humans continuously add on to existing knowledge through modifications and improvements. This unique ability distinguishes humans from related primates, who do not seem to build collaborative knowledge over time. Instead, primates seem to build individual knowledge, in which the expertise of one animal is not built on by others, and does not progress across time.
Social learning refers to learning that is facilitated by observation of, or interaction with, another animal or its products. Social learning has been observed in a variety of animal taxa, such as insects, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals.
David Andrew Whiten, known as Andrew Whiten is a British zoologist and psychologist, Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, and Professor Wardlaw Emeritus at University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is known for his research in social cognition, specifically on social learning, tradition and the evolution of culture, social Machiavellian intelligence, autism and imitation, as well as the behavioral ecology of sociality. In 1996, Whiten and his colleagues invented an artificial fruit that allowed to study learning in apes and humans.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".
Qi Wang is a Chinese-born American psychologist and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. She is best known for her study of memory and culture. Wang is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society. She is also a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, the Cognitive Development Society, the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, and the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. She serves on many editorial boards and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. She directs the Culture & Cognition Lab at Cornell. Wang holds a lifetime endowed chair in human development at Cornell.
References
- 1 2 3 Mesoudi, Alex; Whiten, Andrew (2008-11-12). "The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 363 (1509): 3489–3501. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0129. ISSN 0962-8436. PMC 2607337 . PMID 18801720.
- ↑ Wolters, A. W. (July 1933). "Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. By F. C. Bartlett. (Cambridge University Press. 1932)". Philosophy. 8 (31): 374–376. doi:10.1017/s0031819100033143. ISSN 0031-8191. S2CID 145357365. (book review)
- ↑ Miton, Helena; Claidière, Nicolas; Mercier, Hugo (July 2015). "Universal cognitive mechanisms explain the cultural success of bloodletting". Evolution and Human Behavior. 36 (4): 303–312. Bibcode:2015EHumB..36..303M. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.01.003.
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