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CHAPTER 8 Why Play? An Evolutionary Perspective
Published in Vorderer Peter, Bryant Jennings, Playing Video Games, 2012
Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a synthesis of modern evolutionary biology with modern (cognitive) psychology. It focuses on the influence of natural selection on constructive features of the psychological mechanisms that control behavior. In a narrow cognitive version (Cosmides&Tooby, 1997), EP can be defined as the description of information-processing mechanisms designed by natural selection whose interplay form the human mind or its cognitive architecture, respectively. EP, sometimes also called Darwinian psychology (Plotkin, 1994), should therefore be congruent with valid principles of classical and modern evolutionary biology.
Emergence of Intelligence
Published in Hitoshi Iba, AI and SWARM, 2019
Evolutionary psychology is a field aiming at a biological explanation of human behavior. It was founded by anthropologist John Tooby, psychologist Leda Cosmides, and many other biologically-oriented anthropologists. They objected to the idea of viewing the brain as a general-purpose learning machine. They claimed that each module of the brain existed to be functional and that its design was the result of natural selection. Therefore, the human mind is thought to have evolved to adapt to past environments [99]D
Good errors in mathematics education
Published in International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 2021
Stanovich is a cognitive psychologist, so his task is to describe how the mind works, the so-called proximate explanation, but not why it is working that way. The latter is referred to as ultimate explanation, and is the business of evolutionary psychology. There is an ongoing debate on how modular our mind is, but researchers agree that at least intuition (and System 1) is highly modularized (Stanovich, 2011). We have hundreds of special purpose modules which have been designed by evolution to take in a special type of input (here enters the context) and infer an output. The special conditions to which the module is adapted are sometimes called the proper domain of that module (Mercier & Sperber, 2017). However, each module operates also (less accurately) in a wider domain, called the actual domain. The way this is done is via context, that is, by taking advantage of the regularities in the environment (the domain). Because of those regularities, given a specific situation, the system can infer under typical conditions the expected outcome with high probability of success, though never with certainty. Hence the intelligence (going beyond the information given), hence too the errors when the conditions are not ‘typical’, as is usually the case in the intuition traps as concocted in the psychologists’ lab.