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A participant listening to Mozart while her mother listens to speech. Watch the video here
Forthcoming in PNAS and freely available here, an article by Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola: "Rhythmic engagement with music in infancy"
Abstract: Humans have a ...
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Franz de Waal just wrote an interesting post at 3 Quarks Daily. He is currently in Japan to promote his latest book The Age of Empathy and he writes about cultural differences among scientists: Although Japanese scientists were, he says, ...
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"Comparisons between chimpanzees and humans have led to the hypothesis that only humans voluntarily share their own food with others. However, it is hard to draw conclusions because the food-sharing preferences of our more tolerant relative, the bonobo (Pan paniscus), ...
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Not often do we find in the American Anthropologist material of clear Cognition and Culture relevance. Here is a noteworthy exception: "The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity" (vol. 112,March 2010 issue, available here) by Tanya. M. ...
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March 11th â 12th, 2010, National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute.Research in both the social and cognitive sciences has increasingly focused on the complex dynamic between cultural meaning and practices with cognitive processes. From the sociology of science to ...
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We are today putting online the beta version of a Cognition and Culture Reader with links to relevant papers, books and blog posts. All the papers are freely available on the Internet. All the books listed (and other books mentioned ...
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Forthcoming in PNAS, an innovative study entitled "Interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms exploring the Titanic and Lusitania disasters" by Bruno S. Frey, David A. Savage and Benno Torgler (and already available here alas with subscription; earlier ...
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The great 3 Quarks Daily blog is holding a competition for the best Arts and Literature blog post and one of Nicolas Baumard's posts on our blog, "The universality of music: Cross-cultural comparison, the recognition of emotions, and the influence ...
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As Dan Sperber was complaining that no anthropologist posted "pictures of the week", here is a follow-up of the Punjabi Jingle Bells video, which also raises questions on cultural "borrowings". These pictures come from India as well, but 2500km to ...
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Given the strong reservations that most social scientist have towards evolutionary biology, they might welcome Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini's new book, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), as they once did Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin famous article, "The ...
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Given the strong reservations that most social scientists have towards evolutionary biology, they might welcome Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini's new book, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), as they once did Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin famous article, "The ...
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Our face tells a lot about us. Well, at least this is what other people seem to think: having seen our face for a few seconds-or even a few milliseconds-they will think that we are more or less attractive - ...
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ICCI Home
Our face tells a lot about us. Well, at least this is what other people seem to think: having seen our face for a few seconds-or even a few milliseconds-they will think that we are more or less attractive - ...
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ICCI Home
A hot debate has been taking place these last few days, in the comments section of Harvey Whitehouse's recent post on religion. Part of the dispute has to do with the way cognitive scientists working on that topic might be ...
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In Psychological Science (Vol, 20 (12) pp.1437-1442), an interesting article by Irving Biederman, Xiaomin Yue, and Jules Davidoff entitled: "Representation of Shape in Individuals From a Culture With Minimal Exposure to Regular, Simple Artifacts: Sensitivity to Nonaccidental Versus Metric Properties" ...
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Let's talk about politics for once. It is common knowledge that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. In a quite fascinating book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost ...
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I happen to know the secret of academic success. So far I have never divulged it because, well, charity begins at home. But it looks like the field of cognition and culture might be in need of a shot in ...
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In the last decade, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Experimental studies on captive chimpanzees have shown, on the other hand, that they are limited in the ways they ...
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On July 7th 2009, the The London Evolutionary Research Network held a extremely interesting debate on group selection in which four eminent speakers in the field discussed the motion: "Is natural selection at the group level an important evolutionary force?"
...
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The aim of the post is to bring to the attention of experimentally minded anthropologists the work of Chip Heath and his collaborators. A professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Heath describes his research as examinining "why certain ...
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An article entitled "The Evolution of Misbeliefs" by Ryan McKay and Daniel Dennett In Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2009) 32, 493-561, freely available here, with commentaries by (among many others) George Ainslie, Roberto Casati, Pascal Boyer, Max Coltheart, Owen Flanagan, ...
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ICCI Home
Participant watching the experimenter play a stimulus and indicating her response
There is an intersting forthcoming open access (available here) article of PNAS entitled "Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations," by Disa Sauter, Frank Eisner, Paul Ekman, ...
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The goal of this 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication (web site: [conference.clancorpus.net] is to promote both theoretical and applied research in pragmatics. Three parallel sessions will be held according to the following topics:
Pragmatics theories: meaning, role ...
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From an article in the Financial Times, fascinating both from an anthropological and a biological point of view: 'According to Poyarkov [a biologist specialising in wolves who also studies these dogs, see picture], there are 30,000 to 35,000 stray dogs ...
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Shrine at Qixian Monastery, China (photo Harvey Whitehouse)
Â
Over dinner the other evening, it struck me that religion is rather like ratatouille. People disagree about the ingredients of both but in fact there is no such thing as the ...
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12:52
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Two ambitious papers just published offer broad contrasting views on the biological and cultural bases of human languages:
Nicholas Evans, N. , & Stephen Levinson (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral ...
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Relativity of mental illness has enjoyed the favours of philosophers for decades (Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and, more recently Geoffrey Llyod in his Cognitive Variations). It has lead to the development of the « new cross-cultural psychiatry », heralded by Kleinman in ...
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James Cameron's Avatar is about to become the most viewed film in history. While Cameron may deserve this success for his special effects and breathtaking landscapes, Pandora, the world he has created, may seem rather disappointing. It is situated several ...
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High Culture: Da Vinci's Last Supper (as seen in The Da Vinci Code).
We cognitive anthropologists deal with âcultureâ in the broad sense of distributed mental representations widespread in a social group (and many of us donât really believe that ...
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11:21
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A study by Daniel Haun, published in the December 15th 2009 edition of Current Biology, reports cross-cultural variability in how people memorize bodily movements in space, depending on how space is encoded in the local language. Here is the first ...
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A study by Daniel Haun, published in the December 15th 2009 edition of Current Biology, reports cross-cultural variability in how people memorize bodily movements in space, depending on how space is encoded in the local language. Here is the first ...
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12:17
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ICCI Home
In a recent article entitled "The increased risk of predation enhances cooperation"published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Volume 277, Pages 513 - 518 and available here, Indrikis Krams and colleagues experimentally demonstrate an interaction between predation risk and cooperation in breeding songbirds. ...
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ICCI Home
In a recent article entitled "The increased risk of predation enhances cooperation"published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Volume 277, Pages 513 - 518 and available here, Indrikis Krams and colleagues experimentally demonstrate an interaction between predation risk and cooperation in breeding songbirds. ...
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An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and available here illustrates how insights into 'power', a notion central in the ...
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ICCI Home
An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and available here illustrates how insights into 'power', a notion central in the ...
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ICCI Home
Â
"It was 7:30 PM, December 4th, 2005. The second Sunday of advent, in Joshua Tree, California. Personal Chef Karin Winkler started to prepare dinner. While thinking about upcoming Christmas, she was peeling and cutting a potato. Everything appeared to ...
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ICCI Home
Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of research published on 'psychological essentialism', which has been observed cross-culturally in young children. Essentialism is the tendency to think about animals, plants and social categories in terms of hidden ...
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In an article entitled "Social Learning Mechanisms and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Is Imitation Necessary?" published in Psychological Science, Volume 20 Issue 12, Pages 1478 - 1483 and available here, Christine A. Caldwell and Ailsa E. Millen make an interesting contribution to ...
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ICCI Home
In an article entitled "Social Learning Mechanisms and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Is Imitation Necessary?" published in Psychological Science, Volume 20 Issue 12, Pages 1478 - 1483 and available here, Christine A. Caldwell and Ailsa E. Millen make an interesting contribution to ...
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ICCI Home
When we started this blog, we hoped that anthropologists among our readers would be willing to contribute 'pictures of the week', photos (or videos) that would illustrate in a suggestive manner a theme of cognition-and-culture relevance, but we had very ...
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ICCI Home
Jennifer J. Pokorny and Frans B. M. de Waal show that "Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs" (PNAS December 22, 2009 vol. 106 no. 51 21539-21543)
Â
Subjects need to select the odd facial image from among ...
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In some traditions there is an interesting gap betweeen what people think they are going to learn from the tradition and what actually ends up being transmitted. Recently I found a nice example of that while practicing Qi Gong.
In ...
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In the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B entitled "Personal perspectives in the life sciences for the Royal Society's 350th anniversary", a freely available article on "The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where ...
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Olivier Morin and Sophie Claudel
Human argumentation is at the center of recent (and less recent) psychological work. We are learning a lot about our ability to argue. But the motivation behind human arguing is less well known. What makes ...
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A special series of lectures supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute. All lectures to be held at 6pm the London School of Economics, Seligman ...
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This is the first of what I hope will be a regular, informal interview slot, in which I put 3 questions to people who are researching in areas that may be of interest to ICCI members and readers. We hope ...
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Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: The origins of language. 21-30 June 2010, Montreal: When in human evolution did language appear? Did it appear suddenly or gradually? What were the physiological, cognitive, and social prerequisites of language? The Summer Institute, organized by ...
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This is the second post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication. In Pierre's first post, we saw that these experiments show that, as suggested by relevance theory, human ...
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In PLoS One, two researchers from the Duke Institute for Brain Science, Kamraan Z. Gill and Dale Purves, publish an article providing "A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales" and freely available here.
Abstract: Scales are collections of tones that divide ...
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A recently published article by Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke entitled "Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language" shows evidence that newborns' cry melody is influenced by the native language of their mother. ...
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I donât believe any one of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well preserved chemically â even with a sunflower growing out of the top of his head. - John ...
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Discussion meeting organized by Andrew Whiten, Robert Hinde, Christopher Stringer and Kevin Laland as part of a wider Festival of Science to celebrate the Royal Society's 350th anniversary. The meeting will take place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre ...
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This is the first post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication.
According to Csibra and Gergelyâs (2009) so-called ânatural pedagogicalâ approach to the psychological bases of human culture, ...
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Statistician and polymath blogger Cosma Shalizi is preparing a paper on social contagion, basically dwelling on the fact that the transmission of behaviours through social influence ('contagion') is very hard to distinguish from the fact that similar people tend to ...
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Relativity in culinary matters and in taste is a big issue - our tastes (or distastes) for things are indeed shaped by what we are used to eat and see eaten, as well as other factors, genetics being one. Now ...
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To what extent does the use of language involve a language-specific ability, to what extent is it subserved by a more general symbolic or semiotic system? This is an old and ongoing controversy to which an article pre-published online in ...
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A new paper in PNAS, "Y chromosome diversity, human expansion, drift, and cultural evolution," by Jacques Chiaroni, Peter A. Underhill and Luca L. Cavalli-Sforza (Published online Nov. 17, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0910803106).
Abstract The relative importance of the roles of adaptation ...
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At the Notre Dame conference Darwin in the 21st century, Paul Griffiths gave an interesting talk on evolutionary debunking arguments for religion. Evolutionary debunking arguments basically say that religious beliefs are unjustified because they are a byproduct of evolved cognitive ...
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The workshop on "Cognitive Social Sciences-Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?" (here) is to be held at CogSci 2010 in Portland, Oregon, on August 11, 2010. This workshop is aimed at exploring the cognitive (psychological) basis of the ...
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Zoe Chance and Michael Norton have a delightful book chapter on the very creative ways in which people justify their questionable decisions. They report an experiment in which male participants were given a choice between subscriptions to two sport magazines. ...
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The gene FOXP2 has been in the news ever since it was revealed in 1998 that the members of an extended London family who had a serious language impairment also had an abnormal version of that gene. In a letter ...
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Pierre Jacob recently discussed Sarah Hrdy's book Mothers and Others in which she argues that humans, like New World monkeys but unlike other apes, are cooperative breeders. As Pierre summarizes, cooperative breeding implies that newborns and youngsters have evolved the ...
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Margaret Mead, Franz Boas and Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss on a Portuguese stampIn Memory of Claude LĂ©vi-StraussIn Memory of Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss
In Memory of Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss.
Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss, arguably the world's most famous and influential anthropologist, died on October 30 at the ...
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Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss, probably the most famous antrhopologist in the history of the field, died last Friday. We celebrated his 100th birthday here almost a year ago and concluded: Â "If the study of the mind and that of culture become unified ...
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Recently I came across a quotation that expressed, with wonderful clarity, something that I kind of half-knew but had not articulated so well to myself. The historian John P. Meier, in the course of an argument about the historical Jesus ...
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Chimps line up to watch as Dorothy, who died of heart failure, is wheeled away.Picture: Monica Szczupider, in the National Geographic Magazine (Nov. 2009)
The National Geographic Magazine reports: "On September 23, 2008, Dorothy, a female chimpanzee in her late ...
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Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew have compiled and "Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior". This is quite an impressive endeavour that can be used for scholarly purposes (it is well referenced) and for fun (because people do weird things sometimes). The ...
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It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are specific to a speciïŹc musical culture. A recent paper, "Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music" by T. Fritz, S. Jentschke, N. Gosselin, D. Sammler, ...
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The latest issue of Mind and Society (Volume 8, Number 2 / décembre 2009), a journal of obvious cognition and culture relevance, is on social simulation. Here is the table of content:...
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Proper names are a standard topic of anthropological research, focusing on the variety of naming systems across cultures and on the role of names in social relationships and verbal interactions (for a recent collection, see The Anthropology of names and ...
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The recently established Cognitive Development Center at the Central European University, led by Professors Gergely Csibra and György Gergely, will hold its Opening Conference in Budapest on January 15 and 16, 2010.
The speakers of the conference are:Â Susan Carey (Harvard), Â Susan Gelman (University ...
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In a recent post, I commented on the existence of markets of goods and services in monkeys' societies. Exactly as in human societies, supply and demand determine value of commodities exchanged among individuals. In an article entitled "Chimpanzees coordinate in ...
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A new paper by Adrian V. Bell, Peter J. Richerson, and Richard McElreath published online in PNAS (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903232106) entitled "Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality" (Restricted access) in which they argue ...
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I have never quite understood why there is a Nobel Prize just in economics. Why a prize basically on financial relationships? Why not a prize for the human sciences as whole instead? After all, there is a prize in biology, ...
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A new book of cognition-and-culture relevance edited by Mark Schaller, Ara Norenzayan, Steven J Heine, Toshio Yamagishi and Tatsuya Kameda:
Evolution, Culture, and the Human MindPublished by: Psychology Press, List Price: ÂŁ37.50
"An enormous amount of scientific research compels two ...
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22:34
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Preparing for a lecture on homeostatic mechanisms, I came across a surprising phenomenon, g tum-mo heat meditation, that raises an interesting question about human enculturability. Homeostatic mechanisms are those that maintain our bodies (or our lives) in a state of balance ...
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PNAS has just released an article on the variability of cultural attitudes to punishment. However, one may wonder if the experiment is really about punishment or cultural attitudes. Here is the abstract.
In a pairwise interaction, an individual who uses ...
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(We have asked Nick Enfield to share with us and thus open to discussion his review of The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, [MIT Press, 2008] published in the TLS, September ...
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(Jon Elster has just published (in French) the first volume of a trilogy: Le désintéressement : Traité critique de l'homme économique Tome 1 (Paris, Le Seuil, 2009). We have asked Gloria Origgi to review it for us.)
In one of his ...
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The Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, invites applications for an open-rank faculty position to extend its recently established Cognitive Science Program. This new position can be taken at Fall 2010. We are seeking candidates with a PhD in ...
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In a provocative post at  3 Quarks Daily Sam Kean asks: "Will the Manhattan project always exist?" raising interesting possiblities about future representations of the present, which by then will be a distant past. He writes:
"Will historians and archaeologists a ...
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10:27
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Philip Gerrans discuss bubbles in the academic market in "Bubble Trouble", published July 9, 2009 in the THES and available here. Â He argues that the humanities are in the same state financial markets were in before they crashed. Of relevance ...
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An excellent, humoristic and refreshing paper by Daniel M. Wegner explains why under cognitive load we tend to do precisely what we try not to do! The counterintentional error is "when we manage to do the worst possible thing, the ...
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Good stuff in the last issue (vol 9, 1-2, 2009) of the Journal of Cognition and Culture (that provides "an interdisciplinary forum for exploring the mental foundations of culture and the cultural foundations of mental life. The primary focus of ...
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ICCI Home
Another post from our holiday collection of oldies but goodies.
The first post in the series dealt with Nisbett's findings on different patterns of attention in Asian and Western cultures, and I talked a bit about how certain differences are ...
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While taking a break, we are happy to republish some of our favorite 'oldies but goodies'. This one was first put online in December of last year (2008). It was the first installment of a series of posts on Richard ...
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