Lecture 1 - Evolution and the Mind Attributes of living species are a product of evolutionary adaptations amongst other species which are now extinct. Adaptations are those favourably selected in the past. . Primary adaptation: feature with a function to overcome an original evolutionary obstacle . Exaptation: feature with a function not for what is was originally evolved for · Secondary adaptation: evolutionary enhancement of exaptation · Vestigial: had a function but no longer does Secondary adaptation - working with the previous model Bag of tricks General purpose device · Building blocks · Specific things its adapted to do Lecture 2 Evolutionary psychology - behaviours exist because they were selected for . Allport (1989) - Attention and selection for action . We only have limited attention because we need to make decisions. Barriers: treating ourselves as gods, lacking understanding of evolution (Shane Warne, on "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!") and thinking of ourselves as opposite to how Darwin did: · We are different in kind to animals Evolved behaviours were important for ancestors, but not as important in modern society. Evolutionary psychology reasons that animals + plants were important to keep track of - invaluable resources in a hunter-gather society. Also threats . But animals move - moving of resources, moving of threats . If evolutionary demands -> more attention should be directed towards A New and others tested an evolutionary explanation for (animals > plants) through a change blindness paradigm. · Results: Animals and people (over plants and man made objects) o Greatest cumulative recognition o Fastest reaction time · Confounds: could be due to perceptual features - we are evolved to attend to round things like plants and animals - as opposed to things with straight edges. o Color o Luminance . Study 3/4: Controlled for confounds by inversion > found that the animal/people effect disappears. o Demonstrates a category advantage, rather than lower level perceptual features · Study 5: Disproving the animate objects hypothesis o Animals + people > plants / inanimate man made objects because of the low-level perceptual tendency to attend moving objects
Results: People and animals detected faster than vehicles o Supports an evolutionary explanation for our attention to animals and vehicles New and German - Spiders at the Cocktail Party - testing for an evolutionary fear of spiders through an inattentional blindness paradigm (closely modelled from Mack and rock) · Compared prototypical spider with scrambled and rectilinear spiders · Experiment 1: though the prototypical spider showed greatest rates of detection and localisation, the scrambled spider and rectilinear spider showed equally high detection and location in experiment 1. · Experiment 2: Found that prototypical spider was identified much more readily than rectilinear and scrambled spiders. · Conclusion: mixed Lecture 3 Kanwisher and others - fusiform gyrus activation greater when exposed to intact faces, compared to hands, animals and scrambled faces. There is no general problem solving machine because we had no general problems · Evolutionary vicissitudes were specific and hence overcome