CogSci 2020 session report

UNRAVELLING PAST COGNITION: APPROACHES ACROSS DISCIPLINES’

On July 30th 2020, postdoc Larissa Mendoza Straffon chaired an online symposium during the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020). Co-organized by SapienCE Principal Investigator, Andrea Bender, the session focused on the historical dimension of cognition from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brought together experienced scholars from different backgrounds with a common interest in human cognitive evolution. The session began with talks by Claudio Tennie (University of Tübingen, Germany), Dietrich Stout (Emory University, USA), Simon Greenhill (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany), and Francesco d’Errico (University of Bordeaux, France & SapienCE).

The fact that cognition changes over time and geography is often overlooked by narratives of human cognitive evolution, but is now being reassessed as fundamental for explaining the processes that have shaped the modern human mind. This in turn raises new questions, for example: Were such processes sudden or gradual? What factors spurred them? What role did culture play? The four talks and the panel discussion which followed them addressed some of these challenging issues head on.

While acknowledging that understanding past cognition is a necessarily inferential exercise reliant on present-day cognition, the speakers presented important contributions from comparative psychology, evolutionary neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive archaeology, all of which advance this understanding through novel methods and evidence-based hypotheses. One of the themes that emerged as a key issue in the current state of the field was the processes of information transmission that lead to typically human cumulative culture, such as imitation, instruction, and verbal communication. The participants also agreed that future studies should account for human cultural and cognitive diversity throughout evolution.