33 found
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  1. Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate.H. Clark Barrett & Robert Kurzban - 2006 - Psychological Review 113 (3):628-647.
    Modularity has been the subject of intense debate in the cognitive sciences for more than 2 decades. In some cases, misunderstandings have impeded conceptual progress. Here the authors identify arguments about modularity that either have been abandoned or were never held by proponents of modular views of the mind. The authors review arguments that purport to undermine modularity, with particular attention on cognitive architecture, development, genetics, and evolution. The authors propose that modularity, cleanly defined, provides a useful framework for directing (...)
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  2.  17
    The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve.H. Clark Barrett - 2015 - Oxford University Press.
    The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions (...)
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  3. Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment.H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich, Martin Kanovsky, Geoff Kushnick, Anne Pisor, Brooke A. Scelza, Stephen Stich, Chris von Rueden, Wanying Zhao & Stephen Laurence - 2016 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (17):4688–4693.
    Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...)
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  4. Enzymatic computation and cognitive modularity.H. Clark Barrett - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (3):259-87.
    Currently, there is widespread skepticism that higher cognitive processes, given their apparent flexibility and globality, could be carried out by specialized computational devices, or modules. This skepticism is largely due to Fodor’s influential definition of modularity. From the rather flexible catalogue of possible modular features that Fodor originally proposed has emerged a widely held notion of modules as rigid, informationally encapsulated devices that accept highly local inputs and whose opera- tions are insensitive to context. It is a mistake, however, to (...)
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  5.  78
    Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies.Cameron M. Curtin, H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Martin Kanovsky, Stephen Laurence, Anne Pisor, Brooke Scelza, Stephen Stich, Chris von Rueden & Joseph Henrich - 2020 - Evolution and Human Behavior 41 (5):415-429.
    Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...)
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  6. Adaptive Specializations, Social Exchange, and the Evolution of Human Intelligence.Leda Cosmides, H. Clark Barrett & John Tooby - 2010 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (Supplement 2):9007--9014.
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  7.  38
    Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies.H. Clark Barrett, Tanya Broesch, Rose M. Scott, Zijing He, Renee Baillargeon, Di Wu, Matthias Bolz, Joseph Henrich, Peipei Setoh, Jianxin Wang & Stephen Laurence - 2013 - Proceedings of the Royal Society, B (Biological Sciences) 280 (1755).
  8. Experimental philosophy.Jordan Kiper, Stephen Stich, H. Clark Barrett & Edouard Machery - 2021 - In David Ludwig & Inkeri Koskinen (eds.), Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science. New York: Routeldge.
  9.  53
    Children's understanding of death as the cessation of agency: a test using sleep versus death.H. Clark Barrett & Tanya Behne - 2005 - Cognition 96 (2):93-108.
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  10. (1 other version)On the functional origins of essentialism.H. Clark Barrett - 2001 - [Journal (Paginated)] (in Press) 2 (1):1-30.
    This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism results from a history of natural selection acting on human representation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist representational systems are especially well suited for representing natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductive potential of such kinds, then it must be subserved by cognitive mechanisms that carry out at least three distinct functions: identifying these kinds in the environment, constructing (...)
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  11.  80
    Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross‐Cultural Study.H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Tanya Broesch, Emma Cohen, Peggy Froerer, Martin Kanovsky, Mariah G. Schug & Stephen Laurence - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (6):e12992.
    It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief (...)
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  12.  32
    Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies.Daniel M. T. Fessler, H. Clark Barrett, Martin Kanovsky, Stephen P. Stich, Colin Holbrook, Joseph Henrich, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Geoff Kushnick, Anne C. Pisor, Christopher von Rueden & Stephen Laurence - 2015 - Proceedings of the Royal Society; B (Biological Sciences) 282:20150907.
    Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable (...)
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  13.  21
    Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals across the Life Course.James Broesch, H. Clark Barrett & Joseph Henrich - 2014 - Human Nature 25 (2):181-199.
    Prior work has demonstrated that young children in the US and the Ecuadorian Amazon preferentially remember information about the dangerousness of an animal over both its name and its diet. Here we explore if this bias is present among older children and adults in Fiji through the use of an experimental learning task. We find that a content bias favoring the preferential retention of danger and toxicity information continues to operate in older children, but that the magnitude of the bias (...)
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  14. Artifacts and Original Intent: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Design Stance.H. Clark Barrett, Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2008 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 8 (1-2):1-22.
    How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer’s original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we examined intuitions about artifact categorization among the Shuar, a hunter-horticulturalist society in the Amazon region of Ecuador. We (...)
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  15. Do human parents face a quantity-quality tradeoff? Evidence from a shuar community.H. Clark Barrett - manuscript
     
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  16.  90
    Resolving the debate on innate ideas: Learnability constraints and the evolved interpenetration of motivational and conceptual functions.John Tooby, Leda Cosmides & H. Clark Barrett - 2005 - In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York, US: Oxford University Press on Demand. pp. 305--337.
    In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (Eds.). The innate mind: Structure and content. (pp. 305-337). New York: Oxford University Press.
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  17. Essay Review-Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature.Edouard Machery & H. Clark Barrett - 2006 - In Borchert (ed.), Philosophy of Science. MacMillan. pp. 73--2.
  18.  34
    Descent Versus Design in Shuar Children's Reasoning about Animals.H. Clark Barrett - 2004 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 4 (1):25-50.
    The ability to make inductive inferences is important because without it, generalization of knowledge to new circumstances would be impossible. One context in which such inductive skills are likely to have been important over evolutionary time is encounters with animals. Previous research suggests that children take into account at least two kinds of relationships between animals when making inductive inferences about them: descent relationships, and design relationships. Because descent and design relationships are sometimes orthogonal, making correct inferences about particular traits (...)
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  19.  29
    Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies.Bailey R. House, Joan B. Silk, Joseph Henrich, H. Clark Barrett, Brooke A. Scelza, Adam H. Boyette, Barry S. Hewlett, Richard McElreath & Stephen Laurence - 2013 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (36):14586-14591.
    Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...)
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  20.  32
    Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures.Gregory Bryant & H. Clark Barrett - 2008 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 8 (1-2):135-148.
    There exists substantial cultural variation in how emotions are expressed, but there is also considerable evidence for universal properties in facial and vocal affective expressions. This is the first empirical effort examining the perception of vocal emotional expressions across cultures with little common exposure to sources of emotion stimuli, such as mass media. Shuar hunter-horticulturalists from Amazonian Ecuador were able to reliably identify happy, angry, fearful and sad vocalizations produced by American native English speakers by matching emotional spoken utterances to (...)
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  21.  3
    Resolving the Debate on Innate Ideas.H. Clark Barrett & John Tooby - 2005 - In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York, US: Oxford University Press on Demand.
    This chapter addresses the question of why many cognitive and behavioural scientists still fail to recognize the truth of nativism despite the power of poverty of stimulus arguments. It argues that this is primarily because the domains in which these arguments have hitherto been applied, for example, language or naive physics, are all ones in which the knowledge that children acquire is objectively present in their environment. Thus, the possibility always remains open that children could somehow be acquiring this knowledge (...)
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  22. Perinatal sadness among shuar women: Support for an evolutionary theory of psychic pain.H. Clark Barrett & E. Hagen - manuscript
  23.  30
    Moral parochialism misunderstood: a reply to Piazza and Sousa.Daniel M. T. Fessler, Colin Holbrook, Martin Kanovsky, H. Clark Barrett, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich, Geoff Kushnick, Anne C. Pisor, Stephen P. Stich, Christopher von Rueden & Stephen Laurence - 2016 - Proceedings of the Royal Society; B (Biological Sciences) 283.
  24. Debunking Adapting Minds[REVIEW]Edouard Machery & H. Clark Barrett - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (2):232-246.
    David Buller’s recent book, _Adapting Minds_, is a philosophical critique of the field of evolutionary psychology. Buller argues that evolutionary psychology is utterly bankrupt from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Although _Adapting Minds _has been well received in both the academic press and the popular media, we argue that Buller’s critique of evolutionary psychology fails.
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  25.  26
    The Risks of Evolutionary Explanation.H. Clark Barrett - 2023 - In Agathe du Crest, Martina Valković, André Ariew, Hugh Desmond, Philippe Huneman & Thomas A. C. Reydon (eds.), Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines: Problems and Perspectives in Generalized Darwinism. Springer Verlag. pp. 29752211-31555011.
    Evolutionary explanations of behavior are special in that they involve both proximate and ultimate components. Proximately, evolutionary accounts posit mechanisms that generate observed patterns of behavior. At the ultimate level, evolutionary accounts explain the existence of these proximate mechanisms via evolutionary processes such as selection or drift acting in the past. Does positing or accepting such explanations carry any risks? Here I consider two kinds of risk, epistemic and ethical. Epistemic risk is the risk of being wrong about a matter (...)
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  26.  23
    Lying about the future: Shuar-Achuar epistemic norms, predictions, and commitments.Alejandro Erut, Kristopher M. Smith & H. Clark Barrett - 2023 - Cognition 239 (C):105552.
  27.  23
    How cultural framing can bias our beliefs about robots and artificial intelligence.Jeff M. Stibel & H. Clark Barrett - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e46.
    Clark and Fischer argue that humans treat social artifacts as depictions. In contrast, theories of distributed cognition suggest that there is no clear line separating artifacts from agents, and artifacts can possess agency. The difference is likely a result of cultural framing. As technology and artificial intelligence grow more sophisticated, the distinction between depiction and agency will blur.
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  28. Adaptation to moving targets: Culture/gene coevolution, not either/or.H. Clark Barrett, Willem E. Frankenhuis & Andreas Wilke - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (5):511-512.
    We agree that much of language evolution is likely to be adaptation of languages to properties of the brain. However, the attempt to rule out the existence of language-specific adaptations a priori is misguided. In particular, the claim that adaptation to cannot occur is false. Instead, the details of gene-culture coevolution in language are an empirical matter.
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  29. Evolved cognitive mechanisms and human behavior.H. Clark Barrett - manuscript
    In Crawford, C. & Krebs, D. (eds.) Foundations of evolutionary psychology: Ideas, issues, applications and findings. (2nd Ed.) Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.
     
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  30.  36
    Is category specificity in the world or in the mind?H. Clark Barrett - 2001 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (3):478-479.
    HIT produces category-specific deficits without category- specific mechanisms by assuming that differences in properties of objects are transparently converted into differences in representational format. A complete model would specify the mechanisms that accomplish this. Such category-specific mechanisms may have evolved because assumptions about the properties of some kinds of objects (e.g., living things) are invalid for others (e.g., artifacts).
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  31.  18
    Modularity and.H. Clark Barrett - 2005 - In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York, US: Oxford University Press on Demand. pp. 2--199.
  32.  29
    Prosody in spontaneous humor: Evidence for encryption.Thomas Flamson, Gregory A. Bryant & H. Clark Barrett - 2011 - Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (2):248-267.
    The study of conversational humor has received relatively little empirical attention with almost no examinations of the role of vocal signals in spontaneous humor production. Here we report an analysis of spontaneous humorous speech in a rural Brazilian collective farm. The sample was collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Brazil, and is drawn specifically from the monthly communal business meetings conducted in Portuguese. Our analyses focused on humorous utterances identified by the subsequent presence of laughter. Acoustic features (...)
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  33.  31
    Development: Evolutionary ecology's midwife.Karthik Panchanathan, Willem E. Frankenhuis & H. Clark Barrett - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):105-106.
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