Evolution and the psychology of thinking : the debate

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Title:

Author:

Over, D. E., 1946-

ISBN:

9781841692852

Publication Information:

New York : Psychology Press, 2003.

Physical Description:

p. cm.

Series:

Current issues in thinking and reasoning

Contents:

Introduction: The evolutionary psychology of thinking / David E. Over -- 1. The allocation system: Using signal detection processes to regulate representations in a multimodular mind / Gary L. Brase -- 2. Is there a faculty of deontic reasoning? A critical re-evaluation of abstract deontic versions of the Wason selection task / Laurence Fiddick -- 3. Evolutionary psychology's grain problem and the cognitive neuroscience of reasoning / Anthony P. Atkinson and Michael Wheeler -- 4. Specialized behaviour without specialized modules / Amit Almor -- 5. From massive modularity to metarepresentation: The evolution of higher cognition / David E. Over -- 6. Probability judgement from the inside and out / Steven A. Sloman and David E. Over -- 7. Evolutionary versus instrumental goals: How evolutionary psychology misconceives human rationality / Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West.

Subject Term:

Cognitive psychology.

Genetic psychology.

Added Author:

Over, D. E., 1946-

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... IIEMSA	General Books	33168015724707	155.7 O.96E 2003	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

The field of evolutionary cognitive psychology has stimulated considerable interest and debate among cognitive psychologists and those working in related areas. In this collection, leading experts evaluate the status of this new field, providing a critical analysis of its most controversial hypotheses. These hypotheses have far reaching implications for cognition, including a modular view of the mind, which rejects, in its extreme form, any general learning or reasoning abilities. Some evolutionary psychologists have also proposed content-dependent accounts of conditional reasoning and probability judgements, which in turn have significant, and equally controversial, implications about the nature of human reasoning and decision making.
The contributions range from those that are highly critical of the hypotheses to those that support and develop them. The result is a uniquely balanced, cutting-edge evaluation of the field that will be of interest to psychologists, philosophers and those in related subjects who wish to find out what evolutionary considerations can, and cannot, tell us about the human mind.