PAD Keynote, Prof Cecelia Heyes

Cultural Evolutionary Psychology 

Abstract
Cultural evolutionary psychology seeks to explain the origins and effectiveness of distinctively human cognitive mechanisms by combining the resources of cognitive science and evolutionary theory.  In contrast with classical evolutionary psychology, it suggests that these mechanisms have been shaped primarily by culture; by Darwinian selection operating on socially rather than genetically inherited variants. In other words, cultural evolutionary psychology casts distinctively human psychological mechanisms as ‘cognitive gadgets’ rather than ‘cognitive instincts’, but it is not a blank slate theory. During human evolution, often via Baldwinisation, genetic selection has tuned motivational, attentional, and learning processes that we share with other animals to make our developing minds more malleable by information from other agents. Using morality, imitation and metacognition as examples, I will sample the evidence from developmental psychology, comparative psychology and cognitive neuroscience that supports cultural evolutionary psychology and discuss the opportunities and challenges it presents for those who want to understand not only how our minds work, but why they work that way.

Speaker bio
I was trained as an experimental psychologist at University College London (UCL, 1978-84). As a Harkness Fellow in the United States (1984-6), I studied evolutionary epistemology with Donald T Campbell and philosophy of mind with Daniel Dennett. I spent a second postdoctoral period studying associative learning as a Research Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge (1986-9), and then returned to UCL as a member of faculty in 1988. The next 20 years were focussed on experimental work, initially in animal cognition and later in cognitive neuroscience. In the later years  my group developed and tested an associative account of the origins of imitation and the mirror neuron system. In 2008 I left UCL to become a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Here I am concentrating on theoretical work while collaborating in experimental projects in Oxford and elsewhere.

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