Psychology 3228 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Swiss Army Knife, Cognitive Module, Optical Illusion
5 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
Our cognition and memory systems are designed to do a good enough job, most of the time. Evolutionary approach to cognition: we have cognitive modules, that are a set of adaptations to evolutionary problems that have benefited our ancestors in a way: cognitive functions are solutions to problems related to survival and reproduction. Idea that the mind and the brain are separate - renee decartes. Our mind operates differently than our brain. The human mind and soul was independent of the physical structure of the brain. Mind is modular, and these cognitive modules (language, spatial memory) have been implemented by specific mechanisms in the brain. But for some cognitive psychologist, how the brain does it is unimportant. The adaptation is the cognitive module itself, and the brain has to be able to do that somehow. There are no domain general psychological modules, because there are no domain general problems: tooby and cosmides.
