PSYC 3100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Time Preference, Number Sense, Joint Attention
23 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
Cooperation is complex, requires significant cognitive capacities: that which allows for the possibilities of reliable decisions about the future. Aided by institutions (marriage, economy, law, education, reading) Temporal discounting: immediate small benefits vs. large delayed benefits (humans vs. non- humans) Numerosity: abilities we share, and abilities which differ with non-humans. Number sense is shared with chimps, and young human infants: pertaining to discriminating small groups of objects (up to 4 objects) Does not exist in other animals, no temporal discounting. This system breaks down after 4 objects, so that even 1 vs. 6 objects cannot be perceived: magnitude discrimination when number of objects are larger in certain ratios. Counting is a cultural construct, essential to cooperation. Successor principle: generalization from early rote learning of counting, successor number for any number in a sequence, the essence of counting, when they can"t count, they can count up to a memorized number.
