01:185:253 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Heredity, Dual Inheritance Theory, Pleistocene

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Cognitive Science
• Course: 01:185:253
• Professor: Stephen Stich

Document Summary

Cultural learning definition: seek to acquire info from others, often make inferences about beliefs, preferences and goals of the person from whom they are acquiring information, often copy their actions and motor patterns. To an extent that is unprecedented in other species, we acquire beliefs, skills, desires, preferences, emotion elicitors, other information rich mental states that are similar in content to the mental states of the people around us. Humans not only acquire far more information and far more varied information via cultural learning than any other species. We are far more reliant on cultural learning, couldn"t survive without it: boyd and richerson thought experiment, lost european explorers- burke and wills in the australian outback- 1860. Indigenous people acquired it from other (usually older) members of their culture by cultural learning. This answer leads to another important question how did the indigenous culture acquire the knowledge needed to survive? (how do the older people get the knowledge)