In mainstream psychology, there are three major theories of how we humans process information:

Stage approach

Levels-of-processing theory

Connectionist model

The Stage Theory focuses on how information is stored in memory. The model is based on the work of Atkinson and Shriffin and proposes that information is processed and stored in three stages -- Sensory memory; Short-term memory; Long-term memory – and there is a central processing or executive functioning in coordinating these three stages. Evo psy also proposes similar domain general model.

Atkinson, R., & Shiffrin, R. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K Spence & J Spence (Eds.). The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 2). New York: Academic Press.

The Levels-of-Processing theory is based on the work of Craik and Lockhart and proposes that all stimuli that activate a sensory receptor cell are permanently stored in memory. The issue is not storage, but retrieval, which is based on the amount of elaboration used as information is processed. The elaboration (rehearsal, labeling, meaning, inhibiting other information) is done through a central processing such as executive functioning and working memory. This is domain general which evo psy also proposes

Craik, F., & Lockhart, R. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Thinking and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684.

Connectionist Theory emphasizes the fact that information is stored in multiple locations throughout the brain in the form of networks of connections. It is also consistent with the levels-of-processing approach in that the more connections to a single idea or concept (when more elaboration and rehearsal are used), the more likely it is to be remembered. This supports evo psy model that emphasizes modularity and heuristics selected through solving invariant and recurring evolutionary challenges. The difference lies when the connections were made.

Rumelhart, D., & McClelland, J. (Eds.). (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Executive Functioning &Working Memory focusing and shifting attention inhibiting irrelevant information effortful and conscious Perceptual MemoryShort-Term MemoryLong-Term Memory

Behavioral output

PerceptualInput

Mainstream Psychology Cognitive Model:

One Super ComputerCentral processing like a computer that may

be serial or parallel, of single or multiple

connections.

Domain Specific Modules & HeuristicsMostly unconscious & effortlessEvolved early, Invariant informationLow level perceptual and cognitive e.g., face module, shape moduleBehavio

ral Output

ModularizedPerceptionFace perceptionDistance perceptionShape perception

Domain General IntelligenceConscious & effortfulEvolved later, variant informationHigh level cognitive executive functioning, short, long memory; focusing attention, inhibiting modules

Find where things are

Get to a place

See mom and feel secure

Study evo psych

ModularizedPerceptionFace perceptionDistance perceptionShape perception

Evolutionary Psychology Cognitive Model

Many Mini Computers

Evidence of Specialized, Effortless, Automatic Cognitive Modules

Gerd Gigerenzer, Fast and Frugal Heuristics

Which is the stronger currency: Pound or Marka?

Which city has a larger population: San Diego or San Antonio?

1. Take The Familiar:Its activation is automatic because the distinction between knowing and not knowing has a stronger cognitive root than any other logical deduction because it is adaptive in the evolutionary past – landmark recognition, face recognition, kin recognition, neophobia.

2. Take the First:

Take the first clue that is found to be positive for one object but negative for the other.

3. Take the Last:Since the capital clue worked last time, use it again.

4. Take the Best:

The fact that a habit dies hard is evolutionarily adaptive because it solved your problem in the past and you are likely to continue with it.

Which city has a larger population: Tokyo or Osaka?

Which city held the Olympic game: London or Manchester?

Which house to buy: one with a sea view, one on higher floors, one with discount?Which class to take: one by a good teacher, one at good time, one with a textbook?

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, The Social Contract Module

Warson selection task: If p, then q; four options: p, q, p’, q’

D

3E

4

Verify the rule that if the letter side is D, the number side is 4.

Taxi

ArlingtonSubway

Boston

Familiar Context: Verify the rule that if transportation side is Taxi, the destination side is Boston.

Drink Beer

13 years oldDrink Coke

18 years old

One side is type of drink and the other is age. Make sure that a person has to be 18 to drink alcohol

If p, then q; four options: p, q, p’, q’; different context, success rate

D

4

3

E

Boston

Subway

Taxi

Arlington

Beer

18 years old

13 years old

Coke

10% 30-40% 75%

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnerman, Conjunction fallacy

If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1/1000 has a false positive rate of 5%, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease?

When given to Harvard students, only 18% got the correct answer of 2% (.001/ (.001)+(.999)(.05).

Cosmides and Gierenzer presented the same problem in words and replaced probabilities with actual numbers. Success rate increased to 76%.

Herbert Simon

“Satisfying” and “Adjustable aspiration”Much research on consumer behavior, e.g., purchasing a house, finding a job, finding a mate, shows that the decision that makes us happy is often irrational because it deviates from our rational planning and we can only justify it after the fact.

Jerry Fodor, Poverty Of Stimulus (POS)

“..there is typically more information in a perceptual response than there is in the proximal stimulus that prompts the response; hence perceptual integration must somehow involve the contribution of information by the perceiving organism.”

Perception includes cognition which is often encapsulated: resistant to other information processing, i.e., specialized or modularized.

Müller-Lyer Illusion

Müller-Lyer IllusionRevealed

Stroop Effect

Yellow, Lavender, Purple, Blue, Green, Black, Orange, Pink, Red, Lavender, Purple, Orange, Blue, Green, Black, Red, Yellow, Black,en, Pink

Fodor’s black panther example:

Imagine seeing something like

this in the jungle versus on TV.

Domain specific Domain generalImplicit System Explicit System

Unconscious ConsciousAutomatic ControllableFast, frugal Slow, effortfulEvolved early Evolved lateCommon across many species May be unique to humansPragmatic, Logical, context-dependent De-contextualized, abstract, rational Parallel Processing Sequential Processing High capacity Limited by attention and working

memoryEffortless EffortfulHeuristics as paradigm General Intelligence as paradigmAcquisition by biology Acquisition by culture and learning

e.g., Social discourse e.g., Chess

The system is constrained The system is plastic

Cognitive activities were conducted and repeated within specific and the same context so much in our evolutionary past so that they become hardwired cognitive modules. They are fast; i.e., their activation is automatic. They are frugal because they do not require a lot of information and, because of that, they are often inaccurate. Schooling and education mean we need to inhibit these fast and frugal decision making modules and develop our central executive functioning.

The EP Modularity View about Cognition and IQ

• Perception is (in part) innate cognition which is (in part) organized separately as modules.

• Modules are “dedicated intelligences” that receive characteristic inputs and produce characteristic output.

• Their operation is mandatory (i.e., they are automatically triggered in the presence of appropriate environmental stimulation), fast, and unconscious (but their output may be conscious).

• Modules have a built-in sense of relevance about what information is needed to solve an adaptive problem.

• When the environment presents recurrent problems, the optimal solution is to develop domain-specific cognitive and psychological mechanisms specialized to handle specific types of input and generate certain types of solutions.

• There is also a domain general mechanism called “improvised intelligence” that help us develop strategies (plans) to achieve goals in rapidly changing, variable, and unpredictable environments. This process is conscious and effortful. Part of this process means inhibiting the domain-specific modules or heuristics that have been selected to solve context specific problems.

• Higher IQ people are better able to inhibit heuristic processing such as intuition in favor of abstract reasoning and that requires attention and working memory both are characteristic of IQ.

• The mind is designed to make common mental activities unconscious and automatic so that the limited resources available to the conscious mind can be allocated to tasks requiring attention and cognitive resources. With time, conscious, explicit, effortful become unconscious, implicit, and involuntary.

• “Transient conditions that disappear after a single or a few generations may lead to some temporary change in the frequency of designs, but the associated selection pressures will disappear or reverse as often as conditions do. Therefore, it is only those conditions that recur, statistically accumulating across many generations, that lead to the construction of complex adaptations” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 69).

Cognitive activities were conducted and repeated within specific and the same context so much in our evolutionary past so that they become hardwired cognitive modules. They are fast; i.e., their activation is automatic. They are frugal because they do not require a lot of information and, because of that, they are often inaccurate. Schooling and education mean we need to inhibit these fast and frugal decision making modules and develop our central executive functioning.

The EP Modularity View about Cognition and IQ

• Perception is (in part) innate cognition which is (in part) organized separately as modules.

• Modules are “dedicated intelligences” that receive characteristic inputs and produce characteristic output.

• Their operation is mandatory (i.e., they are automatically triggered in the presence of appropriate environmental stimulation), fast, and unconscious (but their output may be conscious).

• Modules have a built-in sense of relevance about what information is needed to solve an adaptive problem.

• When the environment presents recurrent problems, the optimal solution is to develop domain-specific cognitive and psychological mechanisms specialized to handle specific types of input and generate certain types of solutions.

• There is also a domain general mechanism called “improvised intelligence” that help us develop strategies (plans) to achieve goals in rapidly changing, variable, and unpredictable environments. This process is conscious and effortful. Part of this process means inhibiting the domain-specific modules or heuristics that have been selected to solve context specific problems.

• Higher IQ people are better able to inhibit heuristic processing such as intuition in favor of abstract reasoning and that requires attention and working memory both are characteristic of IQ.

• The mind is designed to make common mental activities unconscious and automatic so that the limited resources available to the conscious mind can be allocated to tasks requiring attention and cognitive resources. With time, conscious, explicit, effortful become unconscious, implicit, and involuntary.

• “Transient conditions that disappear after a single or a few generations may lead to some temporary change in the frequency of designs, but the associated selection pressures will disappear or reverse as often as conditions do. Therefore, it is only those conditions that recur, statistically accumulating across many generations, that lead to the construction of complex adaptations” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 69).

The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one area of interaction with the world. The modules’ basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history (Pinker, 1997, p.21).

The purpose of behavior is to allow the individual to gain access to and control of the types of resource that have tended to enhance survival or reproductive options during the species’ evolutionary history (p.101, Geary, 2000).

For us humans (and many other animals) the constant and recurring type of resources comes from three environments – social, biological, and physical.

The evolved brain in acquiring this resource is modularized into cognitive heuristics or shortcuts known as folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics.

These are evolved biologically primary competencies in contrast to non-evolved biologically secondary competencies such as reading, writing, problem solving and various academic abilities.

We do not have pre-selected hardwires for solving novel problems. What is selected is general intelligence which is defined as the ability to explicitly represent information in working memory and to systematically manipulate this information so as to engage in controlled problem solving. It also include speed of processing, memory, attention focusing and shifting and the ability to inhibit irrelevant information including existing modules and heuristics.

“Cognitive mechanisms that operate on ecological or social information are predicted to vary with the extent to which that information tended to be invariant (resulting in evolved heuristics) or variant (resulting in evolved problem solving mechanisms) during the species’ evolutionary history and during a typical lifespan.” David Geary (2005), p.168.

Heuristics:Fast, frugal, andimplicit mechanisms

Controlled Problem-Solving:Slow, effortful, complex, and explicit/consciousmechanisms

Invariant VariantInformation Patterns

Evolution and Schooling: Two sides of the same coin1. Acquire scientific problem solving methods and inhibit fastbut fallible evolutionary modules through formal schooling.

Conscientiousness in personality psychology:– 1 of big 5: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness – Effortful Control (innate but learned too)– Delay of gratification– Inhibition of dominant responses (learned or innate)– Focus attention– Persevere in unpleasant tasks– Planning for long-term goals– Dependable, responsible, dutiful, disciplined– Slow developing ― Lack of conscientiousness defines immaturity– Highly correlated with school performance among children and

career success among adults

Experiments and observations at 22 to 33 months of age among a variety of tasks assessing the ability to inhibit dominant responses

waiting for signal before eating snack, not peeking while gift is wrapped, not touching wrapped gift until experimenter returns,not eating candies to get more.

Related to better academic performance from primary school to college

Related to better ability to modulate anger and joy.

Thus, effortful control (major component of conscientiousness) is potentially linked to control over or inhibition of automatic and implicitmodularized processing, suggesting a correlation between conscientious

personality and general intelligence (the explicit, plastic, and domain general system).

Kochanska, G., Murray, K.T., & Harlan, E. (2000). Effortful control in early childhood: Continuity and change, antecedents, and implications for social development. Developmental Psychology, 36, 220–232.

Evolution and Schooling: Two sides of the same coin

2. Despite formal learning, it is our basic instincts and natural abilities that guide our day to day decision making activities. Children possess adaptations that serve preparatory functions for adulthood (e.g., high self-esteem, curiosity) that facilitate learning. Children also possess ontogenetic adaptations not to serve future needs (e.g., suckling and reflexes and various immature patterns of behavior) that should not be stopped or exploited for learning.

Rats who started training for classical conditioning on day 14 outperformed those who started on day 12 who outperformed those who started on day 10 (Rudy, Vogt, & Hyson, 1984). Similar findings with rhesus monkeys (Harlow, 1959).

Rhesus monkeys trained for two months at 120, 150, and 365 days outperformed those trained at 60 and 90 days one year later when they were tested on the same object discrimination tasks (Harlow, 1959).

In a natural experiment conducted by the German government, young children from playschools performed as well or better academically than children from academic schools after kindergarten and even years later; those from playschools had a more positive attitude toward learning and school (Darling-Hammond, 1971).

Children from Academic kindergarten and play kindergarten perform similarly in primary schools. Children from academic schools show less interest in and more anxiety about schools. (Sylvia Opper, 1992)

Viewing the motivation system as part of cognitive development, keeping children interested in and confident about something may be more important than teaching the thing. On the other hand, losing interest or confidence may be an adaptation to prevent over-stimulation of immature sensory system.

Starting formal learning presents the untimely opportunity from which children learn to be “realistic” about their abilities (losing confidence) and which kills their interests and curiosities (losing interest).

Observe evolutionarily selected gender differences in primary cognitive abilities, e.g., spatial organization versus location memory, and in social attributes, e.g., competitive versus cooperative styles that may be exploited in designing the best learning environment for the two genders. Such socialization techniques as simply encouraging one gender to engage in things the other gender is good at, e.g., calling out girls for answers in math class, may be too simplistic.