Journal ArticleDOI
Ecological and Developmental Perspectives on Social Learning
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TLDR
This paper explored the possible adaptive links between teaching and learning during childhood, and explored how human life history, ecological experience, cumulative culture, and ethnolinguistics impact social learning and child development in foraging and transitioning societies around the world.Abstract:
In this special issue of Human Nature we explore the possible adaptive links between teaching and learning during childhood, and we aim to expand the dialogue on the ways in which the social sciences, and in particular current anthropological research, may better inform our shifting understanding of how these processes vary in different social and ecological environments. Despite the cross-disciplinary trend toward incorporating more behavioral and cognitive data outside of postindustrial state societies, much of the published cross-cultural data is presented as stand-alone population-level studies, making it challenging to extrapolate trends or incorporate both ecological and developmental perspectives. Here, contributors explore how human life history, ecological experience, cumulative culture, and ethnolinguistics impact social learning and child development in foraging and transitioning societies around the world. Using historical ethnographic data and qualitative and quantitative data from studies with contemporary populations, authors interrogate the array of factors that likely interact with cognitive development and learning. They provide contributions that explore the unique environmental, social, and cultural conditions that characterize such populations, offering key insights into processes of social learning, adaptive learning responses, and culture change. This series of articles demonstrates that children are taught culturally and environmentally salient skills in myriad ways, ranging from institutionalized instruction to brief, nuanced, and indirect instruction. Our hope is that this collection stimulates more research on the evolutionary and developmental implications associated with teaching and learning among humans.read more
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Factors Affecting the Perception of Disability: A Developmental Perspective.
Iryna Babik,Elena S Gardner +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a developmental approach was used to study children's perception of disability from early age into adolescence while exploring cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of children's attitudes.
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Studying Close Entity Encounters of the Psychedelic Kind: Insights from the Cognitive Evolutionary Science of Religion
TL;DR: In this paper , a more robust mutual engagement between the science of psychedelic experiences (SPE) and the cognitive evolutionary science of religion (CESR) is proposed, which could open up opportunities for producing new knowledge not only about the human brain and the therapeutic effects of psychedelics, but also about the evolution of our species and our prospects for creatively enjoying our minds and peacefully living in pluralistic groups in a rapidly changing global environment.
References
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Book
The WEIRDest People in the World
TL;DR: A review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers.
Book
The Cultural Nature of Human Development
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present concepts and ways of understanding the cultural nature of human development and the transformation of participation in cultural activities in families and communities, as well as the transition in individuals' roles in their communities.
Journal ArticleDOI
WEIRD languages have misled us, too [Comment on Henrich et al.]
Asifa Majid,Stephen C. Levinson +1 more
Book
Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution
TL;DR: This book extends evolutionary theory by formally including niche construction and ecological inheritance as additional evolutionary processes, and demonstrates how the theory can resolve long-standing problems in ecology, particularly by advancing the sorely needed synthesis of ecology and evolution.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Developmental Niche: A Conceptualization at the Interface of Child and Culture:
Charles M. Super,Sara Harkness +1 more
TL;DR: The developmental niche as discussed by the authors is a framework for examining the cultural structuring of child development, including the physical and social settings in which the child lives, the customs of child care and child rearing, and the psychology of the caretakers.