Evolutionspsykologi repræsenterer et skifte fra fokus på vidensopnåelse til forståelse af, hvordan udviklede mentale systemer regulerer adfærd tilpasset overlevelse og reproduktion. Det foreslår, at hjernen har specialiserede systemer designet af naturlig selektion. Denne tilgang har givet nye indsigter i områder som opmærksomhed, kategorisering og motivation.
Titel på undersøgelse:
Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives on Cognition and Motivation.
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Hele abstrakt på originalsprog:
Evolutionary psychology is the second wave of the cognitive revolution. The first wave focused on computational processes that generate knowledge about the world: perception, attention, categorization, reasoning, learning, and memory. The second wave views the brain as composed of evolved computational systems, engineered by natural selection to use information to adaptively regulate physiology and behavior. This shift in focus–from knowledge acquisition to the adaptive regulation of behavior–provides new ways of thinking about every topic in psychology. It suggests a mind populated by a large number of adaptive specializations, each equipped with content-rich representations, concepts, inference systems, and regulatory variables, which are functionally organized to solve the complex problems of survival and reproduction encountered by the ancestral hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended. We present recent empirical examples that illustrate how this approach has been used to discover new features of attention, categorization, reasoning, learning, emotion, and motivation.