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Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture

Cumulative transmission and innovation are the hallmark properties of the cultural achievements of human beings. Cognitive scientists have traditionally explained these properties in terms of social learning and creativity. The non-social cognitive dimension of cumulative culture, the so-called tech...

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Autores principales: Hohol, Mateusz, Wołoszyn, Kinga, Brożek, Bartosz
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8579038/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34776886
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2021.734930
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author Hohol, Mateusz
Wołoszyn, Kinga
Brożek, Bartosz
author_facet Hohol, Mateusz
Wołoszyn, Kinga
Brożek, Bartosz
author_sort Hohol, Mateusz
collection PubMed
description Cumulative transmission and innovation are the hallmark properties of the cultural achievements of human beings. Cognitive scientists have traditionally explained these properties in terms of social learning and creativity. The non-social cognitive dimension of cumulative culture, the so-called technical reasoning, has also been accounted for recently. These explanatory perspectives are methodologically individualistic since they frame cumulative and innovative culture in terms of the processing of inner cognitive representations. Here we show that going beyond methodological individualism could facilitate an understanding of why some inventions are disseminated in a stable form and constitute the basis for further modifications. Drawing on three cases of cognitive history of prominent achievements of Antiquity, i.e., Homerian epics, Euclidean geometry, and Roman law, we investigate which properties of cognitive artifacts shaped cognitive niches for modifying original cognitive tasks or developing new ones. These niches both constrained and enabled the cognitive skills of humans to promote cumulative culture and further innovations. At the same time, we claim that “wide cognition,” incorporating both intracranial resources and external cognitive representations, constitutes a platform for building explanations of cognitive phenomena developing over a historical time scale.
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spelling pubmed-85790382021-11-11 Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture Hohol, Mateusz Wołoszyn, Kinga Brożek, Bartosz Front Integr Neurosci Neuroscience Cumulative transmission and innovation are the hallmark properties of the cultural achievements of human beings. Cognitive scientists have traditionally explained these properties in terms of social learning and creativity. The non-social cognitive dimension of cumulative culture, the so-called technical reasoning, has also been accounted for recently. These explanatory perspectives are methodologically individualistic since they frame cumulative and innovative culture in terms of the processing of inner cognitive representations. Here we show that going beyond methodological individualism could facilitate an understanding of why some inventions are disseminated in a stable form and constitute the basis for further modifications. Drawing on three cases of cognitive history of prominent achievements of Antiquity, i.e., Homerian epics, Euclidean geometry, and Roman law, we investigate which properties of cognitive artifacts shaped cognitive niches for modifying original cognitive tasks or developing new ones. These niches both constrained and enabled the cognitive skills of humans to promote cumulative culture and further innovations. At the same time, we claim that “wide cognition,” incorporating both intracranial resources and external cognitive representations, constitutes a platform for building explanations of cognitive phenomena developing over a historical time scale. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-10-27 /pmc/articles/PMC8579038/ /pubmed/34776886 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2021.734930 Text en Copyright © 2021 Hohol, Wołoszyn and Brożek. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Hohol, Mateusz
Wołoszyn, Kinga
Brożek, Bartosz
Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture
title Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture
title_full Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture
title_fullStr Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture
title_full_unstemmed Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture
title_short Making Cognitive Niches Explicit: On the Importance of External Cognitive Representations in Accounting for Cumulative Culture
title_sort making cognitive niches explicit: on the importance of external cognitive representations in accounting for cumulative culture
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8579038/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34776886
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2021.734930
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