Matt Spike

the life logistic

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Week 6 Tutorial

No reading this week, but I’ll ask you to watch a lecture given by Professor Cecilia Heyes. Heyes is one of the world’s leading developmental psychologists, and over the course of her career has, through both experimental and theoretical work, critically re-examined a wide range of established theory in developmental and evolutionary psychology, challenging both their assumptions and conclusions.

More recently, she has brought her research programme together into a coherent theoretical framework, which she calls ‘Cultural Evolutionary Psychology’. If you want to read more about her work, I highly recommmend looking at her book (available via the library here, but we only seem to have one copy so tell me if you can’t get hold of it), or the precis of the book here.

In the meantime, watch the lecture in the video below, and while you’re watching make a note of any questions you have about the material, using the prompts below as a rough guide, and prepare to discuss them in the tutorial.

Content questions

  1. What does Heyes say about Evolutionary Psychology and how does she constrast it with her approach?
  2. What is the role of cultural learning in her theory?
  3. What is ‘mindreading’?
  4. Why does she compare mindreading and print reading?
  5. What does she say about neural specification, genetic heritabilty, and cultural variation?
  6. What is epistemic engineering?
  7. Why does she discuss Nicaraguan Sign Language?

Possible discussion questions

  1. What do you think of Cultural evolutionary psychology - what benefits and drawbacks does it have, especially in comparison with Evolutionary Psychology?
  2. Do you think that the comparison between mindreading and print reading is a good one?
  3. Are you convinced by all Heyes’ arguments, or what more would you need to convince you?
  4. What do you think are the implications for language evolution?