Interactions between cognition and culture.

Abstract

This chapter takes a broad and often comparative perspective to look at the interactions between cognition and culture. After a brief introduction of the methods used to study cultural evolution and gene-culture co-evolution (G-CC), there is a review of research on social transmission of information, including the conditions favouring the evolution of social learning, particular context or content-specifi c social learning biases, the infl uence of transmission mode on cultural evolution and the cognitive requirements for different social learning processes. The chapter then develops some of the key theories concerning the cognitive evolution of learning and intelligence in<br>hominids, such as social, technical and cultural intelligence, the Baldwin effect, niche construction, the evolution of cooperative behaviour and cumulative cultural evolution. The chapter concludes in support of a multimodal niche-constructive framework to provide a full description of the interactions between cognition and culture.