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Evolutionary Psychology

Brain and Mind

Darwin
• The theory of the origin of species by evolution through natural selection
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” Charles Darwin, November 13,
1859, in a letter to L
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Natural Selection
• Those that are better fitted to their social and physical environment are more likely to pass
their genes to the next generation
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Variation – everybody is different
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Inheritance – some traits are passed on
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Selection – survival and more offspring for the fittest because of limited resources
such as food and sexual partners
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Time – successful variations accumulate over many generations
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Sexual Selection
• Females usually invest more in offspring than males do
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• Therefore males usually compete for mating access to females
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• Inter-sexual selection: Opposite sex choose a mate based on their elaborate ornamentation
behaviours
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”
• Human evolution began 6
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• To understand human behaviour from an ultimate perspective, we need to understand the
natural and sexual selection fitness benefits that selected these behaviours
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• The EEA refers to an array of factors that have influenced inclusive fitness during our
evolution over the last 200,000 years
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• We have evolved to survive; in small family groups, in the African Savannah and on a diet
provided by hunting and gathering
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• We are not designed to cope with city living or fast food
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Mental Continuity
• “Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is,
certainly is one of degree and not of kind
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Sources of data
• Archaeology
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• Observation
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• Life-history data and public records
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Altruism
• Why do we help others when it involves a cost to ourselves?
• Moll and Grafman (2006) used brain-imaging techniques to show that human brain is
equipped with a built-in moral compass
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examined neural responses to taxation and voluntary giving
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Mate Preferences
• Females should be more concerned with traits of parenting effort in terms of material
resources and males should be concerned with parental effort in terms of biological
resources
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• Costs in reproduction: Grammer (1989) found that women use more cues than men when
evaluated prospective mates
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• Parental investment: Buss (1989) discovered that sex differences are universal
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The Brain
The Human Nervous System
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2
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The Human Brain
• Weighs approximately 1
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• Cells:
1
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2
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Contrary to previous belief, they have
a higher purpose than just being the scaffolding of the brain
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• Reflexes
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Anatomical Organisation
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5
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Five Major Divisions of the Brain
• Telencephalon (forebrain)
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• Mesencephalon (midbrain)
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• Myelencephalon (hindbrain)
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• Metencephalon: contains the pons and the cerebellum
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The Forebrain
• Diencephalon: contains the thalamus (relay with feedback) and the hypothalamus
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Parts of the Brain and What They Do
• Parietal Lobe: integrating input and control of motor movement
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• Temporal Lobe: processing auditory input, visual object recognition and memory
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• Excitation and inhibition
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The Neuron and Neural Communication
Neuronal Structure
• Dendrites: a branch-like structures of neurons along which neural impulses received from
other neurons at synapses are transmitted to the cell body
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• Axon: tail-like structures found on neurons, used to send information to other neurons
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Types of Neurons
• Sensory neurons: controls muscles
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• Motor neuron: extensive dendrites with long axon
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• Astrocyte: star-shaped, symmetrical, nutritive and support function
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• Oligodendroglial: asymmetrical, forms the myelin around axons in brain and spinal cord
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How Neurons Conduct Information
• The movement of ions creates a number of different types of electrical activity
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Resting potential
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Graded potential: changes in voltage due to electrical stimulation (hyperpolarisation
= increase negative voltage, depolarisation = decrease in negative voltage)
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Action potential: brief but large change in the polarity of an axon’s membrane when
the potential exceeds a threshold of -50mv
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How Neurons Integrate Information
• Stimulation of cell body can result in either:
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2
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Varieties of Synapse
• Dendrodendritic: dendrites sending messages to other dendrites
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• Axoextracellular: terminal with no specific target
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• Axosomatic: axon terminal ends on cell body
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• Axoaxonic: axon terminal ends on another axon
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The Neurotransmission Process
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Neurotransmitters
• Small molecule transmitters: acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin and amino acids
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• Transmitter gases: nitrous oxide
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• Long-term potentiation is confirmation of this rule
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Problems with Neurons
• Motor neuron disease begins with muscular stiffness and leads to complete lack of muscular
use
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• However, the hippocampus can spawn new neurons, so a cure could be discovered
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The Auditory Sense
• Characteristics of auditory stimulus:
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Taste
• Anatomy of taste – between 2000 and 10000 taste buds
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• Five primary tastes – sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami
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• Children don’t like bitter tastes as an evolutionary adaptation because poisonous things are
often bitter
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• Smell declines with age (65 year olds – men = 25% and female = 11% are impaired)
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• The nose has a direct link to the limbic region of the brain
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• Wavelength of light = hue/colour
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• Purity = saturation
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• Rods: most sensitive to changes in to light level, shapes and movement
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• However, they are not intrinsic to sight as mice with no rods or cones were still able to
navigate their way out of a maze using only light
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• M cells – connect to magnocellular cells (primary input from rods)
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Streams of Visual Information
• Dorsal – “where” information
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• Ventral – “what” information
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Visual Field
• The central part of the visual field is represented at the back of the brain
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• The top part of the visual field is represented in the lower part of the occipital lobe
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• Information weighted to emphasise differences in luminance; forms edges of shapes
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Seeing Colour
• Trichromatic theory
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Retina sensitive to primary colours
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2
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(Wald, 1964)
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1
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2
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• Composite theory (De Valois and De Valois, 1975)
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• From 1 in 200 to 1 in 20,000
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• It is not a disorder; it gives a better recall but in turn makes the person less creative
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• We do this by using contrast to identify the edges of the object
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Form Perception: Gestalt Psychology
• Look for: order, regularity, symmetry, simplicity etc
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• He also believed that perception richer than sensation
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• Law of Similarity: objects that are similar are perceived as a group
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• Law of Symmetry: symmetrical objects are grouped together
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Depth Perception
• How do we perceive in 3D when the retina produces 2D images?
• Absolute distance: distance between object and observer
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• Types of cue:
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Monocular Cues
• Interposition
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• Linear perspective
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• Location in the picture plane
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• Relative positions of areas of light/shade help determine orientation, shape and depth of
object
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Difference in two retinal images
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Degree of disparity is interpreted as a cue of depth
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Not effective at long distances
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Eyes turn in as object approaches
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Brain interprets muscular movement
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Not effective at long distance
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• Influenced by experience and knowledge
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Influence of Context
• Contrast effects: perception shaped by other objects/stimuli; such as the Ebbinghaus illusion
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Global Precedence
• Global versus Local – whether the focus is on the whole picture or the parts of the picture
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Memory
What is memory?
• Memory is the representation of the past
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”

Types of memory
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3
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Structures of Memory
• Physical basis of memory
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A physical change in the brain and neural pathways
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Cognitive psychologists are not so interested in this
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Short and long term memory
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Implicit or explicit memory
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Procedural and semantic processing
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Encoding: how memories are registered in the brain
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Storage: how they remain as memories after they have been registered
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Retrieval: how we retrieve memories when output is needed
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Recall: trying to produce items of knowledge from memory
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Recognition: is a stimulus item a member of a remembered set?

The Multi-store Model of Memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968)
• Three areas are studied in the MSM:
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Feature
Sensory register
Short-term store
Long-term store
How the information
enters
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The form information is
in
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Not possible
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Large, but only a small
amount is attended to
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Method of information
loss
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Need to be paid
attention
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Phonemic (sound);
probably also visual and
maybe semantic
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Needs to be rehearsed
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Possibly no loss; loss of
accessibility by
interference
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Duration of trace
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Up to 30 seconds
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Readout (can only read Probably automatic;
back what is received at items in consciousness
that moment in time)
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Repetition;
organisation
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Limit not known
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Forgetting Theories: Decay Theory
• Forgetting due to passage of time
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Repeating trigrams while blocking rehearsal
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After 6 seconds, accuracy dropped to 40%
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Done by Brown in 1958 and Peterson & Peterson in 1959
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• Probe Digit Task (Waugh & Norman, 1965) – found that both groups showed similar patterns
of loss despite different time frames
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Proactive interference: Old material interferes with recall of new
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Retroactive interference: New material interferes with recall of old
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• Cruciality: patients with deficit in the STM are still able to learn, and recall information from
LTM
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• Structure of the STM: single system or multiple? Deficit in STM affected words and digits but
not images
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Working Memory
• A place to store and manipulate information
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Incorporates STM from MSM
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Deals with speech but also with printed words
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Printed words are ‘heard’
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Allows us to manipulate metal imagery e
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mental rotation
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Supervises information in working memory
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Allocates resources to WM tasks
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Not much is known about how it works
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Capable of binding modality-specific representations into ‘multi-modal’ ones
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Interfaces with long-term memory
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Applies chronological order to the representations
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• Knowledge of what a circle looks like is retrieved from long-term memory and stored in the
visuospatial scratchpad and rehearsed
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• Partial combinations and arrangements are placed on the visuospatial scratchpad
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(Baddeley, 1996)
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(Baddeley at al
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How is this model an improvement?
• Maintains a structural distinction between long-term and short-term memory
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• Fits well with available data suggesting this architecture
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Organisation of LTM
• Episodic Encoding – levels of processing, deeper processing led to greater recall (Craik &
Lockhart, 1972)
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• Semantic Memory – giving something meaning helps with retention and retrieval
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• Conditioning: linking a stimulus to a response
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• Structuralism – the mind comes in pieces
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• Observation and experiment are the only sources of substantive knowledge
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No ‘why’, only ‘how’
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• Inductive process: giving assumptions based on premises
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• Identifying the structure of consciousness by identifying its elements
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• Determine why these elements are combined like this
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• Influenced William James (1842-1910) and G
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• Helped to develop educational psychology
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Angell (1869-1949) stated that functionalism:
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Functionalist Methods
• Introspection
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• Experiments
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• Mental testing
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What does Cognitive Psychology study?
• Perception
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• Learning
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• Categorisation
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Types of Cognitive Psychologist
• Experimental psychologists – create groups and look for differences
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• Modeller – create models of cognitive theories
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• Is there a link between believing in something without evidence and visual perception?
• Paranormal believers are more likely to see faces accurately and quickly (Riekki et al
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Cognitive Neuropsychologist (example)
• Single Dissociation – weak evidence of dissociation of X and Y, maybe X is harder than Y
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Modeller
• Coming up with a specified theory that can explain behaviour
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Information Processing
• Things happen in stages and unique processing happens at each stage
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• The mind:
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Top-Down Processing
• Goal-driven processing
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Voicing – vibration of the vocal cords
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Voice Onset Time (VOT): the delay between the initial sound of a voiced consonant
and the onset of vibration of the vocal cords
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• Pollack and Pickett (1964):
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Bottom-Up Processing
• Data-driven processing
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• Gibson’s Direct Perception:
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Interactionism
• A theoretical perspective that derives social processes (such as conflict, cooperation, identity
formation) from human interaction
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Modularity
• The degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined
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Modularity in Language
• There is meaning (semantics)
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• Do separate modules process them?
• If we find physically separate parts of the brain that handle each then maybe this is a correct
distinction
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• Open vocabulary: new items are added easily
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”
• Messages are typically structured sequences of vocabulary items
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• Closed vocabulary: new items are not usually added
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• Messages are usually single items, sometimes with repetition
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• Differences in formulation:
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Some earlier ideas about the origins of speech
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Reasons for language
• Organising hunts
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• Communicating about distributed food sources
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• Passing on tool making skills
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• Establishing social bonds between individuals
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• Caring for and training young
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Social gossip hypothesis (Dunbar): promotes cohesion in large social groups
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2
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Therefore, symbolism was needed for intentions and feelings
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Scheherazade effect (Miller): brain as a sexually selected organ and language as a byproduct, cultural output is higher in males than in females
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• Broca’s area involved in motor activity related to language and active when playing music
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Humans and Music
• Humans are the only species that has music; is this due to natural selection or sexual
selection?
• Music as a sexual signal:
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2
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If you could do both it
indicated a degree of physical and sexual fitness
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Those of our ancestors that could convey this would be the best at attracting mates
and reproducing themselves
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Oxytocin produced when listening to music helps to form social bonds
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Social bonding: rhythm – dance – music – singing – language
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• Processes of cultural evolution:
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Culture as autonomous from biology
• No genetic change, but massive cultural change over the past 35000 years
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• Underlying structures in cultures are determined by evolution (marriage, morality)
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• Cultures reflect biological needs
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Religion
• Psychology of religion: “Whether it’s a dead ancestor or God, whatever supernatural agent it
is, if you think they’re watching you, your behaviour is going to be affected
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• Disadvantages: sacrifice of livestock, painful rituals, celibacy
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• Religion has evolved by natural selection and helps with survival
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