The Descent of Mind Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution

About this book

To most people it seems obvious that there are many major mental differences between ourselves and other species, but there is considerable debate over exactly how special our minds are, and which were the critical evolutionary events that shaped us. This volume aims to show what pyschologists have to say on the evolution of the mind.

Contents

1. Are Humans Special? a history of psychological perspectives; 2. The Background to Hominid intelligence; 3. Phylogeny from Apes to Humans; 4. Human Cognitive Evolution; r 5 Predicting Hominid Intelligence from Brain Size; 6. Perception of Personality Traits and Semantic Learning in Evolving Hominids; 7. Whatever Happened to Articulate Speech?; 8. Preconditions for the Evolution of Protolanguages; 9. The Role of Gesture and Mimetic Representation in Making Language the Province of Speech; 10. The Evolution of Deep Social Mind in Humans; 11. Handedness, Cerebral Lateralization, and the Evolution of Language; 12. The Rise of the Metamind; 13. The Evolution of a Theory of Mind; 14. Beliefs About Purpose: On the Origins of Teleological Thought; 15. The Evolution of Certain Novel Human Capacities; 16. Social Influences on Human Assortative Mating; 17. On the Recent Origin of Symbolically-Mediated Language and its Implications for Psychological Science

Customer Reviews