Connecting the study of cognition to everyday life, Goldstein and van Hooff’s bestselling text Cognitive Psychology provides an accessible and engaging introduction to the subject, giving insight into the many psychological and physiological aspects of human behaviour.

Now in its third edition and containing the latest stimulating research, this text helps students navigate through all the major sub-disciplines and key concepts of cognitive psychology. It facilitates development of a thorough understanding of the complex relationships between mind, brain and behaviour.

Through the authors’ international approach and emphasis on research, methodology and application, students learn how to interpret theories and then use them in practical applications.

A mother of small children trusts her 'gut feelings' and it saves her life.

A young dad is able to grieve for his lost baby – using a song.

What if there were parts of our minds which we never use, but if awakened, could make us so much happier, connected and alive? What if awakening those parts could bring peace to the conflicts and struggles we all go through?

From the cutting edge, where therapy meets neuroscience, Steve Biddulph explores the new concept of 'supersense' – the feelings beneath our feelings – which can guide us to a more awake and free way of living every minute of our lives. And the Four-storey Mansion, a way of using your mind that can be taught to a five-year-old, but can also help the most damaged adult.

In Fully Human, Steve Biddulph draws on deeply personal stories from his own life, as well of those of his clients, and from the frontiers of thinking about how the brain works with the body and the wisdom of the `wild creature' inside all of us. At the peak of a lifetime's work, one of the world's best-known psychotherapists and educators shows how you can be more alive, more connected. More FULLY HUMAN.

From the bestselling author of Raising Boys.

Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself?

From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos comes a provocative hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated.

A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.

A fascinating, practical guide to making better decisions with our money, health and personal lives from Gerd Gigerenzer, the author of Reckoning with Risk. Numbers don't lie - but they often mislead us. From health risks to financial decisions, we often find it hard to make decisions because the statistics have been presented to us by 'experts' who misinterpret the data themselves. Here Gerd Gigerenzer shows how we can all use simple rules to become better-informed, risk-savvy citizens. 'Important, Gigerenzer draws valuable lessons . . . his clear explanations will be a great help to all' Omar Malik, Times Higher Education 'Gerd Gigerenzer argues that when it comes to taking risks in life, we are often much better off following our instincts than expert advice' Oliver Burkeman, Guardian 'Things will only get better, he shows, when specialists, particularly doctors and investment advisers, improve on their appalling record of analysing and communicating risks in their fields' Clive Cookson, Financial Times, Books of the Year 'Gigerenzer is brilliant' Steven Pinker Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on heuristics and decision making, including Reckoning with Risk.

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives―and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

In the Handbook of Culture and Memory, Brady Wagoner and his team of international contributors explore how memory is deeply entwined with social relationships, stories in film and literature, group history, ritual practices, material artifacts, and a host of other cultural devices. Culture is seen as the medium through which people live and make meaning of their lives. In this book, analyses focus on the mutual constitution of people's memories and the social-cultural worlds to which they belong. The complex relationship between culture and memory is explored in: the concept of memory and its relation to evolution, neurology and history; life course changes in memory from its development in childhood to its decline in old age; and the national and transnational organization of collective memory and identity through narratives propagated in political discourse, the classroom, and the media.

A robbery victim tries to remember how the crime unfolded and who was present at the scene. A medical patient recalls the doctor saying that the pain in her side wasn't worrisome, and now that the tumor is much larger, she's suing. An investigation of insider trading hinges on someone's memory of exactly what was said at a particular business meeting. In these and countless other examples, our ability to remember our experiences is crucial for the justice system. The problem, though, is that perception and memory are fallible. How often do our eyes or memories deceive us? Is there some way to avoid these errors? Can we specify the circumstances in which perceptual or memory errors are more or less likely to occur?
Professor Daniel Reisberg tackles these questions by drawing on the available science and his personal experience training attorneys. He provides detailed pragmatic advice that will prove helpful to law enforcement, prosecutors, defenders, and anyone else who hopes to maximize the quality of the evidence available to the courts -- whether the evidence is coming from witnesses, victims, or defendants.
This book is carefully rooted in research but written in a way that will make it fully accessible to non-scientists working in the justice system. Early chapters provide an overview of the relevant science and a broad portrait of how perception and memory function. Later chapters offer practical solutions for navigating situations involving eyewitness identifications, remembered conversations, evidence obtained from interviews with children, confession evidence, and the risks of false confession.

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions: What is the role of consciousness in the creative process? How does the audience for a work for art influence its creation? How can creativity emerge through childhood pretending? Do great works of literature give us insight into human nature? Can a computer program really be creative? How do we define creativity in the first place? Is it a virtue? What is the difference between creativity in science and art? Can creativity be taught? The new essays that comprise The Philosophy of Creativity take up these and other key questions and, in doing so, illustrate the value of interdisciplinary exchange. Written by leading philosophers and psychologists involved in studying creativity, the essays integrate philosophical insights with empirical research.

The Two Selves takes the position that the self is not a "thing" easily reduced to an object of scientific analysis. Rather, the self consists in a multiplicity of aspects, some of which have a neuro-cognitive basis (and thus are amenable to scientific inquiry) while other aspects are best construed as first-person subjectivity, lacking material instantiation. As a consequence of its potential immateriality, the subjective aspect of self cannot be taken as an object and therefore is not easily amenable to treatment by current scientific methods. Klein argues that to fully appreciate the self, its two aspects must be acknowledged, since it is only in virtue of their interaction that the self of everyday experience becomes a phenomenological reality. However, given their different metaphysical commitments (i.e., material and immaterial aspects of reality), a number of issues must be addressed. These include, but are not limited to, the possibility of interaction between metaphysically distinct aspects of reality, questions of causal closure under the physical, the principle of energy conservation, and more. After addressing these concerns, Klein presents evidence based on self-reports from case studies of individuals who suffer from a chronic or temporary loss of their sense of personal ownership of their mental states. Drawing on this evidence, he argues that personal ownership may be the factor that closes the metaphysical gap between the material and immaterial selves, linking these two disparate aspects of reality, thereby enabling us to experience a unified sense of self despite its underlying multiplicity.

Why do people find monkeys and apes so compelling to watch? One clear answer is that they seem so similar to us-a window into our own minds and how we have evolved over millennia. As Charles Darwin wrote in his Notebook, "He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke." Darwin recognized that behavior and cognition, and the neural architecture that support them, evolved to solve specific social and ecological problems. Defining these problems for neurobiological study, and conveying neurobiological results to ethologists and psychologists, is fundamental to an evolutionary understanding of brain and behavior. The goal of this book is to do just that. It collects, for the first time in a single book, information on primate behavior and cognition, neurobiology, and the emerging discipline of neuroethology. Here leading scientists in several fields review work ranging from primate foraging behavior to the neurophysiology of motor control, from vocal communication to the functions of the auditory cortex. The resulting synthesis of cognitive, ethological, and neurobiological approaches to primate behavior yields a richer understanding of our primate cousins that also sheds light on the evolutionary development of human behavior and cognition.

Evidence-based practice has become the benchmark for quality in healthcare and builds on rules of evidence that have been developed in psychology and other health-care disciplines over many decades. This volume aims to provide clinical neuropsychologists with a practical and approachable reference for skills in evidence-based practice to improve the scientific status of patient care. The core skills involve techniques in critical appraisal of published diagnostic-validity or treatment studies. Critical appraisal skills assist any clinician to evaluate the scientific status of any published study, to identify the patient-relevance of studies with good scientific status, and to calculate individual patient-probability estimates of diagnosis or treatment outcome to guide practice. Initial chapters in this volume review fundamental concepts of construct validity relevant to the assessment of psychopathology and cognitive abilities in neuropsychological populations. These chapters also summarize exciting contemporary development in the theories of personality and psychopathology, and cognitive ability, showing a convergence of theoretical and clinical research to guide clinical practice. Conceptual skills in interpreting construct validity of neuropsychological tests are described in detail in this volume. In addition, a non-mathematical description of the concepts of test score reliability and the neglected topic of interval estimation for individual assessment is provided. As an extension of the concepts of reliability, reliable change indexes are reviewed and the implication of impact on evidence-based practice of test scores reliability and reliable change are described to guide clinicians in their interpretation of test results on single or repeated assessments. Written by some of the foremost experts in the field of clinical neuropsychology and with practical and concrete examples throughout, this volume shows how evidence-based practice is enhanced by reference to good theory, strong construct validity, and better test score reliability.

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. In nineteen new essays, philosophers and cognitive scientists explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information and what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. Questions pertaining to how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful feature prominently. Contributors examine the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. Many of the essays engage with the idea that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities. Rather, contributors contend that to understand perception properly we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. In doing so, they aim to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception.

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.

Cognitive psychology has matured and flourished in the last half-century, as new theories, research tools, and theoretical frameworks have allowed cognitive psychologists and researchers to explore a broad array of topics. In the same vein, the depth of understanding and the methodological and theoretical sophistication have also grown in wonderful ways. Given the expanse of the field, an up-to-date and inclusive resource such as this handbook is needed for aspiring generalists who wish to read the book cover to cover, and for the many readers who are simply curious to know the current happenings in other cognition laboratories. Guided by this need, this volume's 64 chapters cover all aspects of cognition, spanning perceptual issues, attention, memory, knowledge representation, language, emotional influences, judgment, problem solving, and the study of individual differences in cognition. Additional chapters turn to the control of complex actions and the social, cultural, and developmental context of cognition. The authors include a mix of well-established influential figures and younger colleagues in order to gain an understanding of the field's forward trajectory. The volume also includes a mix of "tutorial" chapters and chapters that powerfully represent a particular research team's point of view.

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material - from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films - and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

In this book, Chris Eliasmith presents a new approach to understanding the neural implementation of cognition in a way that is centrally driven by biological considerations. He calls the general architecture that results from the application of this approach the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA), based on the Semantic Pointer Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, higher-level cognitive functions in biological systems are made possible by semantic pointers. These pointers are neural representations that carry partial semantic content and can be built up into the complex representational structures necessary to support cognition. The SPA architecture demonstrates how neural systems generate, compose, and control the flow of semantics pointers. Eliasmith describes in detail the theory and empirical evidence supporting the SPA, and presents several examples of its application to cognitive modeling, covering the generation of semantic pointers from visual data, the application of semantic pointers for motor control, and most important, the use of semantic pointers for representation of language-like structures, cognitive control, syntactic generalization, learning of new cognitive strategies, and language-based reasoning. He agues that the SPA provides an alternative to the dominant paradigms in cognitive science, including symbolicism, connectionism, and dynamicism.

Rethinking Thought takes readers into the minds of 30 creative thinkers to show how greatly the experience of thought can vary. It is dedicated to anyone who has ever been told, "You're not thinking!", because his or her way of thinking differs so much from a spouse's, employer's, or teacher's. The book focuses on individual experiences with visual mental images and verbal language that are used in planning, problem-solving, reflecting, remembering, and forging new ideas. It approaches the question of what thinking is by analyzing variations in the way thinking feels. Written by neuroscientist-turned-literary scholar Laura Otis, Rethinking Thought juxtaposes creative thinkers' insights with recent neuroscientific discoveries about visual mental imagery, verbal language, and thought. Presenting the results of new, interview-based research, it offers verbal portraits of novelist Salman Rushdie, engineer Temple Grandin, American Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and Nobel prize-winning biologist Elizabeth Blackburn. It also depicts the unique mental worlds of two award-winning painters, a flamenco dancer, a game designer, a cartoonist, a lawyer-novelist, a theoretical physicist, and a creator of multi-agent software. Treating scientists and artists with equal respect, it creates a dialogue in which neuroscientific findings and the introspections of creative thinkers engage each other as equal partners. The interviews presented in this book indicate that many creative people enter fields requiring skills that don't come naturally. Instead, they choose professions that demand the hardest work and the greatest mental growth. Instead of classifying people as "visual" or "verbal," educators and managers need to consider how thinkers combine visual and verbal skills and how those abilities can be further developed. By showing how greatly individual experiences of thought can vary, this book aims to help readers in all professions better understand and respect the diverse people with whom they work.

Time pervades every aspect of people's lives. We are all affected by remnants of our pasts, assessments of our presents, and forecasts of our futures. Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors over time inexorably intertwine and intermingle, determining varied reactions such as affect and emotions, as well as future behaviors. The purpose of this volume is to bring together the diverse theory and research of an outstanding group of scholars whose work relates to peoples judgements over time. To date, much theory and research on temporal variables within psychology has remained somewhat fragmented, isolated, and even provincial--researchers in particular domains are either unaware of or are paying little attention to each other's work. Integrating the theory and research into a single volume will bring about a greater awareness and appreciation of conceptual relations between seemingly disparate topics, define and promote the state of scientific knowledge in these areas, and set the agenda for future work. The volume presents the two main ways of looking at judgments over time: looking at how people's thoughts about the future and the past affect their present states, and looking at the interplay over time among people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Multitasking is all around us: the office worker interrupted by a phone call, the teenager texting while driving, the salesperson chatting while entering an order. When multitasking, the mind juggles all the many tasks we're doing this second, this hour, this week, and tries to perform them together-sometimes with great ease, sometimes with great difficulty. We don't often stop to think about how exactly we accomplish these feats of multitasking great and small. How do we switch from one task to another? What types of multitasking are disruptive, and when are they most disruptive? And ultimately, how can we take advantage of the benefits of multitasking while alleviating its negative effects in our daily lives?
This book presents the theory of threaded cognition, a theory that aims to explain the multitasking mind. The theory states that multitasking behavior can be expressed as cognitive threads-independent streams of thought that weave through the mind's processing resources to produce multitasking behavior, and sometimes experience conflicts to produce multitasking interference. Grounded in the ACT-R cognitive architecture, threaded cognition incorporates computational representations and mechanisms used to simulate and predict multitasking behavior and performance.
The book describes the implications of threaded cognition theory across three traditionally disparate domains: concurrent multitasking (doing multiple tasks at once), sequential multitasking (interrupting and resuming tasks), and multitask skill acquisition (learning and practicing multiple tasks). The work stresses the importance of unifying basic and applied research by alternating between in-depth descriptions of basic research phenomena and broader treatments of phenomena in applied domains, such as driver distraction and human-computer interaction. The book also includes practical guidelines for designers of interactive systems intended for multitasking contexts.

Consciousness is a perennial source of mystification in the philosophy of mind: how can processes in the brain amount to conscious experiences? Robert Kirk uses the notion of `raw feeling' to bridge the intelligibility gap between our knowledge of ourselves as physical organisms and our knowledge of ourselves as subjects of experience; he argues that there is no need for recourse to dualism or private mental objects. The task is to understand how the truth about raw feeling could be strictly implied by narrowly physical truths. Kirk's explanation turns on an account of what it is to be a subject of conscious perceptual experience. He offers penetrating analyses of the problems of consciousness and suggests novel solutions which, unlike their rivals, can be accepted without gritting one's teeth. His sustained defence of non-reductive physicalism shows that we need not abandon hope of finding a solution to the mind-body problem.

Some psychological phenomena can be explained by identifying and describing the processes that constitute them. Others cannot be explained in that way. In Attention is Cognitive Unison Christopher Mole gives a precise account of the metaphysical difference that divides these two categories and shows that, when current psychologists attempt to explain attention, they assign it to the wrong one.
Having rejected the metaphysical approach taken by our existing theories of attention Mole then develops a new theory. According to this theory the question of whether someone is paying attention is not settled by the facts about whichprocesses are taking place. It is settled by the facts about whether the processes that serve that person's task-- whichever processes those happen to be--are processes that operate in unison. This theory gives us a new account of the problems that have dogged debates about the psychology of attention since the middle of the twentieth century. It also gives us a new way to understand the explanatory importance of cognitive psychology's empirical findings. The book as whole shows that metaphysical questions have a foundational role to play in the explanatory project of cognitive psychology.
This volume is of interest to anyone engaged in current debates in the philosophy of mind and perception, and in cognitive science generally.

Simple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. Yet, the social world also encompasses domains where social animals such as humans can learn from one another and can forge alliances with one another to boost their chances of success. According to the book's thesis, the undeniable complexity of the social world does not dictate cognitive complexity as many scholars of rationality argue. Rather, it entails circumstances that render optimization impossible or computationally arduous: intractability, the existence of incommensurable considerations, and competing goals. With optimization beyond reach, less can be more. That is, heuristics--simple strategies for making decisions when time is pressing and careful deliberation an unaffordable luxury--become indispensible mental tools. As accurate as or even more accurate than complex methods when used in the appropriate social environments, these heuristics are good descriptive models of how people make many decisions and inferences, but their impressive performance also poses a normative challenge for optimization models. In short, the Homo socialis may prove to be a Homo heuristicus whose intelligence reflects ecological rather than logical rationality.

This is the last major work of Eugene N. Sokolov, Professor of Psychophysiology at Moscow State University from 1950 to 2008. It summarizes the contributions of a lifetime on the neural mechanism of consciousness. Working at the intersection of psychology, neurophysiology and mathematics, Sokolov early introduced the concept of quantifiable 'difference in neuronal activity' and 'cognitive distance' as corresponding metrics in the physical and mental models of reality. He demonstrated the power of multidimensional vector mathematics to represent the neural computations that mediate between the brain's neural model and the mind's mental model of reality.
Sokolov and colleagues showed a mathematical commonality among the neuronal mechanisms that mediate the perception of basic features of visual stimuli including color, brightness, line orientation and motion. This led to a general vector model linking perceptual and memory processes to adaptive motor mechanisms. They extended the model to encompass broader, more complex functions, such as the perception of emotions in facial expressions, semantic differences in verbal stimuli and differential executive control mechanisms. Integrating evidence from human psychophysics, animal neurophysiology and vector mathematics they developed a unified model to characterize quantitatively many complex relations between objective and subjective aspects of reality.
Sokolov's studies of neuronal mechanisms of mental phenomena led him to distinguish two categories of neurons: 'consciousness neurons' directly associated with awareness of perceptual, emotional and cognitive events, and neurons that are necessary for, but not directly involved in, conscious processes. The book integrates his findings with major themes shaping twenty-first century understanding of the brain-mind relationship. It relates the findings both to work of other Russian investigators, such as Pavlov, Luria, and Rusinov, and to work of many Western researchers, including von Bekesy, Eccles, Edelman, Ehrenstein, Grossberg, John, Koch and Crick, Ledoux, Llinas, Milner, Penfield, Penrose, Posner, and Schrodinger."

Few conversational topics can be as significant as our troubles in life, whether everyday and commonplace, or more exceptional and disturbing. In groundbreaking research conducted with John Lee at the University of Manchester UK, Gail Jefferson turned the microscope on how people talk about their troubles, not in any professional or therapeutic setting, but in their ordinary conversations with family and friends. Through recordings of interactions in which people talk about problems they're having with their children, concerns about their health, financial problems, marital and relationship difficulties (their own or other people's), examination failures, dramatic events such as burglaries or a house fire and other such troubles, Jefferson explores the interactional dynamics and complexities of introducing such topics, of how speakers sustain and elaborate their descriptions and accounts of their troubles, how participants align and affiliate with one another, and finally manage to move away from such topics. The studies Jefferson published out of that remarkable period of research have been collected together in this volume. They are as insightful and informative about how we talk about our troubles, as they are innovative in the development and application of Conversation Analysis. Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) was one of the co-founders of Conversation Analysis (CA); through her early collaboration with Harvey Sacks and in her subsequent research, she laid the foundations for what has become an immensely important interdisciplinary paradigm. She co-authored, with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, two of the most highly cited articles ever published in Language, on turn-taking and repair. These papers were foundational, as was the transcription system that she developed and that is used by conversation analysts world-wide. Her research papers were a distinctive and original voice in the emerging micro-analysis of interaction in everyday life.

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with that information. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between "nativist" approaches to development, based on innateness, and "empiricist" approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends.