Some evolutionary psychologists claim that humans are good at creating superstimuli, and that many pleasure technologies are detrimental to our reproductive fitness. Most of the evolutionary psychological literature makes use of some version of Lorenz and Tinbergen’s largely embryonic conceptual framework to make sense of supernormal stimulation and bias exploitation in humans. However, the early ethological concept “superstimulus” was intimately connected to other erstwhile core ethological notions, such as the innate releasing mechanism, sign stimuli and the fixed action pattern, notions (...) that nowadays have, for the most part, been discarded by ethologists. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we will reconnect the discussion of superstimuli in humans with more recent theoretical ethological literature on stimulus selection and supernormal stimulation. This will allow for a reconceptualisation of evolutionary psychology’s formulation of (supernormal) stimulus selection in terms of domain-specificity and modularity. Second, we will argue that bias exploitation in a cultural species differs substantially from bias exploitation in non-cultural animals. We will explore several of those differences, and explicate why they put important constraints on the use of the superstimulus concept in the evolutionary social sciences. (shrink)

Spaces in the brain can refer either to psychological spaces, which are derived from similarity judgments, or to neurocognitive spaces, which are based on the activities of neural structures. We want to show how psychological spaces naturally emerge from the underlying neural spaces by dimension reductions that preserve similarity structures and the relevant categorizations. Some neuronal representational formats that may generate the psychological spaces are presented, compared and discussed in relation to the mathematical principles of monotonicity, continuity and convexity. In (...) particular, we discuss the spatial structures involved in the connections between perception and action, for example eye-hand coordination, and argue that spatial organization of information makes such mappings more efficient. (shrink)

The overall objective is to explore the question of why our DNA is encoded to actualize an aesthetic experience that is autonomic and cognizant. It is proposed that the aesthetic experience is an adaptation selected by providing relief form the psychophysiological disorders that can arise from life’s burdens. It is further proposed that our aesthetic response to human form is an adaptation brought about by selecting alleles that generate an avoidance of mating with closely related species thus reducing the risk (...) of having less fit offspring, sterile offspring or no offspring. It is noted that with regard to human form apomorphic anatomical traits are attractive and plesiomorphic anatomical traits are unattractive. The term for this attitude has been coined cross species avoidance. The issue were addressed by interfacing philosophical aesthetics with evolutionary principles. (shrink)