The visuospatial system integrates inner and outer functional processes, organizing spatial, temporal, and social interactions between the brain, body, and environment. These processes involve sensorimotor networks like the eye–hand circuit, which is especially important to primates, given their reliance on vision and touch as primary sensory modalities and the use of the hands in social and environmental interactions. At the same time, visuospatial cognition is intimately connected with memory, self-awareness, and simulation capacity. In the present article, we review issues associated (...) with investigating visuospatial integration in extinct human groups through the use of anatomical and behavioral data gleaned from the paleontological and archaeological records. In modern humans, paleoneurological analyses have demonstrated noticeable and unique morphological changes in the parietal cortex, a region crucial to visuospatial management. Archaeological data provides information on hand–tool interaction, the spatial behavior of past populations, and their interaction with the environment. Visuospatial integration may represent a critical bridge between extended cognition, self-awareness, and social perception. As such, visuospatial functions are relevant to the hypothesis that human evolution is characterized by changes in brain–body–environment interactions and relations, which enhance integration between internal and external cognitive components through neural plasticity and the development of a specialized embodiment capacity. We therefore advocate the investigation of visuospatial functions in past populations through the paleoneurological study of anatomical elements and archaeological analysis of visuospatial behaviors. (shrink)

The domain of early hominin stone tool making and tool using abilities has received little scholarly attention in mainstream philosophy of technology. This is despite the fact that archeological evidence of stone tools is widely seen today as a crucial source of information about the evolution of human cognition. There is a considerable archeological literature on the cognitive dimensions of specific hominin technical activities. However, within archeology and the study of human evolution the standard perception is stone tools are mere (...) products of the human mind. A number of recent approaches to cognition challenges this simplistic one-way-causal-arrow view and emphasizes instead the functional efficiency of tools or artifacts in transforming and augmenting human cognitive capacities. As a result, the very idea that tools or artifacts are intimately tied to human cognitive processes is fast becoming an alternative within the cognitive sciences and a few allied disciplines. The present study intends to explore its implications for philosophy of technology. The central objective of this paper is to examine the dynamic and intricate tool-mediated activities of the early hominins through the lens of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological theory of human-technology relations and Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory. Highlighting the key points where these two research approaches, despite their subtle nuances, converge and look capable of mutually catalyzing each other, the paper attempts to show why it is important to bring these approaches together for a more refined understanding of the controversial role these stone tools played in human evolution. (shrink)

This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...) and environments. The argumentation synthesizes Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity theory, adding the notion of niche broadness as well as changes concerning the view of cognition and control, and Hohwy’s predictive mind theory, making explicit the significance of accuracy as a composite of trueness and precision where the nervous system acts as a distributed controller motivating actions that keep the body in homeostasis. (shrink)

This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...) and environments. The argumentation synthesizes Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity theory, adding the notion of niche broadness as well as changes concerning the view of cognition and control, and Hohwy’s predictive mind theory, making explicit the significance of accuracy as a composite of trueness and precision where the nervous system acts as a distributed controller motivating actions that keep the body in homeostasis. (shrink)

Comparative approaches to language evolution are essential but cannot by themselves resolve the timing and context of evolutionary events since the last common ancestor with chimpanzees. Archaeology can help to fill this gap, but only if properly integrated with evolutionary theory and the ethnographic, ethological, and experimental analogies required to reconstruct the broader social, behavioral, and neurocognitive implications of ancient artifacts. The current contribution elaborates a technological pedagogy hypothesis of language origins by developing the concept of an evolving human technological (...) niche and applying it to investigate two key transitions posited by Arbib’s Mirror System Hypothesis: from complex action recognition and imitation to proto-language, and from proto-language to language. (shrink)

Using a model of cognition as extended and enactive, we examine the role of materiality in making minds as exemplified by lithics and writing, forms associated with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. We address ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause such change, and the spans of time required for neurofunctional reorganization. We also offer three hypotheses for investigating co-influence and change in cognition (...) and material culture. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 785793. (shrink)

A key issue in cognitive sciences is to understand the cognitive bases of human tool use. Answers have been provided by two competing approaches. The manipulation-based approach assumes that humans can use tools because of the ability to store sensorimotor knowledge about how to manipulate tools. By contrast, for the reasoning-based approach, human tool use is based on the ability to reason about physical object properties. Recently, Caruana and Cuccio proposed a kind of reconciliation, based on the distinction between three (...) types of abductive inference, involving a different contribution of motor and cognitive elements: Automatic abduction, abduction by selection and creative abduction. This perspective offers new interesting avenues. Nevertheless, it is also subject to several theoretical and epistemological limitations, which make it in its present form inappropriate for the study of the cognitive bases of human tool use. This article aims to discuss these limitations. (shrink)

Cumulative technological culture (CTC) refers to the increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations. A fascinating question is to understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon. Because CTC is definitely a social phenomenon, most accounts have suggested a series of cognitive mechanisms oriented toward the social dimension (e.g., teaching, imitation, theory of mind, and metacognition), thereby minimizing the technical dimension and the potential influence of non-social, cognitive skills. What if we have failed (...) to see the elephant in the room? What if social cognitive mechanisms were only catalyzing factors and not thesufficient and necessaryconditions for the emergence of CTC? In this article, we offer an alternative, unified cognitive approach to this phenomenon by assuming that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills, namely technical-reasoning skills which enable humans to develop the technical potential necessary to constantly acquire and improve technical information. This leads us to discuss how theory of mind and metacognition, in concert with technical reasoning, can help boost CTC. The cognitive approach developed here opens up promising new avenues for reinterpreting classical issues (e.g., innovation, emulation vs. imitation, social vs. asocial learning, cooperation, teaching, and overimitation) in a field that has so far been largely dominated by other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Humans can follow different social learning strategies, sometimes oriented toward the models’ characteristics. The goal of the present study was to explore which who-strategy is preferentially followed in the technological context based on the models’ psychological characteristics. We identified three potential who-strategies: Copy the pedagogue, copy the engineer, and copy the friend. We developed a closed-group micro-society paradigm in which participants had to build the highest possible towers. Participants began with an individual building phase. Then, they were gathered to discuss (...) the best solutions to increase tower height. After this discussion phase, they had to make a new building attempt, followed by another discussion phase, and so forth for a total of six building phases and five discussion rounds. This methodology allowed us to create an attraction score for each participant. We also assessed participants’ theory-of-mind skills, technical-reasoning skills, and prosocialness to predict participants’ attraction scores based on these measures. Results show that we learn from engineers because they are the most successful. Their attraction power is not immediate, but after they have been identified as attractors, their technique is copied irrespective of their pedagogy or friendliness. These findings open avenues for the study of the cognitive bases of human technological culture. (shrink)

The contribution of action-perception systems of the brain to lexical semantics remains controversial. Here, we used high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) in healthy adults to examine the role of primary (left hand motor area; HMA) and higher-order (left anterior inferior parietal lobe; aIPL) action areas in action-related word processing (action verbs and manipulable nouns) compared to non-action-related control words (non-action verbs and non-manipulable nouns). We investigated stimulation-related effects at three levels of semantic processing: subliminal, implicit, and explicit. Broadly, we (...) found that stimulation of HMA and aIPL resulted in relative facilitation of action-related language processing compared to non-action. HMA stimulation facilitated action verb processing in subliminal and implicit task contexts, suggesting that HMA helps represent action verbs even in semantically shallow tasks. HMA stimulation also facilitated manipulable noun comprehension in an explicit semantic task, suggesting that HMA contributes to manipulable noun comprehension when semantic demands are high. aIPL stimulation facilitated both manipulable noun and action verb processing during an implicit task. We suggest that both HMA and aIPL play a functional role in action semantics. HMA plays a general role in the semantics of actions and manipulable objects, while aIPL is important only when visuo-motor coordination is required for the action. (shrink)

Tool-use behavior is currently one of the most intriguing and widely debated topics in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts of our ability to use tools have been proposed. In the first part of the paper we review the most prominent interpretations and suggest that none of these accounts, considered in itself, is sufficient to explain tool use. In the second part of the paper we disentangle three different types of reasoning on tools, characterized by a different distribution of motor and cognitive (...) ingredients. At the conceptual level, these types of reasoning reflect the distinction between three types of abductive inference as they are described in semiotic studies. At the functional level, we suggest that these types of reasoning on tools may correspond to different mental processes, possibly implemented in different regions of the left inferior parietal lobe. This proposal can account for the different interpretations commonly associated with the role of the left parietal cortex in tool use. (shrink)

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust’s theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust’s division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to William (...) James’ division of the stream of thought into a “nucleus” and “fringe.” Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Affordances, i.e. the opportunity of actions offered by the environment, are one of the central research topics for the theoretical perspectives that view cognition as emerging from the interaction between the environment and the body. Being at the bridge between perception and action, affordances help to question a dichotomous view of perception and action. While Gibson’s view of affordances is mainly externalist, many contemporary approaches define affordances as the product of long-term visuomotor associations in the brain. These studies have emphasized (...) the fact that affordances are activated automatically, independently from the context and the previous intention to act: for example, affordances related to objects’ size would emerge even if the task does not require focusing on size. This emphasis on the automaticity of affordances has led to overlook their flexibility and contextual-dependency. In this contribution I will outline and discuss recent perspectives and evidence that reveal the flexibility and context-dependency of affordances, clarifying how they are modulated by the physical, cultural and social context. I will focus specifically on social affordances, i.e. on how perception of affordances might be influenced by the presence of multiple actors having different goals. (shrink)

Humans leverage material forms for unique cognitive purposes: We recruit and incorporate them into our cognitive system, exploit them to accumulate and distribute cognitive effort, and use them to recreate phenotypic change in new individuals and generations. These purposes are exemplified by writing, a relatively recent tool that has become highly adept at eliciting specific psychological and behavioral responses in its users, capability it achieved by changing in ways that facilitated, accumulated, and distributed incremental behavioral and psychological change between individuals (...) and generations. Writing is described here as a self-organizing system whose design features reflect points of maximal usefulness that emerged under sustained collective use of the tool. Such self-organization may hold insights applicable to human cognitive evolution and tool use more generally. Accordingly, this article examines the emergence of the ability to leverage material forms for cognitive purposes, using the tool-using behaviors and lithic technologies of ancestral species and contemporary non-human primates as proxies for matters like collective use, generational sustainment, and the non-teleological emergence of design features. (shrink)