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Thinking about possibilities plays a critical role in the choices humans make throughout their lives. Despite this, the influence of individuals' ability to consider what is possible on culture has been largely overlooked. We propose that the ability to reason about future possibilities or prospective cognition, has consequences for cultural change, possibly facilitating the process of cumulative cultural evolution. In particular, by considering potential future costs and benefits of specific behaviours, prospective cognition may lead to a more flexible use of cultural behaviours. In species with limited planning abilities, this may lead to the development of cultures that promote behaviours with future benefits, circumventing this limitation. Here, we examine these ideas from a comparative perspective, considering the relationship between human and nonhuman assessments of future possibilities and their cultural capacity to invent new solutions and improve them over time. Given the methodological difficulties of assessing prospective cognition across species, we focus on planning, for which we have the most data in other species. Elucidating the role of prospective cognition in culture will help us understand the variability in when and how we see culture expressed, informing ongoing debates, such as that surrounding which social learning mechanisms underlie culture. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny’.
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Transhumanism and Education: Embodied Learning in an Era of Altered Bodies
In the past decade, both cognitive science and the learning sciences have been significantly altered by an increased attention to the theme of embodiment. Broadly speaking, this theme complements (or pushes back against) the notion of purely abstract, “disembodied” cognition and emphasizes the role of physical interaction with the environment in the course of learning and development. A common, if usually implicit, assumption in this work is that learners’ bodies are more or less constant from one era to another: after all, human senses, limbs, physiology, and the basic parameters of cognition are part of an ongoing evolutionary human endowment. This assumption, while historically reasonable, is likely to need reconsideration in the near future, as a variety of “transhumanist” technologies (enhanced senses, bodies, and internalized interfaces with the outside physical environment) become more prevalent in children’s lives. This paper discusses several foundational issues and questions that are poised to emerge, and to challenge our enduring ideas about children and education, in the foreseeable future.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1736051
- PAR ID:
- 10098181
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference in the Learning Sciences
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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