Topic: human mind

Tinbergen encouraged ethologists to address animal behaviour by answering four questions, covering physiology, adaptation, phylogeny, and development. This broad approach has implications for neuroscience and psychology, yet, questions about phylogeny are rarely considered in these fields. Here I describe how phylogeny can shed light on our understanding of brain structure and function. Further, I show that we now have or are developing the data and analytical methods necessary to study the natural history of the human mind.

The seminar will first outline the architecture of the human mind, specifying general and domain-specific mental processes. The place of causal reasoning and its relations with the other processes will be specified. Experimental, psychometric, developmental, and brain-based evidence will be summarized. The main message of the talk is that causal thought involves domain-specific core processes rooted in perception and served by special brain networks which capture interactions between objects. With development, causal reasoning is increasingly associated with a general abstraction system which