Interview with Cecilia Heyes about her book Cognitive Gadgets. Discusses various 'cognitive gadgets' such as literacy and imitation, which Heyes argues are not biologically programmed, but culturally evolved feats of cognition.
The Nature & Nurture Podcast
Cecilia Heyes
thepodcastbrowser.com/cecilia-heyes-…

'The cognitive processes that make cognitive inheritance of facts & skills possible, they are themselves culturally inherited. Now in a way that idea is deeply scary. It suggest that within very few generations a society could, for example, completely change the kinds of models…

Robin Hanson Cecilia Heyes is a great experimentalist & theorist. Her work on the development of imitation - basically disproving 'mirror neurons' - was both fantastic (and against the crowd at the time). Deeply influenced me in grad school for the better...

Cecilia Heyes' 2018 book Cognitive Gadgets has revolutionized how I think about human nature.
overcomingbias.com/p/hail-cecilia…

Dan Dennett was a great philosopher, a kind and gentle man, and a dear friend to me and many others. We shall all be poorer without his wisdom, and I shall miss him immeasurably.

We're looking for a new PhD student to come and work with us on the topics of cognitive control and reinforcement learning! Deadline April 26th. For more information, please see users.ugent.be/~sbraem/. Ghent Center for Cognitive Neuroscience

In this episode, Greg talks with Michael Strevens from New York University, exploring the balance between empirical data and the broader intellectual landscape in scientific inquiry. Check the full episode at buff.ly/43yFrju

We are recruiting for a Marie Curie 'CODE' PhD student 💻🧠🚨 (sites.google.com/view/confident…)

The project will focus on neurocomputational approaches to information seeking, offloading and metacognitive control across the lifespan

ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/se…

Deadline 22 Feb, pls RT!

An Open Address to the Jewish Mainstream - by Brian Klug contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-current…

Saying goodbye to 2023 with Dr Salter’s Daydream lookup.london/dr-salter-scul… Happy new year.

Quick thread on inheritance tax:

Something that is massively under-discussed in this debate is how the “it’s unfair” argument is completely flipped on its head when you consider it from the perspective of the next generation instead of the person passing on the inheritance.

This paper has it all: behavioral data, computational modeling, and quite a lot of discussion of underlying cognitive mechanisms. This paper is particularly special to me because it's my lab manager Becky's (Becky Beaton) very first publication!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

Learning to imitate for cultural inheritance with a lean starter kit - from some very smart people at Google DeepMind nature.com/articles/s4146… ESLR Society

Many thanks to Philip Gerrans for a generous and penetrating review of Cognitive Gadgets in the British J Philosophy of Science

Huge congratulations to Senior Lecturer Daniel Yon, who has been announced as this year’s winner of the Experimental Psychology Society Prize! The annual award recognises distinguished, independent & original contributions to experimental psychology: bit.ly/3QMiNhN

perfect

Two cognitive neuroscience postdocs with the excellent Raffaella Rumiati in beautiful Trieste. (English after you click.)
tinyurl.com/PDsTrieste

Sound symbolism is not inborn, but (slowly) emerges after the first year of life
journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…