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Explanations of misfortune are the object of much cultural discourse in most human societies. Recurrent themes include the intervention of superhuman agents (gods, ancestors, etc.), witchcraft, karma, and the violation of specific rules or 'taboos'. In modern large‐scale societies, people often respond by blaming the victims of, for example, accidents and assault. These responses may seem both disparate and puzzling, in the sense that the proposed accounts of untoward events provide no valuable information about their causes or the best way to prevent them. However, these responses make sense if we see them in an evolutionary context, where accidents, assault, and illness were common occurrences, the only palliative being social support to victims. This would create a context in which all members of a group might be (a) required to offer support, (b) willing to offer such support to maintain a reputation as co‐operators, and (c) desirous to limit that support because of its cost. In this context, recurrent explanations of misfortune would constitute strategic attempts to create and broadcast a specific description of the situation that concentrates responsibility and potential costs on a few individuals. This strategic model accounts for otherwise perplexing features of explanations based on mystical harm (ancestors, witchcraft, etc.), as well as the tendency to denigrate victims, and offers new predictions about those cultural phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficits in episodic memory are associated with deficits in the ability to imagine future experiences (i.e., mental time travel). We show that K.C., a person with episodic amnesia and an inability to imagine future experiences, nonetheless systematically discounts the value of future rewards, and his discounting is within the range of controls in terms of both rate and consistency. Because K.C. is neither able to imagine personal uses for the rewards nor provide a rationale for selecting larger future rewards over smaller current rewards, this study demonstrates a dissociation between imagining and making decisions involving the future. Thus, although those capable of mental time travel may use it in making decisions about future rewards, these results demonstrate that it is not required for such decisions. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ritualized behavior is a specific way of organizing the flow of action, characterized by stereotypy, rigidity in performance, a feeling of compulsion, and specific themes, in particular the potential danger from contamination, predation, and social hazard. We proposed elsewhere a neurocognitive model of ritualized behavior in human development and pathology, as based on the activation of a specific hazard-precaution system specialized in the detection of and response to potential threats. We show how certain features of collective rituals—by conveying information about potential danger and presenting appropriate reaction as a sequence of rigidly described precautionary measures—probably activate this neurocognitive system. This makes some collective ritual sequences highly attention-demanding and intuitively compelling and contributes to their transmission from place to place or generation to generation. The recurrence of ritualized behavior as a central feature of collective ceremonies may be explained as a consequence of this bias in selective transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's learning—in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well—relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while guarding against the dangers of false or misleading input. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which reported the results of free-recall experiments conducted in France, Gabon and Nepal, to test predictions of a cognitive model of religious concepts. Questions concerning studies of memory effects on cultural material; Experiment contrasting standard situation with breaches of intuitive domain-level expectations; Religious notions that imply a particular treatment of information associated with domain-concepts.

Culturally successful religious concepts are the outcome of selective processes that make some concepts more likely than others to be easily acquired, stored and transmitted. Among the constructs of human imagination, some connect to intuitive ontological principles in such a way that they constitute a small catalogue of culturally successful supernatural concepts. Experimental and anthropological evidence confirm the salience and transmission potential of this catalogue. Among these supernatural concepts, cognitive capacities for social interaction introduce a further selection. As a result, some concepts of supernatural agents are connected to morality, group identity, ritual and emotion. These typical 'religious' supernatural agents are tacitly presumed to have access to information that is crucial to social interaction, an assumption that boosts their spread in human groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asserts that `acquired culture' depends on social transmission and displays salient cross-cultural variability. Assessment of acquired culture; Definition of intuitive ontology; Cultural enrichment of intuitive principles; Counter-intuitive representations; Non-intuitive representations and external support; Models of cultural transmission.

Opinion. Presents a discussion on Pascal Boyer's article in a 1996 issue of `Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute' regarding anthropomorphism and evolution of cognition. Persuasive argument for what makes anthromorphism natural; Answer by Boyer to Stephen Mithen's comments on his article.

Reports that people tend to extend human attributes onto non-human domains, a tendency that can be seen especially in children's thought processes. How to understand what is implied by childhood animism or anthropomorphism; How young children acquire knowledge on quasi-theoretical understandings; Terms children use to interpret the behaviour of animate beings; Why anthropomorphism is natural and widespread; What makes anthropomorphic assumptions so natural.

States that children's representation of counterintuitive phenomena can be better understood if two particular phenomenons are taken into account. Identification of these phenomenons; Discussion of these phenomenons.