PSYC 3100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Environmental Factor, Coevolution, Organism

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3100
• Professor: Don Dedrick

Document Summary

2 kinds of imitative learning: observational learning (true imitation, emulation (outcomes) local enhancement (environmental situatedness) Literally, you learn from being in the locale of older conspecifics. Local enhancement is individual learning, every individual has to learn to make, say, a stone flake tool from scratch. Observational learning (concentrate on the positive ones here) will be preserved so long as there are adult conspecifics to copy from (the copying is veridical) A theory of mind may have initially evolved to allow individuals to better predict the behaviour of other members of their social group. So: what are the units of cultural selection. One view: the conditions of evolution by natural selection occur in culture: memetics. A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, they owe their success to success to their own inherent virtue.