PSYC 3100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Prosopagnosia, Opportunity Cost, Agnosia

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3100
• Professor: Pat Barclay

Document Summary

Adaptation: a trait or set of traits that evolved because they serve a function. Evolved: starts out as a rare mutation passed onto offspring; those offspring have more offspring than others on average, changing the proportion of traits until eventually all individuals come from those common ancestors. Serve a function : raised reproductive success in some way. How to recognize an adaptation (how do we know if something is an adaptation?) Reverse engineering: observe a form, try to infer the function (function form) Regular engineering: have a function in mind, infer the form needed to perform the function (function form) Four criteria: reliability: how often is it produced in the relevant circumstances? (i. e. consistency, cues of a circumstance are still reliable. Illustrative example: physical disgust as an adaptation to protect us from risk of disease by avoidance of things to get us sick (can be co-opted to moral disgust and sexual disgust.