PSYC 3110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Prosopagnosia, Agnosia
23 Oct 2014
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A: basics of adaptationism: what is an adaptation, how to recognize an adaptation. Were those conditions present in ancestral environments: illustrative example: physical disgust. B: is everything adaptive: evolutionary byproducts (a. k. a. Spandrels ): some traits piggyback on others: malfunctioning adaptations: developmental accidents, manipulation, evolutionary lag, trade-offs and adaptive on average . Trade-offs: balancing different kinds of costs and benefits. If we have time (i. e. not enough questions), i will cover the following: The mind as a swiss-army knife : different tools for different purposes (updated metaphor: the mind as a software package with different subroutines for different tasks programmed to know what info to look for in a stimulus) Examples of domain-specific modules (& breakdowns thereof): face processing (& prosopagnosia), motion detection (& motion agnosia), social tasks (social agnosias)
