PSYC 307 Study Guide - Final Guide: Encephalization Quotient, Neocortex, Working Memory
Document Summary
Humans could afford to spend much more energy evolving a larger brain that allowed them to spend more time thinking about other thing. Human then learned how to cook their food: reduces the amount of chewing o theory to account of primates" big brains, was driven by the need for cognitive abilities. Help them keep a mental map of the short-lived and patchily distributed fruit that was around them. Those primates that had better skills at remembering where the fruit was would have been more likely to eat well and to have surviving offspring than those who were stumbling about aimlessly trying to find some ripe bananas. ***** not much support here for the notion that the cognitive skills required to find ripe fruit drove the evolution of primate brains***** 2. rely on food sources that require a fair bit of ingenuity to access nuts and seeds encased in hard shells that need to be cracked open.
