The social brain hypothesis
@article{Dunbar2021TheSB, title={The social brain hypothesis}, author={Robin I. M. Dunbar}, journal={Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues}, year={2021}, volume={6} }
Conventional wisdom over the past 160 years in the cognitive and neurosciences has assumed that brains evolved to process factual information about the world. Most attention has therefore been focused on such features as pattern recognition, color vision, and speech perception. By extension, it was assumed that brains evolved to deal with essentially ecological problem‐solving tasks. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
1,813 Citations
Social and Physical Cognition in Old World Monkeys - A Comparative Perspective
- Biology, Psychology
- 2012
Data regarding the relationship between brain size and social complexity support the hypothesis that this increase is due to the demands of life in a complex social group, and whether this pressure only affects primates or not.
The Hippocampus and Social Cognition
- Psychology, Biology
- 2017
Behavioral, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological evidence suggest an important role for memory—and the hippocampus—in social cognition in social cognition.
Does 'Relationship Intelligence' Make Big Brains in Birds?
- Psychology, BiologyThe open biology journal
- 2008
Although the "relationship intelligence hypothesis" may be valuable, it is doubt that it is supported by sufficient evidence and critically discuss some of the arguments raised by the authors in favour of their new idea.
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
- Psychology, Biology
- 2010
This research attacked the mode of reinforcement learning and its role in human evolution by exploring the role of language and self-consistency in the development of language-based memories.
Experts in action: why we need an embodied social brain hypothesis
- PsychologyPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
- 2021
A view of primate brain and social evolution that is grounded in the body and action, rather than minds and metarepresentation is offered.
Social, Machiavellian and Cultural Cognition: A Golden Age of Discovery in Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology
- Psychology, BiologyJournal of comparative psychology
- 2018
Some of the variants of the social intelligence hypotheses that have evolved in this time and a selective overview of the scientific discoveries in this field, particularly in primates, over the last 30 years are offered.
Social brains, simple minds: does social complexity really require cognitive complexity?
- PsychologyPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- 2007
This paper argues for greater attention to embodied and distributed theories of cognition, which get away from current fixations on ‘theory of mind’ and other high-level anthropocentric constructions, and allow for the generation of testable hypotheses that combine neurobiology, psychology and behaviour in a mutually reinforcing manner.
Cracking Down on Complexity in the Evolving Brain
- Biology, PsychologyTrends in Cognitive Sciences
- 2019
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