Evolutionary Psychology of Cognition

Cognition refers to internal representations of the world and internal information processing. Since the publication of , the scientific community has known that selection mechanisms such as natural selection and sexual selection act on expressed traits, including the structuring and functions of the brain (see evolution). Within the last two decades, cognitive psychologists have shifted their approach to studying the brain and its processes with regards to evolutionary selective pressures. In evolutionary psychology of cognition, or evolutionary cognitive neuroscience, psychologists study the brain and its processes with the assumption that all the traits being studied are the result of selective pressures and are each meant to solve a specific problem or set of problems. Cognitive studies consist of two approaches: the traditional cognitive approach and the evolutionary psychological approach.
Traditional cognitive approach
Psychologists approached cognition by assuming two things about the brain and its processes: (1) the brain is composed of a general processing mechanism, and (2) functional agnosticism. Under the traditional cognitive approach, or the situated cognition approach, the human mind is a content-independent learning and processing system, meaning that all potential behavioral responses are considered and selected from regardless of environmental conditions.
General processing mechanism
Under the traditional cognitive approach, cognitive psychologists assume that the brain is a general purpose mechanism that has no discrimination for content type. Under this assumption, the processes that are used for mate selection are the same as those used for food selection. General purpose mechanisms encompass multiple mental processes, such as learning, memory, facial recognition, or logical reasoning, and as a result the loss of a function due to damage to the brain is compensated for by intact portions of the brain. By extension, the brain has a great deal of plasticity and able to rewire itself in times of need, and any lost functionality can be compensated for on a one-by-one basis by any portion of the brain.
Recent psychological studies and meta-reviews have led to the disfavor of the general processing mechanism assumption of the brain. Tooby and Cosmides point out that general processing mechanisms would respond to a specific problem would lack any knowledge that is specific to solving that problem, and would thus have to select from an infinite range of behavioral responses. Additional evidence from neuroimaging studies, animal behavior experiments, and cognitive research suggest that the human mind is not purely a general processing mechanism, but may have components that are content independent. While the brain has been shown to have compensatory capabilities for functions that may be damaged, the extent to which the lost functions are restored often do not approach restoration of full functionality.
Functional agnosticism
Functional agnosticism makes the assumption that the information-processing mechanisms of the mind can be studied independently of the adaptive problems they were meant to solve. Traditional cognitive psychologists would study brain mechanisms such as language without considerations for the reasons of why those mechanisms emerged. As such, cognitive mechanisms are studied independent of external circumstances and independent of other mechanisms.
Evolutionary psychology approach
The evolutionary psychological approach to cognition contends that the human mind evolved so that it may solve specific problems that our ancestors may have faced. In order for this to be true, evolutionary cognitive psychology holds that the human mind consists of domain-specific information processing mechanisms that were selected for by natural selection.
Mechanisms produced by natural selection
In cognition, natural selection holds that the brain's mechanisms became more or less common by a non-random process as the result of successful reproduction of the bearers of those mechanisms. Ancestral humans evolved in an environment that selected for the specific traits that modern humans now have, and thus the brain is an accumulation of solutions natural selection produced in response to adaptive problems. Evolved mechanisms were tailored specifically to solve a specific problem in the ancestral environment, and the more pressing the adaptive problem, the more natural selection specializes the solution mechanism towards solving it.
Information processing mechanisms
Under the evolutionary psychological approach, cognitive processes are assumed to serve a specific function and "designed" to solve specific problems. These mechanisms are said to be domain-specific, or they have specific functions (e.g. occipital lobe processes information from the eyes and not from the ears). As a result, the brain is an consortium of several function specific processes that are not necessarily independent, and work in such a way that an optimized solution is selected as quickly as possible without sorting through irrelevant behaviors. A brain that is composed of functionally-specific domains is capable of efficiently handling multiple specific problems while at the same time avoid solutions that are irrelevant or would result in a less than ideal solution.
Modules within the brain may or may not be content-specific, but each module has a specific function that it is optimized to perform and where any other module in the brain is incapable of performing that function with equal or greater efficiency than the original. A portion of the brain may process content from other domains, but its function is to process information from those domains that feed into it. The brain itself is thus assumed to be a collection of modules, each with a specific function, but able to communicate with each other in order to solve any problem, so even if a problem is too complex for any one module alone, each involved module is able to solve its specific part of the problem with the ultimate solution produced by the communication between modules.
Implications for modern humans
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, cognition is not general purpose, but uses heuristics, or strategies, that generally increase the likelihood of solving problems that the ancestors of present day humans routinely faced. Thus, the evolutionary psychological approach is more accepted when studying cognitive mechanisms, and under this approach we are able to better understand cognitive modules in regards to their origins and functionality. As a result, we are better able to understand cognitive phenomena that were previously unexplainable to cognitive psychologists under the traditional approach.

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