Differentiation in cognitive and emotional meanings: An evolutionary analysis

Abstract

It is often argued that human emotions, and the cognitions that accompany them, involve refinements of, and extensions to, more basic functionality shared with other species. Such refinements may rely on common or on distinct processes and representations. Multi-level theories of cognition and affect make distinctions between qualitatively different types of representations often dealing with bodily, affective and cognitive attributes of self-related meanings. This paper will adopt a particular multi-level perspective on mental architecture and show how a mechanism of subsystem differentiation could have allowed an evolutionarily “old” role for emotion in the control of action to have altered into one more closely coupled to meaning systems. We conclude by outlining some illustrative consequences of our analysis that might usefully be addressed in research in comparative psychology, cognitive archaeology, and in laboratory research on memory for emotional material.

Acknowledgements

The contribution of DJD was supported by an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship.

Much of the material for this article was initially developed in an interdisciplinary focus group involving P. Barnard, R. Byrne, I. Davidson, V. Janik, A. Miklósi, W. McGrew and P. Wiessner that took place at Collegium Budapest in the Autumn of 2003. The support of the Rector of the Collegium and its staff is gratefully acknowledged. The first author also acknowledges the mentorship of John Morton and, in particular, one of his papers on specifying mental architectures that inspired the approach taken here (Morton, 1968).

Notes

¹For the present purposes, we do not deal directly with temporal extent—we merely assume that it can be treated as a source of variation over which PCA systems can be applied (Bettinger & Cootes, 2004).

²The precise mechanism for the emergence of a separate effector subsystem requires only a subset of the full argument for two interacting ones presented in Figure 4 but relies on exactly the same logic.

³Thieme (1997) reports the appearance of spears at Schoeningen in Germany dated to some 400,000 years ago. Stone flakes from far earlier carry the traces of wood material (Dominguez-Rodrigo, Serrallonga, Juan-Tresserras, Alcala, & Luque, 2001). Since wood is inedible and this is well prior to clear evidence of the control of fire, this is at least consistent with tool manufacture.