PSY 290 Jennifer Booker Fall 2016 Leda Cosmides PSY 290 Jennifer Booker Fall 2016

Leda Cosmides (b. 1957) Dr. Leda Cosmides is a pioneer in evolutionary psychology She earned degrees from Harvard in biology and cognitive psychology Her post-doctoral work was under Roger Shepard from Stanford, a senior researcher in cognitive and evolutionary psychology Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1991

contributions Contributions to many fields: cooperation, coalitional (“us versus them”) psychology, statistical reasoning, visual attention, incest avoidance, threat interpretation, multiple memory systems, friendship, and predator-prey reasoning

History This fledgling field needed technology advances in cognitive psychology before it could exist, circa 1990 Dr. Cosmides got interested in “rebuilding psychology along evolutionary lines” at Harvard

System Her work draws from “cognitive science, human evolution, hunter gatherer studies, neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology” Instead of tabula rasa, she believes that “the mind resembles an intricate network of functionally specialized computers” to solve adaptive survival problems

Future Her work shows that the evolutionary psychology perspective can provide a useful approach for an enormous range of problems This approach is very different from most research which focuses on addressing a very specific set of problems

Me I found evolutionary biology to be an interesting perspective, so that led me to choosing Dr. Cosmides I enjoy wildly interdisciplinary viewpoints, and certainly evolutionary psychology does that

references The Adapted Mind, Oxford University Press https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-adapted-mind-9780195101072?q=978- 0195101072&lang=en&cc=us# Leda Cosmides, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/cosmides Lieberman, D., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2003). Does morality have a biological basis? An empirical test of the factors governing moral sentiments relating to incest. Proceedings of the Royal Society London (Biological Sciences), 02PB0795, 1-8. Stone, V., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., Kroll, N. & Knight, R. (2002). Selective Impairment of Reasoning About Social Exchange in a Patient with Bilateral Limbic System Damage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (August, 2002). Klein, S., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., & Chance, S. (2002). Decisions and the evolution of memory: Multiple systems, multiple functions. Psychological Review, 109, 306-329. Roger N. Shepard, Stanford University https://psychology.stanford.edu/node/3771