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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. references
The Adapted Mind, Oxford University Press &lang=en&cc=us#
Leda Cosmides, UC Santa Barbara,
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,
Roger N. Shepard, Stanford University