Cecilia Heyes
Biographic Data
| ID | 944762 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cecilia Heyes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cecilia |
| FAMILY NAME | Heyes |
| SIGNATURE | HEYES C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9119-9913 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Rethinking Norm Psychology
Norms permeate human life. Most of people’s activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden—rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of “norm psychology” and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuse…
Rethinking Norm Psychology in Good Company
In the target article, I tried to change some norms—to persuade my social group that we should define and investigate norm psychology in a new way. This challenge to existing norms could have met with punishment—harsh attempts to get the deviant back into line. Instead, the commentators offer a richly constructive set of critical and elaborative thoughts, for which I am sincerely grateful. I cannot do them justice in 5,000 words, but I will respo…
Social learning in models and minds
After more than a century in which social learning was blackboxed by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and economists, there is now a thriving industry in cognitive neuroscience producing computational models of learning from and about other agents. This is a hugely positive development. The tools of computational cognitive neuroscience are rigorous and precise. They have the potential to prise open the black box. However, we argue that, fro…
Mnemicity
Episodic representations can be entertained either as “remembered” or “imagined”—as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the mnemicity of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribution should be distinguished from other metacognitive operations (such as reality monitoring) and propose th…
Social overshadowing
In a large variety of contexts, it is essential to use the available information to extract patterns and behave accordingly. When it comes to social interactions for instance, the information gathered about interaction partners across multiple encounters (e.g., trustworthiness) is crucial in guiding one’s own behavior (e.g., approach the trustworthy and avoid the untrustworthy), a process akin to trial-by-trial learning. Building on associative l…
Imitation and culture
What is the relationship between imitation and culture? This article charts how definitions of imitation have changed in the last century, distinguishes three senses of “culture” used by contemporary evolutionists (Culture 1 –Culture 3 ), and summarises current disagreement about the relationship between imitation and culture. The disagreement arises from ambiguities in the distinction between imitation and emulation, and confusion between two ex…
The cultural evolution of teaching
Teaching is an important process of cultural transmission. Some have argued that human teaching is a cognitive instinct – a form of ‘natural cognition’ centred on mindreading, shaped by genetic evolution for the education of juveniles, and with a normative developmental trajectory driven by the unfolding of a genetically inherited predisposition to teach. Here, we argue instead that human teaching is a culturally evolved trait that exhibits chara…
What Happened to Mirror Neurons
Ten years ago, Perspectives in Psychological Science published the Mirror Neuron Forum, in which authors debated the role of mirror neurons in action understanding, speech, imitation, and autism and asked whether mirror neurons are acquired through visual-motor learning. Subsequent research on these themes has made significant advances, which should encourage further, more systematic research. For action understanding, multivoxel pattern analysis…
Henrich, Heyes and Tomasello on the cognitive foundations of cultural evolution
We give a brief overview of three accounts of the cognitive abilities that facilitated the emergence and transmission of cumulative culture in the recent hominin lineage. These accounts were developed by Joseph Henrich (e.g. 2016), Cecilia Heyes (e.g. 2018), and Michael Tomasello (e.g. 1999, 2008, 2014) in collaboration with others. We pay particular attention to the different abilities that these authors think are foundational to human cultural …
Is morality a gadget? Nature, nurture and culture in moral development
Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness
Cognitive Gadgets
The cultural evolution of mind reading
Learning to read minds starts early No parent needs reminding that children are born with a surprising set of abilities. But children still need many hours of guidance and instruction. Heyes and Frith review one particular social cognitive skill: reading the minds of others (or at least working out what other people are thinking and feeling). An unrefined capacity for “mind reading” is present in infants, but teaching is necessary to develop the …
Submentalizing
The nativist view of mentalizing—the view that humans have an inherent capacity to think about the mental states of others—has been recently reinvigorated by reports that adults and infants automatically represent mental states—that they engage in implicit mentalizing. In this article, I take a close look at the strongest evidence of implicit mentalizing in adults, which suggests that people automatically represent what others see, intend, and be…
Automatic imitation
"Automatic imitation" is a type of stimulus-response compatibility effect in which the topographical features of task-irrelevant action stimuli facilitate similar, and interfere with dissimilar, responses. This article reviews behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging research on automatic imitation, asking in what sense it is "automatic" and whether it is "imitation." This body of research reveals that automatic imitation is a covert form…
Social attitudes modulate automatic imitation
Shaking hands
In a semi-naturalistic response-effect compatibility paradigm, participants were given the opportunity to learn that hand-shaking actions would be followed by social effects (human hand-shaking stimuli from a third-person perspective) or inanimate effects (block arrow stimuli). Relative to the actions, these effects appeared on the same or the opposite side of the screen (positional compatibility), and pointed towards or away from the response ha…
Withdrawn
n In naturalistic interpersonal settings, mimicry or `automatic imitation? generates liking, affiliation, cooperation and other positive social attitudes. The purpose of this study was to find out whether the relationship between social attitudes and mimicry is bidirectional: Do social attitudes have a direct and specific effect on mimicry? Participants were primed with pro-social, neutral or anti-social words in a scrambled sentence task. They w…
Sequence learning by action, observation and action observation
The serial reaction time (SRT) task was used to compare learning of a complex sequence by action (participants responded to sequential stimuli), by observation (participants watched but did not respond to sequential stimuli), and by action-observation (participants watched an expert model responding to sequential stimuli). Each of these groups was compared with an untrained control group. Experiment 1 indicated that both observation and action-ob…
"Infants' behavioral reenactment of "failed attempts
The Evolution of Cognition
This book encompasses the behavior and mentality of nonhuman as well as human animals and a full range of evolutionary approaches. Rather than a collection by and for the like-minded, it is a debate about how evolutionary processes have shaped cognition. In the last decade, "evolutionary psychology" has come to refer exclusively to research on human mentality and behavior, motivated by a nativist interpretation of how evolution operates. This boo…
Theory of mind in nonhuman primates
Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of …
Social Learning in Animals
There has been relatively little research on the psychological mechanisms of social learning. This may be due, in part, to the practice of distinguishing categories of social learning in relation to ill-defined mechanisms (Davis, 1973; Galef, 1988). This practice both makes it difficult to identify empirically examples of different types of social learning, and gives the false impression that the mechanisms responsible for social learning are cle…
Automatic imitation
"Automatic imitation" is a type of stimulus-response compatibility effect in which the topographical features of task-irrelevant action stimuli facilitate similar, and interfere with dissimilar, responses. This article reviews behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging research on automatic imitation, asking in what sense it is "automatic" and whether it is "imitation." This body of research reveals that automatic imitation is a covert form…
Social attitudes modulate automatic imitation
"Infants' behavioral reenactment of "failed attempts
Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness
Social learning in models and minds
After more than a century in which social learning was blackboxed by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and economists, there is now a thriving industry in cognitive neuroscience producing computational models of learning from and about other agents. This is a hugely positive development. The tools of computational cognitive neuroscience are rigorous and precise. They have the potential to prise open the black box. However, we argue that, fro…
Is morality a gadget? Nature, nurture and culture in moral development
Shaking hands
In a semi-naturalistic response-effect compatibility paradigm, participants were given the opportunity to learn that hand-shaking actions would be followed by social effects (human hand-shaking stimuli from a third-person perspective) or inanimate effects (block arrow stimuli). Relative to the actions, these effects appeared on the same or the opposite side of the screen (positional compatibility), and pointed towards or away from the response ha…
Social Learning in Animals
There has been relatively little research on the psychological mechanisms of social learning. This may be due, in part, to the practice of distinguishing categories of social learning in relation to ill-defined mechanisms (Davis, 1973; Galef, 1988). This practice both makes it difficult to identify empirically examples of different types of social learning, and gives the false impression that the mechanisms responsible for social learning are cle…
Theory of mind in nonhuman primates
Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of …
The Evolution of Cognition
This book encompasses the behavior and mentality of nonhuman as well as human animals and a full range of evolutionary approaches. Rather than a collection by and for the like-minded, it is a debate about how evolutionary processes have shaped cognition. In the last decade, "evolutionary psychology" has come to refer exclusively to research on human mentality and behavior, motivated by a nativist interpretation of how evolution operates. This boo…
"Infants' behavioral reenactment of "failed attempts
Sequence learning by action, observation and action observation
The serial reaction time (SRT) task was used to compare learning of a complex sequence by action (participants responded to sequential stimuli), by observation (participants watched but did not respond to sequential stimuli), and by action-observation (participants watched an expert model responding to sequential stimuli). Each of these groups was compared with an untrained control group. Experiment 1 indicated that both observation and action-ob…
Withdrawn
n In naturalistic interpersonal settings, mimicry or `automatic imitation? generates liking, affiliation, cooperation and other positive social attitudes. The purpose of this study was to find out whether the relationship between social attitudes and mimicry is bidirectional: Do social attitudes have a direct and specific effect on mimicry? Participants were primed with pro-social, neutral or anti-social words in a scrambled sentence task. They w…
Social attitudes modulate automatic imitation
Shaking hands
In a semi-naturalistic response-effect compatibility paradigm, participants were given the opportunity to learn that hand-shaking actions would be followed by social effects (human hand-shaking stimuli from a third-person perspective) or inanimate effects (block arrow stimuli). Relative to the actions, these effects appeared on the same or the opposite side of the screen (positional compatibility), and pointed towards or away from the response ha…
Automatic imitation
"Automatic imitation" is a type of stimulus-response compatibility effect in which the topographical features of task-irrelevant action stimuli facilitate similar, and interfere with dissimilar, responses. This article reviews behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging research on automatic imitation, asking in what sense it is "automatic" and whether it is "imitation." This body of research reveals that automatic imitation is a covert form…
The cultural evolution of mind reading
Learning to read minds starts early No parent needs reminding that children are born with a surprising set of abilities. But children still need many hours of guidance and instruction. Heyes and Frith review one particular social cognitive skill: reading the minds of others (or at least working out what other people are thinking and feeling). An unrefined capacity for “mind reading” is present in infants, but teaching is necessary to develop the …
Submentalizing
The nativist view of mentalizing—the view that humans have an inherent capacity to think about the mental states of others—has been recently reinvigorated by reports that adults and infants automatically represent mental states—that they engage in implicit mentalizing. In this article, I take a close look at the strongest evidence of implicit mentalizing in adults, which suggests that people automatically represent what others see, intend, and be…
Cognitive Gadgets
Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness
Henrich, Heyes and Tomasello on the cognitive foundations of cultural evolution
We give a brief overview of three accounts of the cognitive abilities that facilitated the emergence and transmission of cumulative culture in the recent hominin lineage. These accounts were developed by Joseph Henrich (e.g. 2016), Cecilia Heyes (e.g. 2018), and Michael Tomasello (e.g. 1999, 2008, 2014) in collaboration with others. We pay particular attention to the different abilities that these authors think are foundational to human cultural …
Is morality a gadget? Nature, nurture and culture in moral development
What Happened to Mirror Neurons
Ten years ago, Perspectives in Psychological Science published the Mirror Neuron Forum, in which authors debated the role of mirror neurons in action understanding, speech, imitation, and autism and asked whether mirror neurons are acquired through visual-motor learning. Subsequent research on these themes has made significant advances, which should encourage further, more systematic research. For action understanding, multivoxel pattern analysis…
Mnemicity
Episodic representations can be entertained either as “remembered” or “imagined”—as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the mnemicity of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribution should be distinguished from other metacognitive operations (such as reality monitoring) and propose th…
Social overshadowing
In a large variety of contexts, it is essential to use the available information to extract patterns and behave accordingly. When it comes to social interactions for instance, the information gathered about interaction partners across multiple encounters (e.g., trustworthiness) is crucial in guiding one’s own behavior (e.g., approach the trustworthy and avoid the untrustworthy), a process akin to trial-by-trial learning. Building on associative l…
Imitation and culture
What is the relationship between imitation and culture? This article charts how definitions of imitation have changed in the last century, distinguishes three senses of “culture” used by contemporary evolutionists (Culture 1 –Culture 3 ), and summarises current disagreement about the relationship between imitation and culture. The disagreement arises from ambiguities in the distinction between imitation and emulation, and confusion between two ex…
The cultural evolution of teaching
Teaching is an important process of cultural transmission. Some have argued that human teaching is a cognitive instinct – a form of ‘natural cognition’ centred on mindreading, shaped by genetic evolution for the education of juveniles, and with a normative developmental trajectory driven by the unfolding of a genetically inherited predisposition to teach. Here, we argue instead that human teaching is a culturally evolved trait that exhibits chara…
Rethinking Norm Psychology
Norms permeate human life. Most of people’s activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden—rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of “norm psychology” and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuse…
Rethinking Norm Psychology in Good Company
In the target article, I tried to change some norms—to persuade my social group that we should define and investigate norm psychology in a new way. This challenge to existing norms could have met with punishment—harsh attempts to get the deviant back into line. Instead, the commentators offer a richly constructive set of critical and elaborative thoughts, for which I am sincerely grateful. I cannot do them justice in 5,000 words, but I will respo…
Social learning in models and minds
After more than a century in which social learning was blackboxed by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and economists, there is now a thriving industry in cognitive neuroscience producing computational models of learning from and about other agents. This is a hugely positive development. The tools of computational cognitive neuroscience are rigorous and precise. They have the potential to prise open the black box. However, we argue that, fro…
Psychology (22 works) · Cognitive psychology (14 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (10 works) · Cognition (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Cognitive science (9 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Neuroscience (7 works)