Towards an Evolutionary Framework for Human Cognitive Neuroscience

In a recent review of her research on early language acquisition, Max-Planck Society neurolinguist Angela Friederici (2005) demonstrated a correspondence between the major changes in the linguistic competencies of children in the first months and years of life and the markers of event related potentials to acoustic stimuli on the interval from 50 to approximately 600 ms following presentation. Thus, extended periods of individual development find their expression in microgenesis – the rapid progression of processing operations in the adult brain. Though elucidation of these operations is a prominent objective for psychology and neuroscience, the developmental evidence, so obvious in data presented by Friederici, played little if any role in mainstream studies for the most part of the cognitive era. The reason for this was the computer-metaphor framework, which stressed the similarity of symbolic information processing in conventional computers and humans. The presumed unitary constraints, which could be attributed to the central processing unit of mental machinery, have never been found. This failure of the mind/computer metaphor was predestined by its inherent incompatibility with evolutionary and developmental concepts.