Beyond Symbolism and Language

Despite 20 years of concerted attention, paleoanthropology has established little of substance concerning the evolution of the modern mind, if by substance we mean conclusions that would be of interest and use to scholars of human cognition. Part of this failure can be linked to a poverty of appropriate interpretive concepts. There is more to the modern mind than symbolism and language, the two “abilities” most often cited in the paleoanthropological literature. Modern humans have a sophisticated ability to make and execute elaborate plans of action, something known in the cognitive science literature as executive functions. Cognitive science has further established that these executive functions are enabled by working memory, an interpretive concept introduced by Alan Baddeley in 1974 and subsequently tested by more than 30 years of intensive research. Recently, Coolidge and Wynn have advanced a controversial hypothesis that it was an enhancement of working‐memory capacity that powered the final evolution of the modern mind. Wenner‐Gren International Symposium 139 met in March 2008 in Cascais, Portugal, to discuss this hypothesis and the evolution of working memory and executive reasoning in general.

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