Report on the Cognition and Culture Workshop

Even though explaining mental foundations of culture and cultural foundations of mental life has always been one of the ultimate objectives of collective social sciences, there seemed little hope of developing a natural science of culture until the recent interdisciplinary attempts called cognition and culture. What sets the new approach apart is its focus on understanding the relationship between individual level cognition and social processes rather than settling for explanations that appeal to only one of these levels and allowing researchers from diverse traditional disciplines to productively communicate with each other and make progress on problems that transcend their disciplinary boundaries. Thus anthropologists, religious studies experts, marketing researchers, experimental psychologists, and computer scientists can work together to identify the ecological, cognitive and ontological factors that are critical to the spread of information and to identify the patterns of complex dynamics between cognition and culture. Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CSS) is an ideal platform for such an endeavor since CSS because of its interdisciplinary nature attracts researchers from various traditional disciplines. This issue oriented workshop focuses on several open issues in the emerging science of cognition and culture. These include: • Can cognitive science of religion explain real world religious concepts and rituals and hence real world religions? • What role does modularity hypothesis play in explaining the preferential processing of minimally counterintuitive concepts? • What role can computer simulation in general and cognitive modeling in particular play in advancing the cognition and culture research? • Are religious and scientific cognition similar or different?