International trade of cultural goods has gained considerable importance over the last decade and has been dominated by rich countries. Meanwhile, trade in cultural goods is considered as a potential threat to cultural diversity, and development process is interpreted as a westernization process. One question arises: how does economic development impact on the cultural diversity of developing c...

Historically, imitation has frequently been proposed as the central mechanism mediating the reproduction, spread, intergenerational transmission and stabilization of human cultural forms, population-specific behavioral traditions found in groups of non-human primates, or both (Baldwin 1894; Bandura 1986; Blackmore 2000; Byrne and Russon 1998; Dawkins 1976; Dennett 1995; Donald 1991; Meltzoff 19...

The neuropeptide oxytocin enhances in-group favoritism and ethnocentrism in males. However, whether such effects also occur in women and extend to national symbols and companies/consumer products is unclear. In a between-subject, double-blind placebo controlled experiment we have investigated the effect of intranasal oxytocin on likeability and arousal ratings given by 51 adult Chinese males an...

In recent years, laboratory studies of cultural evolution have become increasingly prevalent as a means of identifying and understanding the effects of cultural transmission on the form and functionality of transmitted material. The datasets generated by these studies may provide insights into the conditions encouraging, or inhibiting, high rates of innovation, as well as the effect that this h...

We discuss the importance of narrative intelligence (story-awareness, story-telling, historical grounding) in regard to an agent’s transcendence of its immediate local temporal context to create a broad temporal horizon in which the experience and future of the agent can be accounted for, together with the advantage that narrative provides to sociality by making the experience of others availab...

Errors occur commonly in healthcare and can cause significant harm to patients. Most errors arise from a combination of individual, system, and communication failures. Neurologists may be involved in harmful errors in any practice setting and should familiarize themselves with tools to prevent, report, and examine errors. Although physicians, patients, and ethicists endorse candid disclosure of...

It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic networks, developed for understanding the origin and organization of life, may also help explain the origin of the kind of cognitive structure that makes cul...

Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanis...

Evidence for interactions between populations plays a prominent role in the reconstruction of historical and prehistoric human dynamics; these interactions are usually interpreted to reflect cultural practices or demographic processes. The sharp increase in long-distance transportation of lithic material between the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, for example, is seen as a manifestation of the c...