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PubMed1979

Delayed plasticity of an instinct: recognition and avoidance of 2 facing eyes by the jewel fish.

A model depicting 2 horizontally positioned black spots resembling facing eyes, as compared with models depicting other spot arrangements, elicits intense flight activity in young African jewel fish (Hemichromis bimaculatus) under 5 months of age and 7-month-old subadults reared apart from conspecifics with eyeless cave fish (Anoptichthys jordani). In contrast, subadults permitted to observe or interact fully with conspecifics during development exhibited attenuated discriminative flight activity. These findings suggest that visual experience with facing conspecifics, irrespective of physical contact, modifies the flight-eliciting properties of the innat mechanism subserving eye-schema recognition, but only during later maturation.

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Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science.

Cognitive psychology has an opportunity to turn itself into a theoretically rigorous discipline in which a powerful set of theories organize observations and suggest focused new hypotheses. This cannot happen, however, as long as intuition and folk psychology continue to set our research agenda. This is because intuition systematically blinds us to the full universe of problems our minds spontaneously solve, restricting our attention instead to a minute class of unrepresentative "high-level" problems. In contrast, evolutionarily rigorous theories of adaptive function are the logical foundation on which to build cognitive theories, because the architecture of the human mind acquired its functional organization through the evolutionary process. Theories of adaptive function specify what problems our cognitive mechanisms were designed by evolution to solve, thereby supplying critical information about what their design features are likely to be. This information can free cognitive scientists from the blinders of intuition and folk psychology, allowing them to construct experiments capable of detecting complex mechanisms they otherwise would not have thought to test for. The choice is not between no-nonsense empiricism and evolutionary theory; it is between folk theory and evolutionary theory.

Animals↗