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...natomical evidence lends little support to this view,202however, because our brain seems to be a linearly scaledup primate brain [19]. Excessive attention to so-called higher cognitive functions and the corresponding neglect of subcortical processes in cognitive science have been criticized as ‘corticocentric myopia’ [20]. Some have gone so far as to label the fascination with uniquely human capacities as non-evolutionary, together with a warning against ‘hopeful monsters’, that is, the belief that a brief evolutionary time interval could have produced a wellintegrated set of novel capacities [21]. Every species, including our own, comes with an enormous set of evolutionarily ancient components of cognition that we need to better understand before we can reasonably focus on what makes the cognition of each species special. Are cognitive specializations due to new capacities or rather to new combinations of old ones? Bottom-up approaches focus on these building blocks and represent a new Zeitgeist as reflected in the latest treatments of future planning [22], reciprocal altruism [23], theory of mind [24] and comparative cognition in general [25]. Another good example is the field of num...

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...n There have been studies conducted within integrative biology that have investigated overarching conceptualisations of cognition (Squire & Kandel, 2008), including the investigation of high-level performance within such conceptualisations (Ziegler & Phillipson, 2012). Some such studies have attempted to incorporate an evolutionary perspective in order to place human cognition in a context of changing human interaction with environment and human cultural accumulation, and this has sometimes involved describing aspects of behaviour, such as social interaction and language, in scientific terms (Margoliash & Nusbaum, 2009). The insights determined from such studies are being applied to education through combinations of integrative biology, cognitive psychology and information science (Sweller, 2007). Evolutionary perspectives on learning and memory that are based in integrative biology have been related also to connectivity of processes and pathways in organismal and non-organismal structures and systems (Barabási, 2002; Sporns, 2010) and these studies have, in turn, been applied in generalist studies of cognition and applied to education and mathematics, for example, through the use concepts of embodiment (Lak...

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...me continuum with other communication systems, or is categorically distinct (Hauser et al., 2002; Fitch and Hauser, 2004; Fitch et al., 2005; Jackendoff and Pinker, 2005; Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005; =-=Margoliash and Nusbaum, 2009-=-; Berwick et al., 2011; Terrace, 2011), and attempted to dichotomize cognitive processes into those that are or are not “human-like” (Jackendoff and Pinker, 2005; Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005). While r...

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...ge than music (Abe and Watanabe, 2011; Berwick et al., 2012; Bloomfield et al., 2011; Bolhuis et al., 2010; Fitch, 2011; Gentner et al., 2006, 2010; van Heijningen et al., 2009; Lipkind et al., 2013; =-=Margoliash and Nusbaum, 2009-=-, to just name a few). This might be so because both share the striking and rare trait of vocal learning through the acquisition of complex vocal sequences by sensorye motor integration processes thro...

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...recursivity, the latter must be entirely absent in the extra-human animal kingdom. Actually, the facts tell us exactly the opposite. Recent studies (Gentner et al. 2006; Abe & Watanabe 2011; see alsos=-=Margoliash & Nusbaum 2009-=-; Bloomfield et al. 2011) have shown thatssingingsspeciessofsbirdsslikesstarlingssor finches demonstrate, both in the production and insthesreceptionsofsconspecifics’svocalizations, the ability to pro...