A evolução de estratégias cognitivas humanas para resolver desafios do ambiente

Abstract

During the evolutionary history of the first human beings, the constant contact with natural resources seeking sustenance, and the recurrent selective pressures imposed by the environment, influenced the development of a cognitive structure called the naturalistic mind. This complex cognitive structure was selected to help hominids deal with the challenges of the natural world and can, among other things, influence the way people relate to nature. However, it is still necessary to advance in the understanding of how the naturalistic mind operates and which external (environmental) and internal (bias of the human mind) influence it. For example, some work suggests that the human mind is rigid to respond to factors related to specific ancestral environments, such as the savannah. But is this true? Thus, the aim of this thesis is to try to understand which cognitive biases influence the functioning of the human naturalistic mind in ancestral and modern environments. For this, we will work from an evolutionary perspective, using the concept of the naturalistic mind from evolutionary ethnobiology, and promoting a dialogue with the field of evolutionary psychology, mainly using the concept of adaptive memory — which argues that human memory has a propensity (bias) to store and retrieve important survival information in memory. So, at first, we carried out a literature review to go deeper into the concepts and theories that analyze the human mind because of natural selection, a review that resulted in some theoretical insights. In a second moment, we carried out empirical research with 210 volunteers, through a controlled experiment, to analyze how the adaptive bias of human memory operates in different ancestral and modern environments to deal with the challenge of using medicinal plants in the treatment of a disease. Finally, we carried out an experiment, with 816 volunteers, to analyze whether immediate factors, such as the congruence between information and context, influence the performance of adaptive memory in a recall test. Our results showed that the human naturalistic mind is flexible to deal with challenges related to the use of medicinal plants in different environmental contexts. Apparently, the different environments that the first hominids inhabited during evolutionary history may have influenced the evolution of a flexible mind, sensitive to the demands of the natural world, both related to ancestral environments and to modern environments. Furthermore, immediate factors, such as the congruence effect, can influence cognitive biases shaped in the ancestral past—in this case, the adaptive bias of memory. We conclude, therefore, that people remember important information for survival regardless of the environmental context in which they live, and that the ability to remember this information is not exclusively linked to ancestral priorities.