Cognition and culture

The practice of yoga is an increasingly popularized movement within the West that incorporates the desire for physical fitness, spiritual consciousness, and environmentalism. Emanating from the New Age movement, the popularity of yoga has proliferated as a subculture that seeks to encourage mind–body wellbeing while representing an ethos that assumes environmental responsibility. This thesis examines the techniques of modern yoga and the influence that asana (posture) and meditational relaxation have on the senses and subsequently on environmental awareness and activism.

Human handedness is likely related to brain lateralization and major cognitive innovations in human evolution. Identifying handedness in the archaeological record is,
therefore, an important step in understanding our cognitive evolution. This thesis reports
on experiments in identifying knapper handedness in lithic debitage. I conducted a blind
study on flakes (n=631) from Acheulean handaxes replicated by right- and left-handed
flintknappers. Several flake characteristics significantly indicated handedness, with a
binary logistic regression correctly predicting handedness for 71.7% of the flakes.
However, other characteristics were not associated with handedness. This is a result of
personal knapping styles, as additional analyses show that individual knappers associate
with some attributes better than handedness does. Continued work on these methodologies will enable analysis of Paleolithic assemblages in the future, with the ultimate goal of tracking population-level hominid handedness rates through time and using them as a proxy for cognitive evolution and language acquisition.

Little is known about how the minds of dead agents are represented. In Study 1, adult participants with different types of explicit afterlife beliefs were asked in an implicit interview task whether various psychological state types (psychobiological, perceptual, emotional, desire, and epistemic states), as well as pure biological imperatives (e.g., need to eat), continue after death. The results suggest that, regardless of one's explicit reports about personal consciousness after death, those who believe in some form of life after death (and, to a certain extent, even those who do not) implicitly represent dead agents' minds in the same way: psychobiological and perceptual states cease while emotional, desire, and epistemic states continue. The findings are interpreted according to simulation constraints---because it is epistemologically impossible to know what it is like to be dead, individuals will be most likely to attribute to dead agents those types of mental states that they cannot imagine being without. In Study 2, the developmental emergence of such reasoning was investigated. In Experiment 1, 4--6-year-olds and 6--8-year-olds were asked a series of biological questions about a dead agent (e.g., "Does his brain still work?"). Even the youngest children were likely to reason that biological processes cease at death. In Experiment 2, different, similarly aged children and also a group of 10--12-year-olds were asked a series of psychological questions about a dead agent (e.g., "Does he know that he's not alive?"). The youngest children were equally likely to reason that both cognitive (e.g., knowing) and psychobiological states (e.g., hunger) continue after death, while the oldest children were more likely to reason that cognitive states continue. Finally, in Experiment 3, both children and adults were asked about a broad array of psychological states (those used in Study 1). With the exception of the youngest children (M = 5 years), who did not distinguish between any of the psychological state types, older children (M = 11-years) and adults were most likely to attribute to dead agents epistemic, emotional, and desire states, suggesting that developmentally based mechanisms underlie implicit accounts of deceased agents' minds.

The purpose of this study is to understand culture as a factor in the motivation of heritage speakers of Spanish to study Spanish at the college level in South Florida. 59 participants divided into three groups of heritage speakers of Spanish at Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton participated in a questionnaire survey, for a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Subjects were grouped according to the degree of involvement in Spanish-related activities at the college-level. The instrument was a combination of Likert-scale questions as well as open-ended questions aimed at clarifying or expanding on topics presented during the Likert-scale part of the questionnaire. The findings of this study indicate that most heritage speakers understood culture as a part of their identity. Students who were enrolled in Spanish classes were not just looking to expand their Spanish knowledge, but to re-connect and re-establish links with their cultural heritage. Finally, those who chose not to study Spanish cite as their most important reason a dislike for the Spanish language. The results revealed the following implications for the heritage speaker curriculum: the need to address the unique demographic make-up of Spanish heritage speakers in South Florida; the necessity for a consistent and reliable methodology for the identification of heritage speakers, and; the importance of instructors' sensitivity to regional and social dialect variation.