User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Human cognition

I suggest that the unique features of human cognition can be categorized as understanding of large numbers and complex language tightly integrated with (meta)cognition.

(Why isn't "complexity" a criterion in itself? Complexity is often an emergent property of a system, and the relevant "system" is often a group of multiple organisms. Hence, this is already covered by Large social networks.)

TODO: somewhere, mention something about "geek" and "nerd" as uniquely human concepts (i.e., how human technology allows such individuals to survive), as well as behavioral neoteny and deviations from strict koinophilia

Large numbers
In some sense, logarithms are an uniquely human concept... (TODO: what about place numeration? what kinds of animal studies could be done?)

This category can be broken into the following:

Large social networks
TODO: See Dunbar's number, and mention the effects of modern communication technologies (network effects?)

High economic value
Since all economic value is quantified relative to some other thing, this really means "large ratios of economic value."

Language tightly integrated with metacognition
The key words are "tightly integrated."

This is perhaps more precisely expressed as "complex language tightly integrated with all facets of cognition, especially metacognition."

Revealed versus metacognitive preferences
TODO/FIXME: The proper term for the latter is "declared preferences"

In this section, "to preferR" refers to a revealed preference, and "to preferM" refers to a preference derived from metacognition. (I am not using "revealed preference" strictly in an economic sense, unlike that Wikipedia article - is there a good page to cite for the more general use of this term in psychology?)

The distinction is important because the the two types of preferences often disagree in humans.

"Every animal prefersR to stay alive as long as possible" is a sensible statement, while "Every animal prefersM to stay alive as long as possible" is not. (This ties into "Long time scales" above - something should be mentioned there.)