Outline
The mind has always been interpreted as the product of the brain. In recent years, cognitive sciences are offering instead an alternative view, which sees cognition as a process based on the interaction between the brain, body and environment.
In the case of mankind, the environment obviously also includes the cultural environment and, in particular, the technological one. These theories obviously require a radical change in the interpretation of the body and the perceptual system, of tools as peripheral and extra-somatic cognitive elements, and of the concept of space related to processes such as visual imagination, attention, executive functions, social dynamics, mnemonic mechanisms or consciousness itself.
New disciplines are trying to create bridges between anthropology and neuroscience on methodological, theoretical and experimental levels. Paleoneurology studies brain anatomy in fossil species, neuroarchaeology studies brain functions associated with behaviors that we can deduce from archaeological records, and cognitive archeology tries to interpret these behaviors in the context of psychology's theories and research methods.
This cycle of meetings includes four conferences aimed at describing some experimental aspects related to this context, integrating evolutionary aspects (especially technological evolution in humans) with cognitive aspects related to perception and attention. Annapaola Fedato will present a series of studies that consider the attentional response during industrial manipulation of the lower Paleolithic, measured through the electrical potential of the skin (electrodermal analysis). María Silva-Gago will analyze the visual interaction with the same stone tools, using eye-tracking techniques. Justine Cléry will talk to us about how perception changes when an instrument enters the range of action of our body (peripersonal space). Finally, Emiliano Bruner will close by presenting a summary of the visuospatial and attentional evolution in mankind.