This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas.
For cultural concepts, this emphasizes cognitive distribution across an ecosystem, which is predicated on models of the extended mind thesis.
[6] Gibson argued further that organisms cannot be disentangled from their environments, and that their cognitive constraints were consequences of a limited set of environmental invariants which shaped them over evolutionary time.
[5][7] An illustrative example for Gibson is the human capacity for three-dimensional visual perception, which he argues is a cognitive concept resulting from the way that people interact with their environment.
They illustrate their claim with a hypothetical example of two people who achieve the same navigational success through a museum by different means; a person with Alzheimer's may use a notebook with written directions, while another may use her memory.
[13] These ideas elaborate a cognitive interpretation of broader anthropological notions maintaining that humans are a species deeply entangled in social and material elements of culture.
[27][28] Cognitive ecologists who study religion predict that god concepts across cultures can be linked to coordination solutions for local socioecological challenges, such as large-scale cooperation, intragroup cohesion and commitment, and resource management.
But if this society were to shift toward larger-scale agricultural practices, this equilibrium would be destabilized by increases in free riding and general temptations to profit by defecting.
[32] This has been supported empirically in cross-cultural studies using experimental economic game data, which showed a wide range of variance in fairness expectations between populations based on culturally-specific exchange concepts.
In other words, when crops began to fail and supply became low, cultural exchange norms became more stringent, kin-based and based on reciprocity.