Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive science (CS) has long acknowledged the role of cultural systems in producing systematic differences in cognitive organization (e.g. Medin & Atran, 2004; Levinson, 2012; Barrett, 2020). At the same time, we lack general frameworks which would describe the nature of these systems—and their mutual relationship with specific cognitive structures: specifically, accounts articulated under the same formal frameworks (reflecting optimality principles in information processing) that have been used to capture universal features of the mind (e.g. Tenenbaum et al., 2011; Gershman, 2021), or in general evolutionary frameworks such as those used by cultural evolution.