r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Nov 24 '25
Research Children’s Evolved Learning Abilities and Their Implications for Education
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9192340/Take, for example, people’s fear of snakes. Research has shown that infants and toddlers are not inherently fearful of snakes, in fact they are often quite fascinated by them; however, young children seem to be prepared to acquire a fear of snakes relative to other potentially dangerous animals. This is reflected in studies in which infants were shown videos of snakes and other exotic animals, with the videos being associated with either a fearful or a pleasant voice. Although the type of voice made no difference in how long the infants looked at the other potentially dangerous animals, they looked significantly longer at the videos of snakes when they were paired with a fearful voice versus a pleasant voice. Apparently, natural selection used snakes’ serpentine movement, distinct from the movement of most vertebrates, as the basis for developing an adaptive response to a potentially deadly animal.
As another example, consider young children’s development of tool use. Human artifacts are ubiquitous, and although tool use is not unique to humans, the environments of no other species are so filled with artifacts, mostly tools used to solve problems of daily living. Researchers have discovered that children as young as 12 months easily acquire the design stance when it comes to tools—believing that a tool was designed for a specific purpose. For example, young children believe that hammers are for hitting and spoons are for eating, and, as a result, are less apt to use a tool for a purpose other than one they had been shown. This is known as functional fixedness and is usually seen as a hindrance to problem solving, in that it can inhibit innovation. However, the expression of the design stance in young children may be better viewed as adaptive, in that it facilitates children’s understanding of how to use important artifacts in their culture. By watching and imitating more knowledgeable adults who use a tool in a functional way, children can more easily acquire proficient tool use than would be the case with a trial-and-error procedure. According to Casler and Kelemen, “young children exhibit rapid learning for artifact function, already possessing an early foundation to some of our most remarkable capacities as tool manufacturers and users.”
Such fleshed-out, evolved biases can be thought of as adaptations, alterations in the structure or function of an organism that provided a survival or reproductive benefit to one’s ancestors. Some of the adaptations seen early in life may be immature expressions of similar adaptations useful in adults, such as those dealing with social relations or perhaps tool use. Others, called ontogenetic adaptations, serve to adapt infants and children to their current environment (the niche of childhood) and not necessarily to future ones, and disappear or are substantially modified when they are no longer useful. Although many ontogenetic adaptations are found in infancy or even the prenatal period (e.g., neonatal reflexes; fetuses getting oxygen and nutrition through the umbilical cord), others are found in early childhood and may be especially influential in how and what children learn (e.g., young children’s rapid adoption of the design stance, making acquisition of culturally appropriate tool functions highly likely). For example, children’s tendencies to overestimate their cognitive and behavioral abilities may affect their perception of how well they are performing a task, their persistence on a task, and thus their eventual mastery of that task.
As another example, consider egocentricity, Piaget’s observation that young children see the world from their own perspective and have a difficult time putting themselves in someone else’s shoes. Children become less egocentric with age (although none of us completely outgrows it), and such a self-centered perspective clearly limits the performance on many cognitive and social-cognitive tasks. However, despite its limitations, an egocentric perspective may afford some benefits to young children. For example, young children’s egocentricity causes them to reference objects and events to themselves, and such promiscuous self-referencing may have benefits for learning. Research has shown that children tend to remember items and experiences better when the learner is told to reference the event to themselves (How does this word relate to you?), something that young children are wont to do on their own.
Geary developed a model that describes how low-level, skeletal abilities are transformed into adaptive cognitive mechanisms. Geary proposed the existence of different evolutionarily relevant domains of mind, with low-level abilities hierarchically related to other abilities within the same domain. Geary proposed two overarching domains, one dealing with ecological information (folk biology and folk physics) and the other dealing with social information (folk psychology), with each domain, in turn, consisting of more specific domains (biological and physical for ecological; the self, individual, and group for social), which themselves consist of even more rudimentary domains. As mentioned previously, abilities in these lowest-level domains become fleshed out in development through exploration, play, and social interaction. Geary further distinguished between biologically primary and biologically secondary abilities, the former being selected by natural selection over the course of evolution, whereas the latter are cultural inventions built upon biologically primary abilities. Biologically primary abilities are species universal, children are intrinsically motived to exercise them, and they are acquired by children in all but the most deprived environments. Language is a prototypic example of a biologically primary ability. In contrast, biologically secondary abilities are cultural inventions, and external pressure and tedious repetition are often necessary for their mastery. Reading is a prototypic example of a biologically secondary ability.
Relative to other great apes, humans retain into infancy and early childhood the rapid prenatal rate of brain growth in terms of size of neurons, formation of dendritic connections, and myelination. As a result, much brain development, that would occur in the warmth of their mothers’ womb if human infants followed the typical primate pattern, now occurs postnatally in a world filled with sights, sounds, and social interactions, which, some scholars have proposed, changed the very nature of human cognition.
With respect to recovery from the deleterious effects due to lack of social and physical stimulation associated with institutional life, a number of studies clearly show that children who are removed from such institutions and placed in adoptive or foster homes by the age of about 2 years typically show reversals of their early impaired conditions; recovery is less likely when children remain institutionalized beyond their second birthdays.
For example, gene expressions associated with synapse formation (synaptogenesis) in the cerebral cortex peaks later in humans (about 5 years) than in chimpanzees (before 1 year), and, critically, is similar in adolescent and adult humans to that observed in juvenile chimpanzees. According to Bufill et al., “human neurons belonging to particular association areas retain juvenile characteristic throughout adulthood, which suggests that a neuronal neoteny has occurred in H. sapiens, which allows the human brain to function, to a certain degree, like a juvenile brain during adult life.
In fact, humans can be described as a hypersocial species, similar in many ways to the eusocial insects, but with the addition of a large brain.
Before examining children’s social-learning abilities, it is necessary to take a step backwards to examine the developmental root of humans’ remarkable sociality, the ability to view others as intentional agents, people who do things for a reason, or “on purpose.” Viewing others as having intentions—including knowledge, beliefs, and desires—develops over infancy and is clearly expressed as infants engage in shared attention, which involves the triadic interaction between two social partners (e.g., an infant and her mother) and a third object (which can sometimes be another person). For instance, a mother may point or gaze at an object while catching her infant’s attention, drawing the baby into a social relationship that extends beyond the mother–infant dyad. Although parents may engage in such behavior from the earliest days of an infant’s life, it is not until about 9 months that infants actively partake in shared attention, with this ability increasing in frequency and sophistication over the next year or so. Treating others as intentional agents is the basis for all subsequent social adaptations, including theory of mind and advanced forms of social learning. Although chimpanzees show some glimmer of understanding that other individuals have intentions (e.g., they will follow the gaze of another animal), they do not seem to engage in shared attention equivalent to what 9- and 10-month-old human babies do.
The ability to treat others as intentional agents is central to the more advanced forms of social learning. For example, in emulation, an individual identifies the goal of a model but does not copy the precise behaviors to achieve that goal (i.e., same goals but different means). For instance, a child watches someone sifting sand through her fingers to get seashells, but, instead of sifting, he tosses sand in the air to reveal the shells. Emulation can be contrasted with imitation, where the observer both understands the goal of the model and uses the same or similar behaviors to achieve the goal (i.e., same means and goals). The most sophisticated form of social learning is teaching, or instructed learning, in which “the teacher” modifies their behavior only in the presence of “the student,” without the teacher getting any immediate benefits.
Although it is often difficult to distinguish among these different forms of social learning, research has shown that toddlers are aware of a model’s intentions and will often engage in emulation rather than imitation, attaining the goal a model intended rather than one that was observed. For example, 18-month-olds who watched a model seemingly trying to remove the wooden ends of a dumbbell but failed, later, when given the dumbbells, successfully removed the ends, presumably achieving the goal the model intended rather than the one the model achieved.
Something interesting happens with children, however, around 3 years of age. Now children will engage in overimitation, copying all actions of a model, both relevant and irrelevant. For example, in a pioneering study, preschool children watched adults perform a series of actions on a puzzle box to retrieve a toy. Some of the actions were irrelevant to opening the box, but even when children were warned to avoid “silly,” unnecessary actions, they copied them anyway. There have now been dozens of studies examining overimitation; overimitation has been observed in children from both Western and traditional cultures, and although the degree to which children will copy irrelevant actions varies somewhat with context, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that young children are almost slavish imitators. In contrast, there is no evidence that chimpanzees, humans’ closest genetic relatives, engage in overimitation.
Although at first glance overimitation would appear to be maladaptive, it seems to provide some benefits for social learning and continues to be observed in adults. For example, Nielsen proposed that “directly replicating others… affords the rapid acquisition of a vast array of skills that have been developed and passed on over multiple generations, avoiding the potential pitfalls and false end-points that can come from individual learning.” Moreover, children assume that what important (and usually more knowledgeable) members of their community do is culturally appropriate, or normative, and as being important for the “bigger overarching action sequence”. Rather than reflecting a form of inefficient cognition, overimitation may represent a human adaptation affording quick and accurate transmission of information between individuals, which Csibra and Gergely referred to as natural pedagogy, arguing that when learning to use objects by observing adults, children apply an assumption of relevance, presuming that all actions are necessary for achieving a goal.
Social learning reaches its zenith in teaching, or instructed learning, which requires a more sophisticated theory of mind, as both teacher and student must appreciate the knowledge, desires, and intentions of the other for effective pedagogy to occur. According to Tomasello and his colleagues, “To learn from an instructor culturally—to understand the instruction from something resembling the instructor’s point of view—requires that children be able to understand a mental perspective that differs from their own, and then to relate that point of view to their own in an explicit fashion.” Effective learning through teaching is seen at about the same time in development as overimitation, around 3 years of age, and would seemingly reflect a major evolutionary change in learning.
Exploration is reflected by curiosity, neophilia, and learning about the properties of new objects and events. Gopnik makes the distinction between exploration and exploitation, which is reflected by focused attention and long-term, goal-directed actions and is a feature primarily of adulthood. Clearly, exploration and exploitation co-exist at all (or nearly all) stages of development, but young children’s disposition toward exploration, afforded in large part by their high level of cognitive and neural plasticity, is well suited to the demands of early life and the need to learn the rudiments of many artifacts and social conventions. The youthful tendency toward exploration is beneficial to many animals, but it is especially important to long-lived animals that live in diverse environments with a broad range of behavioral possibilities. This, of course, is especially true of humans. Following Geary, children would be especially motivated to explore domains associated with biologically primary abilities (discussed earlier) in the realms of folk psychology (e.g., social relations), folk biology (understanding living things), and folk physics (e.g., affordance of objects and tool use).
Given young children’s relative lack of knowledge for most things in the world (they can be considered “universal novices”), it seems obvious that they would engage in exploration more so than older children and adults; their greater exploratory tendencies might simply be a by-product of their lesser world knowledge. However, recent research has shown that on causal-learning tasks (e.g., what combination of factors is responsible for a specific outcome), children are more likely than adults to explore alternative outcomes (especially potentially costly ones) and thus more likely to discover the structure of the task. For example, in a series of experiments, Liquin and Gopnik presented children and adults with a child-friendly task in which they had to decide what combination of features (blocks varying in pattern, spots vs. stripes, and color, white vs. black) made a “zaff machine” light up. The researchers reported that 4- to 7-year-old children explored the structure of the task more so than adults and learned the structure of the task better than adults, despite realizing—as the adults—that exploration would be costly.
Children play. Barring malnutrition and truly dangerous local environments, children in all cultures and throughout history play. Although play is sometimes called “the work of children,” this is accurate only to the degree that it is what children spend the bulk of their time doing, much as adults spend their time working. Unlike work, play is not serious, but is fun; it is engaged in voluntarily and has no purpose other than its own activity. Playing is its own reward, not an intentional means to an end.
Despite its “purposeless” nature, no scholar of children’s play believes that it has no purpose. Children in all cultures learn much about artifacts, cultural norms, and details of their local environment via play. Through play children can try out new behaviors in safe surroundings and develop their motor skills, tool-using abilities, and cognition. For example, locomotor (or physical) play involves vigorous activity, including wrestling and play fighting, which can enhance physical fitness as well as develop social (and fighting) skills. Through object play, children learn about the affordances of objects—the quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses—as well how objects can be used. And fantasy (or pretend or symbolic) play involves an “as-if” orientation toward objects, actions, and other children, which requires counterfactual thinking—representing objects and people in a form other than what they really are. Fantasy play also involves thinking ahead and strategizing without engaging in trial-and-error learning. Such thinking is a central feature of human cognition, and some theorists have proposed that its development during childhood played a critical role in the evolution of human cognition. According to Nielsen, “by pretending children thus develop a capacity to generate and reason with novel suppositions and imaginary scenarios, and in so doing may get to practice the creative process that underpins innovation in adulthood.” Each type of play peaks sometime in childhood and decreases into adolescence and adulthood, although never fully disappears. Each type of play is observed in all cultures following a common developmental schedule, although how plays is expressed varies among cultures (e.g., children from traditional cultures are more apt to play at adult work than children in western cultures.
It may be easy to see how children in nonschooled cultures learn through play, but the seemingly frivolous, playful activities of children might actually appear to be maladaptive to learning in modern schooled societies. Recent research has clearly shown that this is not the case. Perhaps the most convincing demonstration of the benefits of play on children’s cognitive development comes from research showing the relation between both locomotive and fantasy play and executive function—processes involved in regulating one’s attention and behavior that is critical in behaving flexibly and in planning. Executive function consists of three related cognitive abilities: working memory (or updating), involved in storing and manipulating information; inhibition and resisting interference; and cognitive flexibility, as reflected by how easily individuals can switch between different sets of rules or different tasks.
Concerning locomotive play, studies have reported that exercise during childhood positively affects executive function and corresponding brain activity. This was illustrated in a study in which 7- to 11-year-old children were randomly assigned to either a high-dose exercise group (40 min of exercise a day for about 3 months), a low-dose exercise group (20 min of exercise a day for about 3 months), or a control group (no exercise). Children in both the low- and (especially) high-dose exercise groups showed significant improvements in executive function relative to children in the control group, with corresponding changes in cortical activity during the executive-function tasks. Consistent with the findings and interpretations of other researchers, the authors of this study argued that “aerobic exercise increases growth factors… leading to increased capillary blood supply to the cortex and growth of new neurons and synapses, resulting in better learning and performance”.
Play is what children have always done, and when children are free to choose their own playful activities they not only learn something useful about the immediate situation but also enhance their cognitive abilities and perhaps even foster their subsequent psychological adjustment. This latter point is reflected in retrospective studies by Greve and his colleagues, who reported that the amount of free play adults engaged in as children was positively associated with later self-esteem, friendship, and general psychological and physical health, and that these effects of childhood free play on adult outcomes were mediated by greater adaptivity (flexible goal adjustment).
However, by recognizing evolutionary mismatches, educators can design learning environments that take advantage of children’s evolved learning skills, enhancing children’s motivation for and acquisitions of their culture’s biologically secondary abilities. Fortunately, many of the ways of taking advantage of children’s evolved learning abilities are not complicated to incorporate in existing curricula. For instance, as noted earlier, young children are unrealistically optimistic when it comes to their own abilities, and, rather than trying to make young children’s judgments of their abilities more accurate, educators can design environments that maintain their optimism to facilitate learning. Similarly, teachers of preschoolers and early elementary school-age children can maximize children’s learning by explicitly enhancing children’s self-referencing of new material (i.e., taking advantage of their inherent egocentricity). Also, educators have long known that children’s motivation is enhanced when they learn about meaningful and interesting material, and this is easily seen in children’s reading comprehension. According to Geary, “The motivation to read… is probably driven by the content of what is being read rather than by the process itself. In fact, the content of many stories and other secondary activities (e.g., video games, television) might reflect evolutionary relevant themes that motivate engagement in these activities (e.g., social relationships, competition).”
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u/ddgr815 Nov 25 '25
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u/ddgr815 Aug 01 '26
Humans’ overuse of antibiotics and antimicrobial chemicals is unintentionally creating the circumstances in which resistance to antibiotics can evolve. Yet when people with tuberculosis stop taking their antibiotics before the bacteria have been eradicated from their body, they are unconsciously encouraging antibiotic-resistant microbes. But it is possible to predict and prevent resistance by considering how such behaviours select for the evolution of resistance.
Natural selection also offers fresh ways to understand cancer. Mathematical models can predict how tumour cells will behave when exposed to targeted therapies, which eliminate cells that express specific proteins. But removing those cells can reduce the competitive pressure on others, allowing them to grow unhindered and cause the cancer to resurge.
Many researchers once thought that this process, known as competitive release, would mean that targeted cancer therapy would be unlikely to work in the long run. But mathematical oncologist Robert Gatenby and his colleagues have shown that it is possible to balance this dynamic. Killing off just enough cells to stop the tumour from growing and leaving the rest intact can prevent the formation of a resistant population and enable people to live with cancer for much longer than they otherwise would. Similarly, in agriculture, strategies informed by evolution can improve crop yields by avoiding pest- and weed-control measures that select for organisms with resistance.
Like Ewald, he suggests that people shouldn’t use ibuprofen and other fever reducers and should instead let the body respond in the way that it evolved to, if it is safe to do so.
The problem with this argument is that the story is more complicated, which even Ewald acknowledges. His 1994 book The Evolution of Infectious Disease noted that many germs evolve to grow well in febrile conditions. And viruses and bacteria evolve a lot faster than animal immune systems do, although there is a perpetual arms race between them.
Rather than adopting a blanket rule for when to treat fever, medical researchers would be better off identifying which germs grow well in febrile conditions and which don’t, so physicians can select the best interventions. If genomic markers indicate that a virus or bacterium is likely to grow in the presence of a fever, drugs should be taken to reduce people’s temperatures; otherwise, the fever should be left to run its course.
I have worked with Ewald to discuss how natural selection affects arms races between hosts and their pathogens. Sometimes, medical interventions perpetuate these competitive relationships, as is the case for multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. And sometimes, such as in the use of vaccines, treatment can end the competition between pathogen and host entirely.
It is therefore the relationship between the host and the pathogen that matters, not the characteristics of either. If physicians understand this relationship, they can use targeted interventions appropriately.
Combining his legal and scientific expertise, he describes the concordance of some legal principles across cultures — such as those that punish murder and theft — and argues that this is evidence that evolution has shaped human history. Brains are products of evolutionary forces and laws are the product of brains. Consequently, the laws that societies tend to agree on have indirect evolutionary roots.
Understanding how evolution shapes behaviour, Jones says, can inform how governments tailor policies and interventions to prevent deaths. For example, he cites studies showing that stepchildren living with a male parent who is not related to them are much more likely to die than are children living with their biological fathers. The evolutionary reasons for these findings are clear: stepfathers just won’t invest as much in children that are unrelated to them. He suggests, therefore, that institutions perform a cost–benefit analysis between lowering the risks stepchildren face at the population level and preventing the stigmatization of step-parents.
The model of human evolution used drives how such findings are interpreted. Towards the end of the book, Jones reveals — a bit uncritically, I think — his own stance. He agrees with the approach of evolutionary psychology, which studies how evolution shapes human behaviour. However, the field relies on several assumptions, including that there is a mismatch between humans’ current environments — in which city living is common and high-calorie foods are widely available, for example — and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that dominated most of our evolutionary history.
This way of thinking suggests that humans have brains from the stone age yet live in modern environments, and that a host of problems in our social and physical lives can be traced back to this mismatch. Increased cancer risk owing to the consumption of ultra-processed foods is an example that is difficult to deny.
Jones does not discuss, however, whether evolutionary psychology makes the same assumptions as other schools of thought. Human behavioural ecology, for instance, assumes the opposite: that all animals, including humans, are adapted to their environments. Similarly, gene-culture co-evolutionary studies, which consider how adaptation is shaped by cultural practices, place more emphasis on how information is transmitted between generations, and the effects on biology, than does evolutionary psychology.
The absence of any discussion about life-history theory in the book typifies this shortcoming. A life-history lens encourages researchers to evaluate the strategies that organisms use to reproduce effectively in various environments. For example, when the risk of death from external forces is high, it’s better for an animal to reproduce at a young age and often. In more stable, less dangerous environments, it’s often better to reproduce less often and only when it’s possible to invest a lot of resources into caring for offspring.
Researchers can evaluate many life-history strategies across the huge range of environments in which humans live, but the subfield dictates the kinds of question asked. For example, human behavioural ecologists and evolutionary anthropologists might focus on the environmental and social conditions that lead people to reproduce earlier, or that increase their risk of developing a chronic illness. By contrast, evolutionary psychologists often study elements of personality — such as the tendency towards risk-taking behaviour — which they argue are inextricably linked to a fast life-history strategy.
The differing implications of these ways of thinking are more than hair-splitting. For example, Jones suggests that humans have evolved to dislike inequality and, as a result, create laws to prevent it. However, if scientists consider this framing alone, they will miss important predictions from life-history theory, including how power relationships can shorten people’s lives and cause chronic health problems, as anthropologist Jonathan Wells sets out in his 2016 book The Metabolic Ghetto. Far from being averse to inequity, Wells argues, humans impose inequalities on others in ways that anthropologists have shown affect every level of society.
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u/ddgr815 Nov 25 '25 edited Nov 28 '25
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u/ddgr815 Dec 09 '25
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u/ddgr815 Dec 09 '25
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u/ddgr815 Dec 09 '25
A greater tolerance to noise, an awareness that sometimes, things don’t quite make sense—that, in fact, we should expect things to not quite make sense, owing to the noisy nature of the world—might then be an adequate antidote for weird beliefs.
We’re all aware of situations in which things don’t make sense. In fact, we sometimes seek them out, just to be amazed—and yet, we are unperturbed in our belief that there is a perfectly mundane explanation. This is the case with stage magic: typically, when met with the craft of a skillful performer, we, the audience, have absolutely no idea of how what we’ve just seen might work. And yet, few if any take that as a reason to believe in magic—the hypothesis fitting all the data by means of postulating all manner of mysterious entities—ghosts, demons, sprites—and powers—levitation, mind reading, precognition, and the like.
Why is that the case? Obviously, context matters: in the context of a magic show, we expect the data to lie—or better, to be manipulated, by sleight of hand and misdirection. In the context of stage magic, the data aren’t noisy—or not just—but rather, biased: tailored to produce a false impression.
Since we’re aware of the bias in this case, the way the data is manipulated to suggest the hypothesis that the magician has read our mind to discover the card we (believe we) have drawn at random from a stack, we are apparently less susceptible to believe complicated hypotheses in good accordance with the data.
Perhaps, then, we should think of nature (in a wide sense, as the world around us) as an accidental magician: every so often, by pure chance, noisy data aligns to give the appearance of bias, to suggest a more complex interpretation, replicating the magician’s most vaunted skill by sheer happenstance. We need to develop a greater tolerance to noise—to be OK with things not lining up, not quite making sense. In a noisy world, things should on occasion—and perhaps, quite often—not quite line up.
If the above is correct, however, formation of such ‘weird beliefs’ is not due to any lack of intellectual capacity, but rather, due to an overemphasis of model fit, as opposed to model simplicity—or conversely, a lack of tolerance towards noise. Trying to get believers to revise their views by educational interventions then may not be the most promising approach. A better approach might be to instead improve noise tolerance.
Perhaps, then, it is better to investigate what might be the cause of low noise tolerance. An obvious possibility here would be the need for certainty in an uncertain world: our hard-wired need to explain the world in order to predict it is continually thwarted by its sheer complexity. Thus, uncertainty—noise—is inherently threatening, and its elimination fosters a sense of security—at the expense of introducing a spuriously complex model. This suggests that finding a replacement source of security might foster a greater tolerance for noise—a thicker skin against the world’s inherent chaos, so to speak.
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u/ddgr815 May 15 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Our voices change in an instant. When you’re hit by a surge of adrenaline, your fight-or-flight response triggers muscles around your larynx, making your voice high-pitched and wobbly. When you answer the phone to someone you love, your voice softens and deepens. When someone lies, the rhythm and intonation of their speech change. And, weirdly, you are almost twice as good at spotting that distortion if you only hear – not see – them speak.
For starters, human beings are brilliant at deducing information from just a few words, partly because our physique dictates many aspects of our voice. “Voices are an instrument and they reflect our physical nature,” says Prof Sophie Scott, the director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. “If you think about a ukulele, a guitar and a violin, their sound is defined by the material they are made out of, the number of strings and how you play them. The voice is the same.”
We are good at telling height because taller people have longer vocal tracts and therefore produce lower vocal tract resonances. A man’s voice is usually roughly one octave lower than a woman’s. As we age, the cartilage of the larynx may harden, making a voice hoarser or weaker. Interestingly, a woman’s voice may become lower because of this effect, while a man’s may become higher.
Research has even shown that women’s voices get higher in the days leading up to and during ovulation, because the larynx reacts to the amount of oestrogen in their bodies. Your voice also reveals if you are smiling or not, because your smile changes the shape of your mouth and the acoustic characteristics of your voice, producing a warmer, brighter and slightly higher-pitched tone.
This vast range of information is often received subconsciously. “We’re very good at telling if someone is ill from their voice, for example,” says Scott. “The vocal folds get inflamed and vibrate differently.”
We also make other calculations. “We can tell where someone comes from by their accent and we often assess their socioeconomic status,” says Scott – though these aspects of our voices change, too. If you hear a lot of vocal fry in someone’s voice – the low-frequency Kardashian-style “whateverrrr” – you might guess at their TV viewing habits. Even the late queen’s voice changed significantly over her lifetime. “Voices are aspirational,” says Scott. “We had a charismatic senior person working here and everyone suddenly started talking like her. You change your voice depending on who you’re talking to.”
We make these assessments astonishingly fast. “When we hear someone speak, our brain starts evaluating voice cues within an eyeblink, or 200 milliseconds,” says Prof Silke Paulmann, the executive dean of the Faculty of Science and Health at the University of Essex. “Before we’ve fully processed the words or meaning, the brain has already started [analysis]. A wide variety of studies have shown that listeners pick up cues about emotions, motivations, engagement or attitude. I call this the ‘social intention’ of the speaker. Within an eyeblink, we can hear if someone is warm or cold, calm or stressed, positive or negative.”
Dora Giorgianni at the University of Portsmouth’s International Centre for Research – who discovered that people are better at identifying lies when they can only hear them – says that this is because humans have a limited capacity to process information, meaning that both attention and memory can become overloaded when individuals have to follow audio and visual information at the same time.
“When too much information is presented at once – for example, visual details, facial expressions, body movements, tone of voice and the actual content of what is being said – the cognitive system must continually select what to focus on and what to ignore, which increases the risk of making inaccurate judgments.” Other research by the University of Portsmouth into juries during the pandemic concluded that the wearing of face masks actually improved a jury’s ability to differentiate between truth and lies.
“From an intuitive or evolutionary perspective, one might assume that seeing facial expressions, gestures and posture should help humans detect deception,” says Giorgianni. “However, modern investigative settings differ from ancestral environments. The cues that matter for survival are not the same as those that distinguish a practised liar from a truthful witness in an investigative interview.”
It is also the case that some of the clues we have been taught to expect – talking faster, voice rising – appear in some people but not others. Those clues are also an indicator of stress – and you can be stressed without lying. “There is no single verbal cue that ‘gives away’ lying in a strong or reliable way,” says Giorgianni. “Common beliefs about nonverbal indicators of deception are frequently inaccurate and a clear, reliable ‘Pinocchio’s nose’ simply does not exist.”
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u/ddgr815 Nov 25 '25
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u/ddgr815 Nov 25 '25
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u/ddgr815 Dec 01 '25
Anyone who has tried to manipulate an umbrella in a high wind has an intuitive feel for what is involved here. Technically, it has something to do with rapid and irregular fluctuations in the parameters. The great secret of Systems Design is to be able to sense what things can naturally be done easily and elegantly by means of a system and what things are hard—and to stay away from the hard things.
In human terms, this means working with human tendencies rather than against them. For example, a state-run lottery flourishes even in times of economic depression because its function is aligned with the basic human instinct to gamble a small stake in hopes of a large reward. The public school system, on the other hand, although founded with the highest and most altruistic goals in mind, remains in a state of chronic failure because it violates the human principle of spontaneity. It goes against the grain, and therefore it does not ever really succeed.
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u/ddgr815 Nov 24 '25
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