ABSTRACT
All psychological mechanisms entail information-processing devices that are tailored to solving adaptive problems. Because many of the adaptive problems that humans have confronted over the course of evolutionary history are intrinsically social, cognitive psychology must deal with the ways in which process information about other people. The world provides an infinite array of things that might capture human attention. Attention, however, is an inherently limited capacity. Cosmides and Tooby advance the frequentist hypothesis: the proposition that some human reasoning mechanisms are designed to take as input frequency information and produce as output frequency information. The dominant theory of the function of language is that it evolved to facilitate communication—the exchange of information between individuals. The brain is a metabolically expensive organ to operate. Although the human brain makes up only 2 to 3 percent of the average human’s body weight, it consumes roughly 20 to 25 percent of the body’s calories.
