Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ForumHow Plants Shape the Mind
Section snippets
Plants Are A(n Adaptive) Problem
In many societies, plants are no longer a conspicuous part of human life. Plants are a part of the scenery outside and available for purchase, already packaged and processed, in grocery stores and garden centers. This limited contact with plants may seem perfectly normal, but across the entirety of human history it is quite unusual. Taking as a starting point the emergence of the genus Homo, humans spent 99% of our evolutionary history as hunter–gatherers. In a hunter–gatherer world, there were
Evidence for PLANT
We have begun testing PLANT with studies of human infants. One line of work examines whether infants possess behavioral strategies that would mitigate plant dangers, similar to plant food rejections in older children [8]. Unlike the animate dangers that infants readily attend to (e.g., snakes, spiders [9]), dangerous plant toxins are difficult to detect but relatively easy to avoid. Plants are quite literally rooted to the spot and consequently can inflict harm only on individuals that come
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Our empirical findings to date are consistent with the proposed PLANT systems. Infants appear to deploy a collection of behavioral avoidance strategies and social learning rules for plants. Consequently, PLANT minimizes infants’ exposure to harmful plant defenses and allows them to safely acquire information about the specific plants they encounter from more knowledgeable individuals. In short, this work supports the claim that plants have shaped the human mind.
PLANT is a novel research area
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the Max Planck Society.
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The psychological origins of science fiction
2024, PoeticsImplicit and explicit safety evaluation of foods: The importance of food processing
2022, AppetiteCitation Excerpt :If pica disorder represents an extreme example, the adaptive problem of finding beneficial food likely shaped our brains in ways that constrain the cognitive processes underlying our food behaviors. One possibility could be to render them sensitive to a range of cues indicating safety and edibility (Wertz, 2019). For instance, infants are selective when inferring edibility from conspecifics’ actions, ingesting a particular entity after observing an adult eating it, but not when the adult handles it in other ways without eating it (Wertz & Wynn, 2014a).
Learning blossoms: Caregiver-infant interactions in an outdoor garden setting
2021, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :Such interactions are likely of paramount importance for infants to learn about the specific plants they will encounter in their local environment and gain a broader understanding of the natural world. Additionally, olfactory cues may be particularly important for discriminating between similar looking plants, as one of the biggest challenges in learning about plants is correctly distinguishing between toxic and edible plants (Wertz, 2019; Wertz & Wynn, 2014a) a task that is made particularly difficult by the fact that many edible plants can look very similar to toxic plants (see e.g., Oña et al., 2019). The spontaneous production of olfactory behaviours when infants and caregivers interact with plants, along with the tight link between olfaction and memory (e.g., Herz, 2012; Sullivan et al., 2014), may facilitate the retention of plant information that is acquired via the exploration of scents.
The multidimensional nature of food neophobia
2021, AppetiteCitation Excerpt :For example, infants and children are more vulnerable to the effects of plant toxins, and children appear to be more neophobic toward plants (Cashdan, 1998). To solve plant-specific risks, selection might have also favored social learning over individual learning because of the costs of individual learning via trial-and-error (Wertz, 2019; Wertz & Moya, 2019). Infants, who are especially vulnerable to toxins, attend to social cues (e.g., looking at adults interact with a plant) especially when they are given real plants compared to when they are given other type of artifacts (Elsner & Wertz, 2019) and generalize the edibility information of a plant that they obtain from other individuals to other plants with similar appearances (Wertz & Wynn, 2019).