Koncepcja enkulturacji w perspektywie kognitywistycznej

Abstract

Enculturation in cognitive studies perspective: Enculturation is an idea that emphasizes the significant influence of the cultural environment on cognitive processes. In the background of empirical research on the border of cultural anthropology and neuroscience, some scholars are trying to identify neural structures that may participate in the process of assimilating cultural information. In the paper, I shall argue that the concept of enculturation, as part of the situated cognition, can be enriched with the idea of affordances (in particular cultural and conventional affordances). In the first part, I present briefly the concept of enculturation as an approach that fits in the 4E. Then I characterize the concept of a cultural niche as a landscape of cultural affordances. In the second part, I consider a possible neurobiological mechanism of the discussed processes. Referring to the concept of Paul Cisk who has shown a possible neurobiological mechanism of the realization of motor affordances, it has been proposed that conventional affordances can be realized in a similar way. For this purpose, I shall discuss the concept of cortical-subcortical loops as a broader proposal compared to the concept of Cisk. According to it, motor, emotional and cognitive processes function in an integrated manner.