Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Fiona Cowie works at the interface of philosophy with the sciences of the mind: psychology, neuroscience and biology. She is interested in how human minds develop, both within an individual and over evolutionary time. Her work on language acquisition work emphasizes the multitude of ways in which the environment constrains and determines language development in individuals. As well as continuing to pursue this theme, she is co-authoring a book (with Kim Sterelny) that stresses the vital role of the environment and in particular, the environment we ourselves construct -- in pushing human cognitive evolution in its uniquely human directions. The evolution of language will be a test case for the idea that niche construction and other forms of cultural evolution have played an unprecedented role in the evolution of the hominin lineage.