Afzal Upal: Occidental

Cognitive anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer have argued that religious concepts are minimally
counterintuitive and that this gives them mnemic advantages. I will ague that people have the memory
architecture that results in such concepts being more memorable because it makes them better learners
which gives them an evolutionary edge over their competitors. I will show how such benefits emerge in the
real-time processing of comprehending narratives such as folk tales. This model suggests that memorability
is not an inherent property of a concept as Boyer appears to assume; rather it is a property of the concept, the
context in which the concept is presented, and the background knowledge that the comprehendor possesses
about the concept. The model predicts how memorability of a concept should change if the context containing
the concept were changed. I will also present the results of experiments carried out to test these predictions.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Upal_Paper.pdf