Professor Cecilia Heyes

I am a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College and Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford. I study the origins of human cognition, with a particular focus on the mental capacities that make human life unlike that of other animals: imitation, mindreading, metacognition, language, morality, and other forms of social cognition. My work challenges the idea that these abilities are simply cognitive instincts, built mainly by genetic evolution. Instead, I argue that many are ‘cognitive gadgets’: pieces of mental machinery constructed through cultural learning and shaped over generations by cultural evolution. This approach asks how Nature, Nurture, and Culture work together to build adult human minds. My current work extends the cognitive gadgets framework beyond knowledge and skill to motivation and value. It explores how culture shapes not only how we think, learn, and understand one another, but also what we want, care about, and regard as important, with implications for education, technology, public policy, and other efforts to shape human behaviour.