Media Contact:
Carrie Conko
Director of Communications
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Office: 703-993-4899
Email: cconko@gmu.edu
Pascal Boyer
Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory, Washington University in St. Louis
Biography
Pascal Boyer is a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His work combines experimental (laboratory) studies with field research to answer the following question: what cognitive processes are engaged in the acquisition, use, and transmission of cultural knowledge?
He uses psychological and anthropological techniques to describe the interaction between "collective memory," how people in a group remember their past, and "individual memory," in particular autobiographical memory.
His most recent work bears on the early development of concepts of agency and personhood (what makes persons and animals different from inert objects) and on early mathematical concepts, as well as on the specifically human neural structures that support such competencies.
