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Mental time travel, language evolution, and human self-domestication

Cognitive Processing volume 22, pages 363–367 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

Human self-domestication might have contributed to the evolutionary changes in the hippocampus accounting for our enhanced mental travel abilities, and ultimately for our sophisticated language.

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  1. Department of Spanish, Linguistics, and Theory of Literature (Linguistics), Faculty of Philology, University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Antonio Benítez-Burraco

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  1. Antonio Benítez-Burraco
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ABB conceived and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Antonio Benítez-Burraco.

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This is a retrospective study conducted on already available data. The author assumes that the cited studies were approved by the appropriate institutional and/or national research ethics committees, and that were performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Benítez-Burraco, A. Mental time travel, language evolution, and human self-domestication. Cogn Process 22, 363–367 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-020-01005-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-020-01005-2

Keywords

  • Mental travel
  • Language evolution
  • Hippocampus
  • Human self-domestication