HUMAN SPECIFICS AND LEARNING: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COGNITION, AFFECT AND CULTURE1

Abstract: The article aims to discuss issues related to frequent controversy in the Psychology of Learning, which consists on the relationships between cognition, culture and affect, and human specificity on these processes. Thus, learning is discussed in terms of shared processes with other species such as association and recursion, and others that are specifically human, such as abstraction and metacognition. We examine some hypotheses about how the human mind may have evolved to develop these differences. At the conclusion, it is specified the position about the links between cognition, affect and culture in two levels of psychological functioning, and the decisive role of culture and its main instrument, language, in favoring the development of human specificity