Cognitive anthropology is an approach within
cultural anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge,
cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and
theories of the
cognitive sciences (especially
experimental psychology and
evolutionary biology) often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists and other specialists engaged in the description and
interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.