Jamshid J. Tehrani

Discussion Our results suggest that participants exhibited a tendency for repetition and had approximately a one-in-five chance of failing to faithfully reproduce the perceived trefoil, which was sometimes the mirror image of the demonstrated knot. There was no clear handedness bias although the posterior exhibited considerable uncertainty.

Niche-construction theory (NCT) originated as a branch of evolutionary biology that emphasizes the capacity of organisms to modify their environment and thereby influence their own and other species' evolution [1]. The defining characteristic of niche construction is not the modification of environments per se, but rather organism-induced changes in selection pressures in environments [1].

Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the ‘historic-geographic’ school, it is possible to classify similar tales into “international types” and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international types are artificial constructs.