Evidence from convergent evolution and causal reasoning suggests that conclusions on human uniqueness may be premature

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 241-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex H. Taylor ◽  
Nicola S. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Convergent Evolution ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Cognitive Differences ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Human Uniqueness

AbstractWe agree with Vaesen that there is evidence for cognitive differences between humans and other primates. However, it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the uniqueness of the cognitive mechanisms underlying human tool use. Tests of causal understanding are in their infancy, as is the study of animals more distantly related to humans.

scholarly journals New Caledonian crows plan for specific future tool use

2020 ◽  
Vol 287 (1938) ◽  
pp. 20201490
Author(s):  
M. Boeckle ◽  
M. Schiestl ◽  
A. Frohnwieser ◽  
R. Gruber ◽  
R. Miller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Convergent Evolution ◽  
Food Item ◽  
Common Ancestor ◽  
Research Effort ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Future Events ◽  
New Caledonian Crows ◽  
Future Task ◽  
The Right

The ability to plan for future events is one of the defining features of human intelligence. Whether non-human animals can plan for specific future situations remains contentious: despite a sustained research effort over the last two decades, there is still no consensus on this question. Here, we show that New Caledonian crows can use tools to plan for specific future events. Crows learned a temporal sequence where they were (a) shown a baited apparatus, (b) 5 min later given a choice of five objects and (c) 10 min later given access to the apparatus. At test, these crows were presented with one of two tool–apparatus combinations. For each combination, the crows chose the right tool for the right future task, while ignoring previously useful tools and a low-value food item. This study establishes that planning for specific future tool use can evolve via convergent evolution, given that corvids and humans shared a common ancestor over 300 million years ago, and offers a route to mapping the planning capacities of animals.

The Role of Causality in Young Children's Memory for Stories

1987 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Claire A. B. Freeland ◽  
Ellin Kofsky Scholnick
Keyword(s):  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Recall Performance ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Cognitive Styles ◽  
Story Recall ◽  
Locus Of Causality ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Children's Memory

This study investigates the conceptual development underlying story recall. Children's memory for stories was examined as a function of subjects' causal understanding and causal structure in stories. Kindergarteners (64 boys and 64 girls) who had scored either high or low on a causal reasoning pretest heard and recalled two stories representing one of four versions which varied in amount and locus of causality. The results supported a developmental view in which recall performance was a complex interaction between characteristics of the learner and characteristics of the story. Depending on the causal structure of the story, boys and girls high in causal reasoning responded differently in employing two alternative cognitive styles. Boys tended to elaborate more on unstructured material and girls tended to assimilate well-structured text more easily. In contrast, boys and girls low in causal reasoning did not respond differently from each other and were not influenced by the causal structure of the story.

scholarly journals Cultural linkage: the influence of package transmission on cultural dynamics

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1916) ◽  
pp. 20191951 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Justin Yeh ◽  
Laurel Fogarty ◽  
Anne Kandler
Keyword(s):  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Intermediate Frequency ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Physical Linkage ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Linkage Of Genes ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary

Many cultural traits are not transmitted independently, but together as a package. This can happen because, for example, media may store information together making it more likely to be transmitted together, or through cognitive mechanisms such as causal reasoning. Evolutionary biology suggests that physical linkage of genes (being on the same chromosome) allows neutral and maladaptive genes to spread by hitchhiking on adaptive genes, while the pairwise difference between neutral genes is unaffected. Whether packaging may lead to similar dynamics in cultural evolution is unclear. To understand the effect of cultural packages on cultural evolutionary dynamics, we built an agent-based simulation that allows links to form and break between cultural traits. During transmission, one trait and others that are directly or indirectly connected to it are transmitted together in a package. We compare variation in cultural traits between different rates of link formation and breakage and find that an intermediate frequency of links can lower cultural diversity, which can be misinterpreted as a signature of payoff bias or conformity. Further, cultural hitchhiking can occur when links are common.

Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Derex ◽  
Jean-François Bonnefon ◽  
Robert Boyd ◽  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
High Dimensionality ◽  
Noticeable Effect ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Reasoning Abilities ◽  
Downstream Effects ◽  
Salient Dimension ◽  
Causal Theories

Bows and arrows, houses, and kayaks are just a few examples of the highly-optimized tools that humans produced and used to colonize new environments. Because there is much evidence that humans’ cognitive abilities are unparalleled, many believe that such technologies resulted from our superior causal reasoning abilities. However, others have stressed that the high dimensionality of human technologies make them very hard to understand causally. Instead, they argue that optimized technologies emerge through the retention of small improvements across generations without requiring understanding of how these technologies work. Here, we show that a physical artifact becomes progressively optimized across generations of social learners in the absence of explicit causal understanding. Moreover, we find that the transmission of causal models across generations has no noticeable effect on the pace of cultural evolution. The reason is that participants do not spontaneously create multidimensional causal theories but instead mainly produce simplistic models related to a salient dimension. Finally, we show that the transmission of these inaccurate theories constrains learners’ exploration and has downstream effects on their understanding. These results indicate that complex technologies need not result from enhanced causal reasoning but instead can emerge from the accumulation of improvements made across generations.

scholarly journals Cognitive capacities for cooking in chimpanzees

2015 ◽  
Vol 282 (1809) ◽  
pp. 20150229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Warneken ◽  
Alexandra G. Rosati
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Last Common Ancestor ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Anticipatory Planning ◽  
Raw Foods ◽  
Important Shift

The transition to a cooked diet represents an important shift in human ecology and evolution. Cooking requires a set of sophisticated cognitive abilities, including causal reasoning, self-control and anticipatory planning. Do humans uniquely possess the cognitive capacities needed to cook food? We address whether one of humans' closest relatives, chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ), possess the domain-general cognitive skills needed to cook. Across nine studies, we show that chimpanzees: (i) prefer cooked foods; (ii) comprehend the transformation of raw food that occurs when cooking, and generalize this causal understanding to new contexts; (iii) will pay temporal costs to acquire cooked foods; (iv) are willing to actively give up possession of raw foods in order to transform them; and (v) can transport raw food as well as save their raw food in anticipation of future opportunities to cook. Together, our results indicate that several of the fundamental psychological abilities necessary to engage in cooking may have been shared with the last common ancestor of apes and humans, predating the control of fire.

An area specifically devoted to tool use in human left inferior parietal lobule

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 234-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy A. Orban ◽  
Giacomo Rizzolatti
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Inferior Parietal Lobule ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Neural Substrate ◽  
Parietal Lobule ◽  
Human Capacity

AbstractA comparative fMRI study by Peeters et al. (2009) provided evidence that a specific sector of left inferior parietal lobule is devoted to tool use in humans, but not in monkeys. We propose that this area represents the neural substrate of the human capacity to understand tool use by using causal reasoning.

scholarly journals Percussive tool use by Taï Western chimpanzees and Fazenda Boa Vista bearded capuchin monkeys: a comparison

2015 ◽  
Vol 370 (1682) ◽  
pp. 20140351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Visalberghi ◽  
Giulia Sirianni ◽  
Dorothy Fragaszy ◽  
Christophe Boesch
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Capuchin Monkeys ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Cognitive Differences ◽  
Transport Distance ◽  
Nut Cracking ◽  
Tool Modification ◽  
Selection Of

Percussive tool use holds special interest for scientists concerned with human origins. We summarize the findings from two field sites, Taï and Fazenda Boa Vista, where percussive tool use by chimpanzees and bearded capuchins, respectively, has been extensively investigated. We describe the ecological settings in which nut-cracking occurs and focus on four aspects of nut-cracking that have important cognitive implications, namely selection of tools, tool transport, tool modification and modulation of actions to reach the goal of cracking the nut. We comment on similarities and differences in behaviour and consider whether the observed differences reflect ecological, morphological, social and/or cognitive factors. Both species are sensitive to physical properties of tools, adjust their selection of hammers conditionally to the resistance of the nuts and to transport distance, and modulate the energy of their strikes under some conditions. However, chimpanzees transport hammers more frequently and for longer distances, take into account a higher number of combinations of variables and occasionally intentionally modify tools. A parsimonious interpretation of our findings is that morphological, ecological and social factors account for the observed differences. Confirmation of plausible cognitive differences in nut-cracking requires data not yet available.

scholarly journals The cognitive bases of human tool use

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krist Vaesen
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Nonhuman Primates ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Great Ape ◽  
Hand Eye Coordination ◽  
The Face

AbstractThis article has two goals. The first is to assess, in the face of accruing reports on the ingenuity of great ape tool use, whether and in what sense human tool use still evidences unique, higher cognitive ability. To that effect, I offer a systematic comparison between humans and nonhuman primates with respect to nine cognitive capacities deemed crucial to tool use: enhanced hand-eye coordination, body schema plasticity, causal reasoning, function representation, executive control, social learning, teaching, social intelligence, and language. Since striking differences between humans and great apes stand firm in eight out of nine of these domains, I conclude that human tool use still marks a major cognitive discontinuity between us and our closest relatives. As a second goal of the paper, I address the evolution of human technologies. In particular, I show how the cognitive traits reviewed help to explain why technological accumulation evolved so markedly in humans, and so modestly in apes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document