Josep Call – Replicated Typo

In my last post I wrote about two experiments on imitation in young children and chimpanzees by Lyons et al. (2005) and Horner & Whiten (2005). Their results suggested that young children tend to copy both the ‘necessary’ and the ‘unnecessary’ parts of a demonstrator’s action who shows them how to get a reward out of a puzzle box, whereas chimps only copy the ones necessary to get the reward.

ResearchBlogging.org One important question raised by these experiments was whether these results can only be applied to wild chimpanzees or whether they also hold for enculturated, human-raised chimps. This is an important question because it is possible that chimpanzees raised in these kinds of richly interactive contexts show more sensitivity to human intentionality.

Buttelman et al. (2007) tested just that. They used the “rational imitation” paradigm, which features two conditions

a) the subjects are shown an action in which the specific manner of the action is not purposive and intentional but results from the demonstrator being occupied with something else. For example, he may be carrying something so that he has to use his foot to turn on a light (often called the Hands Occupied Condition).

b) the subjects are shown an action in which the demonstrator chooses a specific manner of doing something on purpose. For example he may have his hands free but still choosto turn on the light with his foot (Hands Free Condition).

taken from Call & Tomasello 2008

Continue reading “Imitation and Social Cognition in Humans and Chimpanzees (II): Rational Imitation in Human Infants and Human-Raised Chimps”

In my last post I summed up some proposals for what (among other things) makes human cognition unique. But one thing that we should bear in mind, I think, is that our cognitive style may more be something of an idiosyncrasy due to a highly specific cognitive specialization instead of a definitive quantitative and qualitative advance over other styles of animal cognition. In this post I will look at studies which further point in that direction.

Chimpanzees, for example, beat humans at certain memory tasks (Inoue & Matsuzawa 2007) and behave more rational in reward situations (Jensen et al. 2007).

In addition, it has been shown that in tasks in the social domain, which are generally assumed to be cognitively complex, domesticated animals such as dogs and goats (Kaminski et al. 2005) fare similarly well or even outperform chimpanzees.

Social Cognition and Self-Domestication

It is entirely possible that the first signs of human uniqueness where at first simply side-effects our self-domesticating lifestyle – the same way the evolution of social intelligence in dogs and goats is hypothesised to have come about –, acting on a complex primate brain (Hare & Tomasello 2005).

This line of reasoning is also supported by domesticated silver foxes which have been bred for tameness over a time period of 50 years but developed other interesting characteristics as a by-product: To quote from an excellent post on the topic over at a Blog Around the Clock (see also here):

“They started having splotched and piebald coloration of their coats, floppy ears, white tips of their tails and paws. Their body proportions changed. They started barking. They improved on their performance in cognitive experiments. They started breeding earlier in spring, and many of them started breeding twice a year.”

What seems most interesting to me, however, is another by-product of their experimental domestication: they also improved in the domain of social cognition. For example, like dogs, they are able to understand human communicative gestures like pointing. This is all the more striking because, as mentioned above, chimpanzees do not understand human communicative gestures like helpful pointing. Neither do wolves or non-domesticated silver foxes (Hare et al. 2005).

Continue reading “What Makes Humans Unique ?(III): Self-Domestication, Social Cognition, and Physical Cognition”