Toddlers have higher social cognition skills than apes
Toddlers have higher social cognition skills than apes
mongabay.com
September 6, 2007
Toddlers have more sophisticated social learning skills than their closest primate relatives, researchers report in the 7 September issue of the journal Science.
Comparing 230 subjects — chimps, orangutans and 2.5 year-old children — using a series of tests, a team of researchers led by Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, found that human toddlers and apes were “about equal” in the physical cognitive skills of space, quantities and causality. However, in terms of the social skills of communication, social learning and theory-of-mind skills, the children performed more than twice as well as the two ape species. In such social tests, children were correct in about 74 percent of the trials, while chimps and orangutans were correct only about a third of the time.
“We compared three species to determine which abilities and skills are distinctly human,” Herrmann explained. “Social cognition skills are critical for learning. The children were much better than the apes in understanding nonverbal communications, imitating another’s solution to a problem and understanding the intentions of others,”
 The orangutan loses out to a human toddler in social cognition tests. Photo by R. Butler |
According to Science, “the researchers chose to study children at an age when they have about the same physical skill level of chimpanzees.”
The researchers say the study supports the hypothesis that humans have distinctive social cognitive skills to interact in cultural groups. They also argue that the findings provide insight into the evolution of human cognition.
Herrmann and colleagues plan trials with the Primate Cognition Test Battery to map out the evolution of cognitive ability of a variety of primate species. Eventually the researchers plan to compare the results with the genomes of respective primate species.
Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, María Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Brian Hare, and Michael Tomasello (2007). Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. 7 SEPTEMBER 2007 VOL 317 SCIENCE
This article is based on a news release from Science as well as Herrmann et al 2007
