Herrmann Esther, Call Josep, Hernàndez-Lloreda Maráa Victoria, Hare Brian, Tomasello Michael
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, D-04103, Germany.
Science. 2007 Sep 7;317(5843):1360-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1146282.
Humans have many cognitive skills not possessed by their nearest primate relatives. The cultural intelligence hypothesis argues that this is mainly due to a species-specific set of social-cognitive skills, emerging early in ontogeny, for participating and exchanging knowledge in cultural groups. We tested this hypothesis by giving a comprehensive battery of cognitive tests to large numbers of two of humans' closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and orangutans, as well as to 2.5-year-old human children before literacy and schooling. Supporting the cultural intelligence hypothesis and contradicting the hypothesis that humans simply have more "general intelligence," we found that the children and chimpanzees had very similar cognitive skills for dealing with the physical world but that the children had more sophisticated cognitive skills than either of the ape species for dealing with the social world.
人类拥有许多其近亲灵长类动物所不具备的认知技能。文化智力假说认为，这主要归因于一套特定物种的社会认知技能，这些技能在个体发育早期就已出现，用于在文化群体中参与和交流知识。我们通过对人类的两种近亲灵长类动物——黑猩猩和猩猩，以及2.5岁尚未接受读写和学校教育的人类儿童进行一系列全面的认知测试，来验证这一假说。支持文化智力假说并与人类仅仅拥有更多“一般智力”这一假说相矛盾的是，我们发现儿童和黑猩猩在处理物理世界方面具有非常相似的认知技能，但在处理社会世界方面，儿童比任何一种猿类都拥有更复杂的认知技能。
