Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA, 02138; Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Dev Psychobiol. 2014 Apr;56(3):547-73. doi: 10.1002/dev.21125. Epub 2013 Jun 14.
There is very little research comparing great ape and human cognition developmentally. In the current studies we compared a cross-sectional sample of 2- to 4-year-old human children (n=48) with a large sample of chimpanzees and bonobos in the same age range (n=42, hereafter: apes) on a broad array of cognitive tasks. We then followed a group of juvenile apes (n=44) longitudinally over 3 years to track their cognitive development in greater detail. In skills of physical cognition (space, causality, quantities), children and apes performed comparably at 2 years of age, but by 4 years of age children were more advanced (whereas apes stayed at their 2-year-old performance levels). In skills of social cognition (communication, social learning, theory of mind), children out-performed apes already at 2 years, and increased this difference even more by 4 years. Patterns of development differed more between children and apes in the social domain than the physical domain, with support for these patterns present in both the cross-sectional and longitudinal ape data sets. These results indicate key differences in the pattern and pace of cognitive development between humans and other apes, particularly in the early emergence of specific social cognitive capacities in humans.
关于大型猿类和人类认知的发展，相关研究非常少。在当前的研究中，我们将 2 至 4 岁的人类儿童（n=48）的横断面样本与同一年龄段的大量黑猩猩和倭黑猩猩（n=42，以下简称：猿）的样本进行了比较，对他们进行了广泛的认知任务。然后，我们对一组幼年猿（n=44）进行了 3 年的纵向跟踪，以更详细地追踪他们的认知发展。在物理认知技能（空间、因果关系、数量）方面，儿童和猿类在 2 岁时表现相当，但到 4 岁时，儿童的表现更先进（而猿类则停留在 2 岁的表现水平）。在社会认知技能（沟通、社会学习、心理理论）方面，儿童在 2 岁时已经优于猿类，到 4 岁时，这种差距甚至更大。在社会领域，儿童和猿类的发展模式之间的差异大于物理领域，在横断面和纵向猿类数据集都支持这些模式。这些结果表明，人类和其他猿类在认知发展的模式和速度上存在关键差异，特别是在人类特定社会认知能力的早期出现方面。
