Seed Amanda, Tomasello Michael
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Top Cogn Sci. 2010 Jul;2(3):407-19. doi: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01099.x. Epub 2010 May 27.
As the cognitive revolution was slow to come to the study of animal behavior, the vast majority of what we know about primate cognition has been discovered in the last 30 years. Building on the recognition that the physical and social worlds of humans and their living primate relatives pose many of the same evolutionary challenges, programs of research have established that the most basic cognitive skills and mental representations that humans use to navigate those worlds are already possessed by other primates. There may be differences between humans and other primates, however, in more complex cognitive skills, such as reasoning about relations, causality, time, and other minds. Of special importance, the human primate seems to possess a species-unique set of adaptations for "cultural intelligence," which are broad reaching in their effects on human cognition.
由于认知革命在动物行为研究领域姗姗来迟,我们对灵长类动物认知的绝大多数了解都是在过去30年中发现的。基于人类及其现存灵长类亲属的物理和社会世界面临许多相同进化挑战这一认识,研究项目已经证实,人类用来在这些世界中导航的最基本认知技能和心理表征,其他灵长类动物也已经具备。然而,在更复杂的认知技能方面,如关系推理、因果关系、时间和他人心理等方面,人类和其他灵长类动物可能存在差异。特别重要的是,人类灵长类似乎拥有一套物种独特的“文化智力”适应机制,这些机制对人类认知产生广泛影响。