School of Biology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews KY16 9ST, United Kingdom; email:
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews KY16 9JP, United Kingdom.
Annu Rev Psychol. 2021 Jan 4;72:689-716. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-062220-051256.
Humanity has regarded itself as intellectually superior to other species for millennia, yet human cognitive uniqueness remains poorly understood. Here, we evaluate candidate traits plausibly underlying our distinctive cognition (including mental time travel, tool use, problem solving, social cognition, and communication) as well as domain generality, and we consider how human cognitive uniqueness may have evolved. We conclude that there are no traits present in humans and absent in other animals that in isolation explain our species' superior cognitive performance; rather, there are many cognitive domains in which humans possess unusually potent capabilities compared to those found in other species. Humans are flexible cognitive all-rounders, whose proficiency arises through interactions and reinforcement between cognitive domains at multiple scales.
人类几千年来一直认为自己在智力上优于其他物种，但人类认知的独特性仍未被很好地理解。在这里，我们评估了可能构成我们独特认知（包括心理时间旅行、工具使用、解决问题、社会认知和沟通）以及领域通用性的候选特征，并考虑了人类认知的独特性是如何进化的。我们的结论是，没有一种特质只存在于人类身上而不存在于其他动物身上，能够单独解释我们物种卓越的认知表现；相反，在许多认知领域，人类拥有与其他物种相比异常强大的能力。人类是灵活的认知多面手，他们的熟练程度是通过在多个尺度上的认知领域之间的相互作用和加强而产生的。
