Institute of Neuroscience, Key Laboratory of Primate Neurobiology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, People's Republic of China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People's Republic of China.
J Neurosci. 2022 Feb 2;42(5):850-864. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0603-21.2021. Epub 2021 Dec 3.
Sequence learning is a ubiquitous facet of human and animal cognition. Here, using a common sequence reproduction task, we investigated whether and how the ordinal and relational structures linking consecutive elements are acquired by human adults, children, and macaque monkeys. While children and monkeys exhibited significantly lower precision than adults for spatial location and temporal order information, only monkeys appeared to exceedingly focus on the first item. Most importantly, only humans, regardless of age, spontaneously extracted the spatial relations between consecutive items and used a chunking strategy to compress sequences in working memory. Monkeys did not detect such relational structures, even after extensive training. Monkey behavior was captured by a conjunctive coding model, whereas a chunk-based conjunctive model explained more variance in humans. These age- and species-related differences are indicative of developmental and evolutionary mechanisms of sequence encoding and may provide novel insights into the uniquely human cognitive capacities. Sequence learning, the ability to encode the order of discrete elements and their relationships presented within a sequence, is a ubiquitous facet of cognition among humans and animals. By exploring sequence-processing abilities at different human developmental stages and in nonhuman primates, we found that only humans, regardless of age, spontaneously extracted the spatial relations between consecutive items and used an internal language to compress sequences in working memory. The findings provided insights into understanding the origins of sequence capabilities in humans and how they evolve through development to identify the unique aspects of human cognitive capacity, which includes the comprehension, learning, and production of sequences, and perhaps, above all, language processing.
序列学习是人类和动物认知的普遍特征。在这里，我们使用常见的序列再现任务，研究了人类成年人、儿童和猕猴是否以及如何获得链接连续元素的顺序和关系结构。虽然儿童和猴子在空间位置和时间顺序信息上的精度明显低于成年人，但只有猴子似乎过分关注第一项。最重要的是，只有人类，无论年龄大小，都会自发地提取连续项之间的空间关系，并在工作记忆中使用分块策略来压缩序列。猴子即使经过广泛的训练也无法检测到这种关系结构。猴子的行为被一个联合编码模型所捕捉，而基于分块的联合模型则可以更好地解释人类的变异性。这些与年龄和物种相关的差异表明了序列编码的发展和进化机制，并且可能为人类独特的认知能力提供新的见解。序列学习是一种编码离散元素顺序及其在序列中关系的能力，是人类和动物认知中的普遍特征。通过探索不同人类发育阶段和非人类灵长类动物的序列处理能力，我们发现只有人类，无论年龄大小，都会自发地提取连续项之间的空间关系，并使用内部语言在工作记忆中压缩序列。这些发现为理解人类序列能力的起源以及它们如何通过发展进化提供了新的视角，以确定人类认知能力的独特方面，包括对序列的理解、学习和产生，也许最重要的是语言处理。
