Human children 18 – 24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees were uninterested in the social games. As an experimental manipulation, in each task the adult partner stopped participating at a specific point during the activity. All children produced at least one communicative attempt to reengage him, perhaps suggesting that they were trying to reinstate a shared goal. No chimpanzee ever made any communicative attempt to reengage the partner. These results are interpreted as evidence for a uniquely human form of cooperative activity involving shared intentionality that emerges in the second year of life. From soon after birth, human infants interact with other persons dyadically in coordinated, turn-taking sequences (Trevarthen, 1979). From about 6 to 9 months of age, infants ’ social interactions become more complex, as they often incorporate outside objects and so become triadic (Tomasello, 1995). Some of these triadic interactions are relatively extended and maintain a turn-taking structure, for example, rolling a ball back and forth or taking turns beating a drum (Gustafson, Green, & West, 1979; Ratner & Bruner, 1978). Most of these early triadic interactionsFsometimes called cooperative gamesFseem to rely on adult scaffolding in fairly ritualized situations, because the introduction of novel toys or a peer partner disrupts them almost totally until 18 months of age (Hay, 1979; Ross, 1982). In a series of longitudinal studies, Eckerman and colleagues have investigated the emergence of young children’s skills in cooperative games of a less ritualized

Abstract: It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief-desire psychology of four-year-old children and adults (so-called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children’s understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing ’ in the sense that it enables young children to participate in cultural activities using shared, perspectival symbols with a conventional/normative/reflective dimension—for example, linguistic communication and pretend play—thus inaugurating children’s understanding of things mental. Understanding beliefs and participating in collective intentionality at four years of age—enabling the comprehension of such things as money and marriage—results from several years of engagement with other persons in perspective-shifting and reflective discourse containing propositional attitude constructions. By all appearances, the cognitive skills of human beings are very different from those of other animal species, including our nearest primate relatives. Human

Abstract not found

This paper reviews recent approaches to human action planning and the cognitive representation of intentional actions. Evidence suggests that action planning takes place in terms of anticipated features of the intended goal, that is, in terms of action effects. These effects are acquired from early infancy on by registering contingencies between movements and perceptual movement outcomes. Co-occurrence of movements and effects leads to the creation of bidirectional associations between the underlying internal codes, thus establishing distributed perception-action networks subserving both perceiving external events and intentionally producing them. Action plans determine only the general, goal-relevant features of intended actions, while the fine-tuning is left to on-line sensory-motor processing. Action plans emerge from competition for action control between several factors: overlearned habits, perceptual events, and emotional influences, among others. Accordingly, action control represents a balance between personal intentions and wishes on the one hand and environmental affordances and demands on the other. KEYWORDS: action planning, intentional action, goal, perception and action, feedback, action effects, action control, will, priming, imitation, mirror neurons, emotion and action DOMAINS: behavioral psychology, cognition, development, learning and memory, motor processes, sensation and perception, neuroscience, behavior PLANNING AN ACTION Humans perform actions to reach goals, that is, to create or modify some event or state of affairs according to their intentions --- otherwise we would talk of movement but not action. Logically, then, intentional, goal-directed action presupposes some sort of (conscious or unconscious) anticipation of the intended goal event,...

This article discusses narrative intelligence in the context of the evolution of primate (social) intelligence, and with respect to the particular cognitive limits that constrain the development of human social networks and societies.

Our aim is to elucidate the similarities and differences between humans and apes as concerns cooperative behaviour and its relation to communication. In particular, we will point to the decisive role of symbolic communication for making more advanced forms of co-operation possible. We distinguish between competitive and collaborative co-operation and take this distinction as a starting point for our analysis. In competitive contexts, co-operation is triggered by what is present in the environment. The resource that is competed for is available and accessible, but not yet in possession. Humans, but not apes, can as well engage in collaborative co-operation. In this type of co-operation the resource is not manifest, but mainly imagined. The reason why only humans can co-operate collaboratively is that they can imagine what is not there. We submit that language has evolved as a tool by which humans can make their imaginations known to each other, in order to enhance co-operation. Language gives human beings a great advantage as concerns co-operative behaviour, especially regarding communication about goals and the ways to reach them. Symbolic communication makes use of representations as stand-ins for actual entities. Use of representations thus replaces the use of environmental features in communication. A consequence of this is that language makes it possible to jointly attend to imagined goals. Joint attention is a more basic capacity than language-use. It is necessary for all kinds of co-operation because it makes it possible for different subjects to attend to a common goal. Apes can engage in joint attention, but do not achieve the same complexity as humans. They can jointly attend only to things that are present in the context. This makes it difficult to co-operat...

Individuals value information that improves decision making. When social interactions complicate the decision process, acquiring information about others should be particularly valuable [1]. In primate societies, kinship, dominance, and reproductive status regulate social interactions [2, 3] and should therefore systematically influence the value of social information, but this has never been demonstrated. Here, we show that monkeys differentially value the opportunity to acquire visual information about particular classes of social images. Male rhesus macaques sacrificed fluid for the opportunity to view female perinea and the faces of highstatus monkeys but required fluid overpayment to view the faces of low-status monkeys. Social value was highly consistent across subjects, independent of particular images displayed, and only partially predictive of how long subjects chose to view each image. These data demonstrate that visual orienting decisions reflect the specific social content of visual information and provide the first experimental evidence that monkeys spontaneously discriminate images of others based on social status. Results and Discussion Most primates live in complex societies where the cultivation and exploitation of social relationships is associated with

To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects — capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin colony, we are able to recover their preferences over a wide range of goods and risky choices. We show that standard price theory does a remarkably good job of describing capuchin purchasing behavior; capuchin monkeys react rationally to both price and wealth shocks. However, when capuchins are faced with more complex choices including risky gambles, they display many of the hallmark biases of human behavior, including reference-dependent choices and loss-aversion. Given gambles, these results suggest that certain biases such as loss-aversion are an innate function of how our brains code experiences, rather than learned behavior or the result of misapplied heuristics. We would like to acknowledge a very generous Whitebox Advisors ’ Research Grant, without which this research would not have been possible. Alisia Eckert provided invaluable research assistance throughout this project. Many people gave generously of their time on this and earlier drafts; we would especially like

Evolutionary developmental psychology involves the expression of evolved, epigenetic programs, as described by the developmental systems approach, over the course of ontogeny. There have been different selection pressures on organisms at different times in ontogeny, and some characteristics of infants and children were selected in evolution to serve an adaptive function at that time in their life history rather than to prepare individuals for later adulthood. Examples of such adaptive functions of immaturity are provided from infancy, play, and cognitive development. Most evolved psychological mechanisms are proposed to be domain specific in nature and have been identified for various aspects of children’s cognitive and social development, most notably for the acquisition of language and for theory of mind. Differences in the quality and quantity of parental investment affect children’s development and influence their subsequent reproductive and childcare strategies. Some sex differences observed in childhood, particularly as expressed during play, are seen as antecedents and preparations for adult sex differences. Because evolved mechanisms were adaptive to ancestral environments, they are not always adaptive for contemporary people, and this mismatch of evolved mechanisms with modern environments is seen in children’s maladjustment to some aspects of formal schooling. We argue that an evolutionary perspective can be valuable for developing a better understanding of human ontogeny in contemporary society and that a developmental perspective is important for a better understanding of evolutionary psychology.