Similar thinking patterns shown in Native Amazonians, Americans, monkeys
The neural computations of human and nonhuman primates shed new light on the evolution of language.
Humans and monkeys may not speak the same lingo, but our ways of thinking are a lot more similar than previously thought, according to new research from UC Berkeley, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University, scitechdaily.com reported.
In experiments on 100 study participants across age groups, cultures and species, researchers found that Indigenous Tsimane’ people in Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest, American adults and preschoolers and macaque monkeys all show, to varying degrees, a knack for “recursion,” a cognitive process of arranging words, phrases or symbols in a way that helps convey complex commands, sentiments, and ideas.
The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, shed new light on our understanding of the evolution of language, researchers said.
“For the first time, we have strong empirical evidence about patterns of thinking that come naturally to probably all humans and, to a lesser extent, nonhuman primates,” said study coauthor Steven Piantadosi, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology.
Indeed, the monkeys were found to perform far better in the tests than the researchers had predicted.
“Our data suggest that, with sufficient training, monkeys can learn to represent a recursive process, meaning that this ability may not be as unique to humans as is commonly thought,” said Sam Cheyette, a PH.D. student in Piantadosi’s lab and coauthor of the study.