The natural pedagogy hypothesis proposes that human infants preferentially attend to communicative signals from others, facilitating rapid cultural learning. In this view, sensitivity to such signals is a uniquely human adaptation and as such nonhuman animals should not produce or utilize these communicative signals. We test these evolutionary…

The power and precision with which humans link language to cognition is unique to our species. By 3-4 months of age, infants have already established this link: simply listening to human language facilitates infants' success in fundamental cognitive processes. Initially, this link to cognition is also engaged by a broader set of acoustic stimuli,…

The prefrontal cortex is larger than would be predicted by body size or visual cortex volume in great apes compared with monkeys. Because prefrontal cortex is critical for working memory, we hypothesized that recognition memory tests would engage working memory in orangutans more robustly than in rhesus monkeys. In contrast to working memory, the…

In a world flooded with 'click bait', 'alternative facts', and 'fake news' one's ability to seek out, discern, and value information is of utmost importance. Although contemporary phenomena, these cultural ills take advantage of an evolutionarily-preserved drive for humans and nonhuman animals to monitor for and pursue opportunities to gain…

Human and non-human primates share the ability to extract adjacent dependencies and, under certain conditions, non-adjacent dependencies (i.e., predictive relationships between elements that are separated by one or several intervening elements in a sequence). In this study, we explore the online extraction dynamics of non-adjacent dependencies in…

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more…

The ability to understand the mental states of other individuals is central to human social behavior, yet some theory of mind capacities are shared with other species. Comparisons of theory of mind skills across humans and other primates can provide a critical test of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for different theory of mind skills to…

Education plays an important role in developing positive conservation behavior in future generations. We promote the use of subtle anthropomorphism within a children's storybook as an effective method of increasing ecological knowledge of a target primate species. We delivered an education programme to 170 children in Indonesia from wherein we…

This is an interview with Frans de Waal who gave the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture at the AME Conference in St. Louis in November 2017. Frans de Waal's research with non-human primates documents that primates share our tendencies towards fairness, reciprocity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, caring for others, strategies for conflict avoidance and for…

Extracting the regularities of our environment is one of our core cognitive abilities. To study the fine-grained dynamics of the extraction of embedded regularities, a method combining the advantages of the artificial language paradigm (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, [Saffran, J. R., 1996]) and the serial response time task (Nissen & Bullemer,…

This conceptual history traces the rise of "social capital" from the theories of James Coleman and Pierre Bourdieu to its eventual adoption in fields such as primatology and evolutionary psychology. It argues that the earliest theories of social capital were formulated in response to a growing perception that education was an economic…

Counting is an evolutionarily recent cultural invention of the human species. In order for humans to have conceived of counting in the first place, certain representational and logical abilities must have already been in place. The focus of this article is the origins and nature of those fundamental mechanisms that promoted the emergence of the…

Unavoidable sample size issues beset psychological research that involves scarce populations or costly laboratory procedures. When incorporating longitudinal designs these samples are further reduced by traditional modeling techniques, which perform listwise deletion for any instance of missing data. Moreover, these techniques are limited in their…

Despite scientific evidence suggesting close phylogenetic relationship between chimpanzees and humans, the inclusion of these apes in the genus "Homo" is controversial. Several tools have been used to analyse this issue such as fossils, molecular clock and genome. This work intended to understand the biology teachers' conceptions about…

Active cognitive control of working memory is central in most human memory models, but behavioral evidence for such control in nonhuman primates is absent and neurophysiological evidence, while suggestive, is indirect. We present behavioral evidence that monkey memory for familiar images is under active cognitive control. Concurrent cognitive…