Higher social skills are uniquely human
A new study published today in Science reports that humans have distinctive social skills. Esther Herrmann, lead author of the study, answers Scitizen’s questions. Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while children follow the experimenter’s example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even […]
A new study published today in Science reports that humans have distinctive social skills. Esther Herrmann, lead author of the study, answers Scitizen’s questions.
Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while children follow the experimenter’s example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even before preschool, toddlers are more sophisticated in their social learning skills than their closest primate relatives, according to a report published in the 7 September issue of the journal Science.
This innate proficiency allows them to excel in both physical and social skills as they begin school and progress through life.
“We compared three species to determine which abilities and skills are distinctly human,” explained Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and lead author of the research paper. Humans differ from their great ape relatives because human brains are about three times the size of the closest primate relatives and humans have language, symbolic math and scientific reasoning.
“Social cognition skills are critical for learning,” Herrmann said. The children were much better than the apes in understanding nonverbal communications, imitating another’s solution to a problem and understanding the intentions of others,” she said.
This is the first comprehensive test comparing social and physical skills of children, chimpanzees and orangutans, Herrmann explained, adding that the findings provide important insight into the evolution of human cognition.
The findings support the cultural intelligence hypothesis that suggests that humans have distinctive social cognitive skills to interact in cultural groups, Herrmann said. An alternate hypothesis suggests that humans differ from apes uniformly across physical and social cognitive tasks because they have more general intelligence.
About 230 subjects – chimps, orangutans and 2.5 year-old children – were compared using a battery of tests and found all to be about equal in the physical cognitive skills of space, quantities and causality. In the social skills of communication, social learning and theory-of-mind skills, the children were correct in about 74 percent of the trials, while the two ape species were correct only about 33 percent of the time.
Full story at EurekAlert
More at Max Planck Institute
