Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 366, Issue 1567, Pages 1017-1027Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0342
Keywords
social learning; behavioural innovation; tool use; cognitive evolution; brain evolution; culture
Categories
Funding
- Utrecht University
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
- ERC [232823]
- European Research Council (ERC) [232823] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
There are consistent individual differences in human intelligence, attributable to a single 'general intelligence' factor, g. The evolutionary basis of g and its links to social learning and culture remain controversial. Conflicting hypotheses regard primate cognition as divided into specialized, independently evolving modules versus a single general process. To assess how processes underlying culture relate to one another and other cognitive capacities, we compiled ecologically relevant cognitive measures from multiple domains, namely reported incidences of behavioural innovation, social learning, tool use, extractive foraging and tactical deception, in 62 primate species. All exhibited strong positive associations in principal component and factor analyses, after statistically controlling for multiple potential confounds. This highly correlated composite of cognitive traits suggests social, technical and ecological abilities have coevolved in primates, indicative of an across-species general intelligence that includes elements of cultural intelligence. Our composite species-level measure of general intelligence, 'primate g(S)', covaried with both brain volume and captive learning performance measures. Our findings question the independence of cognitive traits and do not support 'massive modularity' in primate cognition, nor an exclusively social model of primate intelligence. High general intelligence has independently evolved at least four times, with convergent evolution in capuchins, baboons, macaques and great apes.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available