Toddlers have more sophisticated social learning skills than their closest primate relatives, researchers report Thursday in the latest issue of the journal Science.
This innate proficiency, which is important for learning, allows human children to excel in both physical and social skills as they progress through life.
Researchers compared 230 subjects -- chimps, orangutans and 2.5- year-old children -- 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.
The findings support the cultural intelligence hypothesis that suggests that humans have distinctive social cognitive skills to interact in cultural groups.
Esther Herrmann at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and colleagues suggest that this is the first comprehensive test comparing social and physical skills of children, chimpanzees and orangutans. The findings provide insight into the evolution of human cognition, they write.
The researchers plan to test other closely related species to map out the evolution of cognitive ability through systematically testing a variety of primate species and eventually comparing their genomes as they become available.
Source: Xinhua
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