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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, including non-human primate vocalizations (but not other sounds, like backwards speech). But by 6 months, non-human primate vocalizations no longer confer this cognitive advantage that persists for speech. What remains unknown is the mechanism by which these sounds influence infant cognition, and how this initially broader set of privileged sounds narrows to only human speech between 4 and 6 months. Here, we recorded 4- and 6-month-olds' EEG responses to acoustic stimuli whose behavioral effects on infant object categorization have been previously established: infant-directed speech, backwards speech, and non-human primate vocalizations. We document that by 6 months, infants' 4-9 Hz neural activity is modulated in response to infant-directed speech and non-human primate vocalizations (the two stimuli that initially support categorization), but that 4--9 Hz neural activity is not modulated at either age by backward speech (an acoustic stimulus that doesn't support categorization at either age). These results advance the prior behavioral evidence to suggest that by 6 months, speech and non-human primate vocalizations elicit distinct changes in infants' cognitive state, influencing performance on foundational cognitive tasks such as object categorization.

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 familiarity response that results from repetition of an image is less cognitively taxing and has been associated with nonfrontal brain regions. Across three experiments, we observed a striking species difference in the control of behavior by these two types of memory. First, we found that recognition memory performance in orangutans was controlled by working memory under conditions in which this memory system plays little role in rhesus monkeys. Second, we found that unlike the case in monkeys, familiarity was not involved in recognition memory performance in orangutans, shown by differences with monkeys across three different measures. Memory in orangutans was not improved by use of novel images, was always impaired by a concurrent cognitive load, and orangutans did not accurately identify images seen minutes ago. These results are surprising and puzzling, but do support the view that prefrontal expansion in great apes favored working memory. At least in orangutans, increased dependence on working memory may come at a cost in terms of the availability of familiarity.

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 predictions by examining sensitivity to communicative cues in 206 rhesus monkeys ("Macaca mulatta") using an expectancy looking time task modeled on prior work with infants. Monkeys observed a human actor who either made eye contact and vocalized to the monkey ("social cue"), or waved a fruit in front of her face and produced a tapping sound ("nonsocial cue"). The actor then either looked at an object ("referential look") or looked toward empty space ("look away"). We found that, unlike human infants in analogous situations, rhesus monkeys looked longer at events following nonsocial cues, regardless of the demonstrator's subsequent looking behavior. Moreover younger and older monkeys showed similar patterns of responses across development. These results provide support for the natural pedagogy hypothesis, while also highlighting evolutionary changes in human sensitivity to communicative signals.

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 emerge. A fundamental difference between humans and non-humans is language: while language may scaffold some developing theory of mind skills in humans, other species do not have similar capacities for or immersion in language. Comparative work can therefore provide a new line of evidence to test the role of language in the emergence of complex social cognition. Here we first provide an overview of the evidence for shared aspects of theory of mind in other primates, and then examine the evidence for apparently human-unique aspects of theory of mind that may be linked to language. We finally contrast different evolutionary processes, such as competition and cooperation, that may have been important for primate social cognition versus human-specific forms of theory of mind. We argue that this evolutionary perspective can help adjudicate between different proposals on the link between human-specific forms of social cognition and language.

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 attention to kind than surface feature information when judging the identity of objects (e.g.). Indeed, previous research found that 14-month-old infants can judge trans-temporal identity even in complete absence of kind-specific surface features. Here, we used another more demanding non-linguistic paradigm to test the limits of these abilities in 14-, 18-, 23- and 36-month-old infants, comparing their performance to recent great ape data. Particularly, we presented infants with two food kinds, whose surface features were then fully transformed to make them look identical. If reasoning according to essentialist principles, participants should select the preferred item despite superficial manipulations. However, only 36-month-olds reliably tracked the preferred item after superficial manipulations. This suggests that, although basic psychological essentialism may emerge early in infancy, more complex forms require domain-general cognitive prerequisites, which only develop in more protracted form.

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 tested ecological knowledge across gender toward the species before and after exposure to a mildly anthropomorphized storybook. Following the programme, participants of both genders significantly increased their use of accurate ecology terms (Z = -3.01, p = 0.003). Anthropomorphic terms are markedly altered from human adjectives in females and verbs in males toward accurate ecological terms. If used correctly and in correspondence with accurate ecological representations of a species, subtle anthropomorphism can aid in increasing empathy and knowledge in education programmes.

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 the humans' and chimpanzee's position. It was carried out in three countries with contrasting secularism conditions: Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Teachers were asked to answer to the BIOHEAD-CITIZEN project question: 'The Chimpanzee should be included in the genus "Homo," notably because 98.5% of its DNA is identical to that of "Homo sapiens'." Results were analysed within the KVP model framework and the Barbour's four categories of relationship between science knowledge and religion. Most questioned teachers (80%) of the three countries rejected the idea of including the chimpanzee in the genus "Homo" (86% of Argentinians, 71% of Brazilians and 71% Uruguayans), suggesting the conception of human beings having a special position in relation to other animal species. This study also indicates that the training of biology teachers needs to be analysed in the three countries to understand how teachers-to-be are being trained and evaluate their knowledge regarding molecular biology, phylogeny and evolution.

Acquisition and maintenance of touch-screen responding was examined in naive cynomolgus monkeys ("Macaca fascicularis") under automaintenance and classical conditioning arrangements. In the first condition of Experiment 1, we compared acquisition of screen touching to a randomly positioned stimulus (a gray square) that was either stationary or moving under automaintenance (i.e., banana pellet delivery followed an 8-s stimulus presentation or immediately upon a stimulus touch). For all subjects stimulus touching occurred within the first session and increased to at least 50% of trials by the end of four sessions (320 trials). In the subsequent condition, stimulus touching further increased under a similar procedure in which pellets were only delivered if a stimulus touch occurred (fixed ratio 1 with 8-s limited hold). In Experiment 2, 6 naive subjects were initially exposed to a classical conditioning procedure (8-s stimulus preceded pellet delivery). Despite the absence of a programmed response contingency, all subjects touched the stimulus within the first session and responded on about 50% or more of trials by the second session. Responding was also sensitive to negative, neutral, and positive response contingencies introduced in subsequent conditions. Similar to other species, monkeys engaged in stimulus-directed behavior when stimulus presentations were paired with food delivery. However, stimulus-directed behavior quickly conformed to response contingencies upon subsequent introduction. Video recordings of sessions showed topographies of stimulus-directed behavior that resembled food acquisition and consumption. (Contains 1 table and 7 figures.)

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 humans and baboons using a serial reaction time task. Participants had to produce three-target sequences containing deterministic relationships between the first and last target locations. In Experiment 1, participants from the two species could extract these non-adjacent dependencies, but humans required less exposure than baboons. In Experiment 2, the data show for the first time in a non-human primate species the successful generalization of sequential non-adjacent dependencies over novel intervening items. These findings provide new evidence to further constrain current theories about the nature and the evolutionary origins of the learning mechanisms allowing the extraction of non-adjacent dependencies.

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 conflict resolution and repairing the social fabric. Findings show that primates, especially our nearest relatives, Chimpanzee and Bonobo, intentionally shape their communal interactions, often to the benefit of the whole community. Humans share this evolved primate nature, grounded in mammalian biology of maternal instinct and infant attachment. These provide the deep basis of human morality, which is marked by its own extensions, such as inter-personal moral discourse and consensus, detailed public justifications and philosophical critique, abstraction and universalization. The evolutionary view promotes a bottom-up morality which needs to be fully considered when discussing moral development, moral engagement and moral education.

The application of modelling to social learning in monkey populations has been a neglected topic. Recently, however, a number of statistical, simulation and analytical approaches have been developed to help examine social learning processes, putative traditions, the use of social learning strategies and the diffusion dynamics of socially transmitted information. Here, I review some of the recent advances and show how they influence and combine with empirical studies of social learning.

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 human number concept. Five claims are presented that support an evolutionary view of numerical development: (1) number is an abstract concept with an innate basis in humans; (2) maturational processes constrain the development of humans' numerical representations between infancy and adulthood; (3) there is evolutionary continuity in the neural processes of numerical cognition in primates; (4) primitive logical abilities support verbal counting development in humans; and (5) primitive neural processes provide the foundation for symbolic numerical development in the human brain. We support these claims by examining current evidence from animal cognition, child development, and human brain function. The data show that at the basis of human numerical concepts are primitive perceptual and logical mechanisms that have evolutionary homologs in other primates and form the basis of numerical development in the human brain. In the final section of this article, we discuss some hypotheses for what makes human numerical reasoning unique by drawing on evidence from human and non-human primate neuroimaging research.

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 investment. It argues, moreover, that peculiarities in the earliest theories of social capital, as well as a confluence of historical factors, led to an explosion of social capital research during the 1990s and 2000s. Though researchers have attributed social capital's meteoric rise to the expansion of neoliberal discourse, my account suggests that the factors behind the concept's growth were more complex and manifold. Social capital has never been a singular idea with clear ties to a single theory or ideology. It is all the more troubling, then, that many researchers have discussed this nebulous concept as if it were a self-explanatory and universal empirical principle that can be used to generate "further knowledge." Recommendations for mitigating this problem are made by discussing how researchers should (and should not) use terms such as social capital, neoliberalism, and analytic concepts in general.

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, [Nissen, M. J., 1987]) was used with a group of Guinea baboons ("Papio papio") in a new automatic experimental device (Fagot & Bonté, [Fagot, J., 2010]). After a series of random trials, monkeys were exposed to language-like patterns. We found that the extraction of embedded patterns positioned at the end of larger patterns was faster than the extraction of initial embedded patterns. This result suggests that there is a learning advantage for the final element of a sequence that benefits from the contextual information provided by previous elements.

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 capacity to accommodate alternative correlation structures that are common in repeated measures studies. Researchers require sound quantitative methods to work with limited but valuable measures without degrading their data sets. This article provides a brief tutorial and exploration of two alternative longitudinal modeling techniques, linear mixed effects models and generalized estimating equations, as applied to a repeated measures study (n = 12) of pairmate attachment and social stress in primates. Both techniques provide comparable results, but each model offers unique information that can be helpful when deciding the right analytic tool.

Nearly all primate species are globally threatened. Conservation approaches need to focus on local people and users of resources from the habitats of the apes. Students worldwide should become aware of the context and relationships in school, and they should change their usage and behaviour as the ultimate goals. This study explored the understanding and motivation of adolescents in German secondary schools (grades 5 and 6) introduced to out-of-school lessons in a zoo education program in comparison to a school-based program or no instruction. We developed 2 educational programs to raise awareness and concern for the conservation of primates: one was carried out in the local zoo; the other at workstations in public schools. Students (N = 1,013) participated in the study based on a 2?×?2 factorial design-instruction and place. Students from the zoo education program demonstrated higher content and affective achievement than students from the school-based and control programs; a combination of both programs did not lead to higher scores in the tests after the program. Learning in zoo school had a sustained influence on retention. Interest was higher in the zoo-based programs while perceived choice was higher in the school-based program.

The uncertainty response has been influential in studies of human perception, and it is crucial in the growing research literature that explores animal metacognition. However, the uncertainty response's interpretation is still sharply debated. The authors sought to clarify this interpretation using the dissociative technique of cognitive loads imposed on ongoing discrimination performance. Four macaques ("Macaca mulatta") performed a sparse-dense discrimination within which an uncertainty response let them decline difficult trials or a middle response let them identify middle stimuli. Concurrent memory tasks were occasionally overlain on ongoing discrimination performance. The concurrent tasks disrupted macaques' uncertainty responses far more than their sparse, middle, or dense discrimination responses. This dissociation suggests that the uncertainty response is a higher level decisional response that is particularly dependent on working memory and attentional resources. This is consistent with the theoretical possibility that the uncertainty response is an elemental behavioral index of uncertainty monitoring or metacognition. (Contains 14 figures.)

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 demands during the memory delay impaired matching-to-sample performance for familiar images in a demand-dependent manner, indicating that maintaining these images in memory taxed limited cognitive resources. Performance with unfamiliar images was unaffected, dissociating active from passive memory processes. Active cognitive control of memory in monkeys demonstrates that language is unnecessary for active memory maintenance. (Contains 2 figures.)

The growing consensus that language is distributed into large-scale cortical and subcortical networks has brought with it an increasing focus on the connectional anatomy of language, or how particular fibre pathways connect regions within the language network. Understanding connectivity of the language network could provide critical insights into function, but recent investigations using a variety of methodologies in both humans and non-human primates have provided conflicting accounts of pathways central to language. Some of the pathways classically considered language pathways, such as the arcuate fasciculus, are now argued to be domain-general rather than specialized, which represents a radical shift in perspective. Other pathways described in the non-human primate remain to be verified in humans. In this review, we examine the consensus and controversy in the study of fibre pathway connectivity for language. We focus on seven fibre pathways--the superior longitudinal fasciculus and arcuate fasciculus, the uncinate fasciculus, extreme capsule, middle longitudinal fasciculus, inferior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus--that have been proposed to support language in the human. We examine the methods in humans and non-human primate used to investigate the connectivity of these pathways, the historical context leading to the most current understanding of their anatomy, and the functional and clinical correlates of each pathway with reference to language. We conclude with a challenge for researchers and clinicians to establish a coherent framework within which fibre pathway connectivity can be systematically incorporated to the study of language.

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual narrowing of face-voice matching, whereby young infants match faces and voices across species, but older infants do not. In the present study, we provide neurophysiological evidence for developmental decline in cross-species face-voice matching. We measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while 4- and 8-month-old infants watched and listened to congruent and incongruent audio-visual presentations of monkey vocalizations and humans mimicking monkey vocalizations. The ERP results indicated that younger infants distinguished between the congruent and the incongruent faces and voices regardless of species, whereas in older infants, the sensitivity to multisensory congruency was limited to the human face and voice. Furthermore, with development, visual and frontal brain processes and their functional connectivity became more sensitive to the congruence of human faces and voices relative to monkey faces and voices. Our data show the neural correlates of perceptual narrowing in face-voice matching and support the notion that postnatal experience with species identity is associated with neural changes in multisensory processing (Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2009). (Contains 4 figures.)

It is now well-known that the absence of attention can leave us "blind" to visual stimuli that are very obvious under normal viewing conditions (e.g. a person dressed as a gorilla; Simons & Chabris, 1999). However, the question of whether hearing can ever be susceptible to such effects remains open. Here, we present evidence that the absence of attention can leave people "deaf" to the presence of an "auditory gorilla" which is audible for 19s and clearly noticeable under full attention. These findings provide the first ever demonstration of sustained inattentional deafness. The effect is all the more surprising because it occurs within a lifelike, three-dimensional auditory scene in which the unnoticed stimulus moves through the middle of several other dynamic auditory stimuli. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

The present study investigates the human-specificity of the orienting system that allows neonates to look preferentially at faces. Three experiments were carried out to determine whether the face-perception system that is present at birth is broad enough to include both human and nonhuman primate faces. The results demonstrate that the newborns did not show any spontaneous visual preference for the human face when presented simultaneously with a monkey face that shared the same features, configuration, and low-level perceptual properties (Experiment 1). The newborns were, however, able to discriminate between the 2 faces belonging to the 2 different species (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the newborns were found to prefer looking at an upright, compared with an inverted, monkey face, as they do for human faces. Overall, the results demonstrate that newborns perceive monkey and human faces in a similar way. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the system underlying face preference at birth is broad enough to bias newborns' attention toward both human and nonhuman primate faces. (Contains 3 figures.)

Across all languages studied to date, audiovisual speech exhibits a consistent rhythmic structure. This rhythm is critical to speech perception. Some have suggested that the speech rhythm evolved "de novo" in humans. An alternative account--the one we explored here--is that the rhythm of speech evolved through the modification of rhythmic facial expressions. We tested this idea by investigating the structure and development of macaque monkey lipsmacks and found that their developmental trajectory is strikingly similar to the one that leads from human infant babbling to adult speech. Specifically, we show that: (1) younger monkeys produce slower, more variable mouth movements and as they get older, these movements become faster and less variable; and (2) this developmental pattern does "not" occur for another cyclical mouth movement--chewing. These patterns parallel human developmental patterns for speech and chewing. They suggest that, in both species, the two types of rhythmic mouth movements use different underlying neural circuits that develop in different ways. Ultimately, both lipsmacking and speech converge on an approximately 5 Hz rhythm that represents the frequency that characterizes the speech rhythm of human adults. We conclude that monkey lipsmacking and human speech share a homologous developmental mechanism, lending strong empirical support to the idea that the human speech rhythm evolved from the rhythmic facial expressions of our primate ancestors.

The exhibition of actions that are causally unnecessary to the outcomes with which they are associated is a core feature of human cultural behavior. To enter into the world(s) of their cultural in-group, children must learn to assimilate such unnecessary actions into their own behavioral repertoire. Past research has established the habitual tendency of children to adopt the redundant actions of adults demonstrated directly to them. Here we document how young children will do so even when such actions are modeled to a third person regardless of whether children are presented with the test apparatus by the demonstrating, and assumedly expert, adult or by the observing, and assumedly naive, adult (Experiment 1), whether or not children had opportunity to discover how the apparatus works prior to modeling (Experiment 1), and whether or not children's attention was drawn to the demonstration while they were otherwise occupied (Experiment 2). These results emphasize human children's readiness to acquire behavior that is in keeping with what others do, regardless of the apparent efficiency of the actions employed, and in so doing to participate in cultural learning. (Contains 2 tables.)

A theory of how concept formation begins is presented that accounts for conceptual activity in the first year of life, shows how increasing conceptual complexity comes about, and predicts the order in which new types of information accrue to the conceptual system. In a compromise between nativist and empiricist views, it offers a single domain-general mechanism that redescribes attended spatiotemporal information into an iconic form. The outputs of this mechanism consist of types of spatial information that we know infants attend to in the first months of life. These primitives form the initial basis of concept formation, allow explicit preverbal thought, such as recall, inferences, and simple mental problem solving, and support early language learning. The theory details how spatial concepts become associated with bodily feelings of force and trying. It also explains why concepts of emotions, sensory concepts such as color, and theory of mind concepts are necessarily later acquisitions because they lack contact with spatial descriptions to interpret unstructured internal experiences. Finally, commonalities between the concepts of preverbal infants and nonhuman primates are discussed. (Contains 7 notes and 1 table.)

Syntax is widely considered the feature that most decisively sets human language apart from other natural communication systems. Animal vocalisations are generally considered to be holistic with few examples of utterances meaning something other than the sum of their parts. Previously, we have shown that male putty-nosed monkeys produce call series consisting of two call types in response to different events. They can also be combined into short sequences that convey a different message from those conveyed by either call type alone. Here, we investigate whether "pyow-hack" sequences are compositional in that the individual calls contribute to their overall meaning. However, the monkeys behaved as if they perceived the sequence as an idiomatic expression rather than decoding the sequence. Nonetheless, while this communication system lacks the generative power of syntax it enables callers to increase the number of messages that can be conveyed by a small and innate call repertoire. (Contains 4 figures.)

Among species recovery tools available, re-introduction of animals to the wild is one of the more complex. Since the mid-1990s two successful great ape re-introductions have taken place in the Republic of Congo, leading some conservationists to revisit re-introduction as a strategy. This research explored the role of conservation education and environmental communication in the projects, including activities undertaken, stakeholder perceptions of success and impacts on project outcomes. The research found that education and communication activities, while varied and broad, were managed in an ad hoc, intuitive manner, lacking priority, expertise, and funding leading to recommendations for future reintroduction projects. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

Six-month-olds reliably discriminate different monkey and human faces whereas 9-month-olds only discriminate different human faces. It is often falsely assumed that perceptual narrowing reflects a permanent change in perceptual abilities. In 3 experiments, ninety-six 12-month-olds' discrimination of unfamiliar monkey faces was examined. Following 20 s of familiarization, and two 5-s visual-paired comparison test trials, 12-month-olds failed to show discrimination. However, following 40 s of familiarization and two 10-s test trials, 12-month-olds showed reliable discrimination of novel monkey faces. A final experiment was performed demonstrating 12-month-olds' discrimination of the monkey face was due to the increased familiarization rather than increased time of visual comparison. Results are discussed in the context of perceptual narrowing, in particular the flexible nature of perceptual narrowing. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

The cultural intelligence hypothesis (CIH) claims that humans' advanced cognition is a direct result of human culture and that children are uniquely specialized to absorb and utilize this cultural experience (Tomasello, 2000). Comparative data demonstrating that 2.5-year-old human children outperform apes on measures of social cognition but not on measures of physical cognition support this claim (Herrmann et al., 2007). However, the previous study failed to control for rearing when comparing these two species. Specifically, the human children were raised in a human culture whereas the apes were raised in standard sanctuary settings. To further explore the CIH, here we compared the performance on multiple measures of social and physical cognition in a group of standard reared apes raised in conditions typical of zoo and biomedical laboratory settings to that of apes reared in an enculturated socio-communicatively rich environment. Overall, the enculturated apes significantly outperformed their standard reared counterparts on the cognitive tasks and this was particularly true for measures of communication. Furthermore, the performance of the enculturated apes was very similar to previously reported data from 2.5-year-old children. We conclude that apes who are reared in a human-like socio-communicatively rich environment develop superior communicative abilities compared to apes reared in standard laboratory settings, which supports some assumptions of the cultural intelligence hypothesis.

Adults preferentially use information from the left side of face images to judge gender, emotion, and identity. In this study, we examined the development of this visual-field bias over middle childhood (5-10 years). Our goal was to both characterize the developmental trajectory of the left-side bias (should one exist) and examine the selectivity of the phenomenon. We used own- versus other-species faces (human and monkey faces) to ask whether the left-side bias was equally strong for categories with which children have vastly different amounts of experience. We found that the left-side bias did show both a developmental trend over the age range we considered and distinct category selectivity; for human faces the preference for the left side of the image increased across the age range tested, but for monkey faces it did not. We discuss our results in the context of experience-dependent perceptual narrowing during development. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

The PFC plays a central role in our ability to learn arbitrary rules, such as "green means go." Previous experiments from our laboratory have used conditional association learning to show that slow, gradual changes in PFC neural activity mirror monkeys' slow acquisition of associations. These previous experiments required monkeys to repeatedly reverse the cue-saccade associations, an ability known to be PFC-dependent. We aimed to test whether the relationship between PFC neural activity and behavior was due to the reversal requirement, so monkeys were trained to learn several new conditional cue-saccade associations without reversing them. Learning-related changes in PFC activity now appeared earlier and more suddenly in correspondence with similar changes in behavioral improvement. This suggests that learning of conditional associations is linked to PFC activity regardless of whether reversals are required. However, when previous learning does not need to be suppressed, PFC acquires associations more rapidly.

Inattentional blindness refers to the finding that people do not always see what appears in their gaze. Though inattentional blindness affects large percentages of people, it is unclear if there are individual differences in susceptibility. The present study addressed whether individual differences in attentional control, as reflected by variability in working memory capacity, modulate susceptibility to inattentional blindness. Participants watched a classic inattentional blindness video (Simons & Chabris, 1999) and were instructed to count passes among basketball players, wherein 58% noticed the unexpected: a person wearing a gorilla suit. When participants were accurate with their pass counts, individuals with higher working memory capacity were more likely to report seeing the gorilla (67%) than those with lesser working memory capacity (36%). These results suggest that variability in attentional control is a potential mechanism underlying the apparent modulation of inattentional blindness across individuals. (Contains 1 figure and 3 footnotes.)

Both human and non-human animals often face decisions between options available at different times, and the capacity of delaying gratification has usually been considered one of the features distinguishing humans from other animals. However, this characteristic can widely vary across individuals, species, and types of task and it is still unclear whether it is accounted for by phylogenetic relatedness, feeding ecology, social structure, or metabolic rate. To disentangle these hypotheses, we evaluated temporal preferences in capuchin monkeys, South-American primates that, despite splitting off from human lineage approximately 35 million years ago, show striking behavioural analogies with the great apes. Then, we compared capuchins' performance with that of the other primate species tested so far with the same procedure. Overall, capuchins showed a delay tolerance significantly higher than closely related species, such as marmosets and tamarins, and comparable to that shown by great apes. Capuchins' tool use abilities might explain their comparatively high preference for delayed options in inter-temporal choices. Moreover, as in humans, capuchin females showed a greater delay tolerance than males, possibly because of their less opportunistic foraging style. Thus, our results shed light on the evolutionary origins of self-control supporting explanations of delay tolerance in terms of feeding ecology. (Contains 3 figures, 2 supplementary videos, 1 supplementary data and 2 tables.)

Gaze following is a fundamental component of triadic social interaction which includes events and an object shared with other individuals and is found in both human and nonhuman primates. Most previous work has focused only on the immediate reaction after following another's gaze. In contrast, this study investigated whether gaze following is retained after the observation of the other's gaze shift, whether this retainment differs between species and age groups, and whether the retainment depends on the nature of the preceding events. In the social condition, subjects (1- and 2-year-old human children and chimpanzees) witnessed an experimenter who looked and pointed in the direction of a target lamp. In the physical condition, the target lamp blinked but the experimenter did not provide any cues. After a brief delay, we presented the same stimulus again without any cues. All subjects looked again to the target location after experiencing the social condition and thus showed a carryover effect. However, only 2-year-olds showed a carryover effect in the physical condition; 1-year-olds and chimpanzees did not. Additionally, only human children showed spontaneous interactive actions such as pointing. Our results suggest that the difference between the two age groups and chimpanzees is conceptual and not only quantitative.

We describe, discuss and illustrate a metaphoric parallel between the history of the most famous Spanish liqueur, "Anis del Mono" ("Anis" of the Monkey), and the evolution of living organisms in the light of Darwinian theory and other biological hypotheses published subsequent to Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species." Also, we report the use of a caricature of a simian Darwin with a positive connotation, perhaps the only one ever produced. We conclude that, like some species in the natural world, "Anis" of the Monkey has evolved, adapted, survived and become the fittest and most successful "anis" in the Spanish market and possibly the world. We hope this paper will contribute a new useful metaphor for the teaching of biological evolution.

The purpose of this study was to analyze quantitative needs for more adapted physical education (APE) teachers based on both market- and prevalence-based models. The market-based need for more APE teachers was examined based on APE teacher positions funded, while the prevalence-based need for additional APE teachers was analyzed based on students requiring APE services. All relative data available in The 27th Annual Report to Congress (USDE, 2007) and a national APE job survey (Kelly & Gansneder, 1998) were used. Results indicate that 640 more qualified APE teachers are needed to fill out all the APE positions currently funded (a shortage of 9.15%) and 20,087 more qualified APE teachers are required to meet needs by all the students requiring APE services (a shortage of 75.96%), resulting in a substantial difference of 19,447 additional APE teachers with full certifications needed between the prevalence- and market-based models (a shortage difference of 66.81%). Implications of these results are discussed in this article. (Contains 1 table.)

Co-existing with wildlife and maintaining rural livelihoods are common challenges in remote villages in Japan. The authors assess the effects of the Monkey-Persimmon Environmental Education Program developed to reduce wildlife conflicts and to revitalize a community in Nagano Prefecture. Development of a logic model helped guide interviews with staff and villagers about program outcomes. Household interviews revealed that 83% of respondents knew about the program and, of these, 90% had positive attitudes toward activities. Recommendations to monitor and improve program effects are based on the environmental, economic, and social components of education for sustainable development. (Contains 3 tables.)

Property is rare in most nonhuman primates, most likely because their lifestyles are not conducive to it. Nonetheless, just because these species do not frequently maintain property does not mean that they lack the propensity to do so. Primates show respect for possession, as well as behaviors related to property, such as irrational decision making regarding property (e.g., the endowment effect) and barter. The limiting factor in species other than humans is likely the lack of social and institutional controls for maintaining property. By comparing primates and humans, we gain a better understanding of how human property concepts have evolved. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

Research on the relationship between the representation of space and time has produced two contrasting proposals. ATOM posits that space and time are represented via a common magnitude system, suggesting a symmetrical relationship between space and time. According to metaphor theory, however, representations of time depend on representations of space asymmetrically. Previous findings in humans have supported metaphor theory. Here, we investigate the relationship between time and space in a nonverbal species, by testing whether non-human primates show space-time interactions consistent with metaphor theory or with ATOM. We tested two rhesus monkeys and 16 adult humans in a nonverbal task that assessed the influence of an irrelevant dimension (time or space) on a relevant dimension (space or time). In humans, spatial extent had a large effect on time judgments whereas time had a small effect on spatial judgments. In monkeys, both spatial and temporal manipulations showed large bi-directional effects on judgments. In contrast to humans, spatial manipulations in monkeys did not produce a larger effect on temporal judgments than the reverse. Thus, consistent with previous findings, human adults showed asymmetrical space-time interactions that were predicted by metaphor theory. In contrast, monkeys showed patterns that were more consistent with ATOM. (Contains 6 figures.)

In this review, we place equal emphasis on production, usage, and comprehension because these components of communication may exhibit different developmental trajectories and be affected by different neural mechanisms. In the animal kingdom generally, learned, flexible vocal production is rare, appearing in only a few orders of birds and few species of mammals. Compared with humans, the majority of species produce a limited repertoire of calls that show little modification during development. Call usage is also highly constrained. Unlike humans, most animals use specific call types only in a limited range of contexts. In marked contrast to production and usage, animals' comprehension of vocalizations, as measured by their responses, are highly flexible, modifiable as a result of experience, and show the most parallels with human language. The differences among vocal production, usage, and comprehension create an oddly asymmetric system of communication in which a small repertoire of relatively fixed calls, each linked to a particular context, can nonetheless give rise to an open-ended, highly modifiable, and cognitively rich set of meanings. Recent studies of baboons and eavesdropping songbirds provide two examples.

Adapted physical education (APE) is designed to meet the unique needs of children with disabilities within the least restrictive environment. Placement in the right environment can help the child succeed, but the wrong environment can create a very negative experience. This article presents a systematic approach to making decisions when determining appropriate APE or physical education placements for students with disabilities and should enable teachers to understand better their own district policies regarding such placements. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

Recent research suggests that witnessing events of fission (e.g., the splitting of a solid object) impairs human infants', human adults', and non-human primates' object representations. The present studies investigated the reactions of gorillas and orangutans to cohesion violation across different types of fission events implementing a behavioral paradigm previously used with human infants. Results suggest that fission events vary in their impact on representational abilities but do not destroy apes' representations of continuously existing objects. (Contains 5 figures.)

These activities, prepared for key stage 5 students (ages 16-18) and also suitable for key stage 4 (ages 14-16), show that physical appearance is not necessarily the best way to classify mammals. DNA structure is examined to show how similarities and differences between DNA sequences of mammals can be used to establish evolutionary relationships. Some real DNA sequences are compared to illustrate that the whale is surprisingly closely related to mammals such as the hippo, camel and cow, a relationship confirmed by fossil evidence. Finally, an analysis of haemoglobin sequences of primates shows the close relationship between humans and other great apes such as the chimpanzee. (Contains 4 figures and 5 tables.)