Social Attention in Humans and Great Apes: A Key Difference and its Possible Origins

Richard Moore (University of Warwick)

April 28 @17:00 (CET) — Sala 06, Edificio de Humanidades UNED

Abstract

In this talk I argue for a small but fundamental difference between humans and other great ape species: our willingness to use others as sources of information about the world. I will argue that this difference explains both our capacity for high fidelity information, and our superior understanding of informative pointing. I then consider the possible origins of this difference.

I start this talk by considering the question of when it is appropriate to assume that uniquely human cognitive traits are a product of adaptations in the hominin lineage, and when alternative, non-adaptationist explanations should be preferred. I’ll argue that while adaptationism is a highly successful explanatory strategy in the biological sciences, often this strategy has been abused in studies of cognitive development. When this happens, appeals to adaptation are often less a way of explaining human origins than they are of avoiding giving explanations of cognitive development.

I illustrate my case with reference to two skills identified as central to human cognitive uniqueness – pointing and imitation, which are sometimes argued to be the result of independent adaptations in the recent hominin lineage (e.g. Tomasello 2020). I suggest that there are relatively weak grounds for accepting this proposal. Instead, I argue that the development of these abilities may result from a common underlying cause in human history, namely a change to our social attention. This led our ancestors to look to each other, rather than to the environment, as a source of information about the world. I’ll explain why both ape emulation and pointing failure can be thought of as resulting from individualistic information gathering strategies, and present empirical data that support this conclusion.

I finish by considering a range of different possible sources of this attentional difference. One possibility is that these differences are learned in ontogeny. Another possibility is that differences are the product of ecological changes in our ancestors’ environment, which made individualistic foraging strategies non-viable, and which led to selection for new forms of social attention and information sharing. Finally, I’ll consider a recent proposal by Christian Kliesch, according to which differences in human and non-human great ape social attention may be a product of our extended dependency in infancy, which prevents human infants from exploring their environment independently, in contrast to great apes. I’ll finish by considering whether these explanations are inconsistent, and to what extent we need to appeal to adaptations in the recent hominin lineage to explain key differences.

Bio

Richard Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Warwick. His research investigates similarities and differences in the cognitive, communicative and cooperative abilities of humans, great apes, and other species; and the evolution of human language and cognition.