Identification of the Social and Cognitive Processes Underlying Human Cumulative Culture

TLDR

Human social cognition uniquely enables the acquisition and sharing of knowledge. The authors compared children, capuchins, and chimpanzees using a three‑level puzzlebox task to elicit social and cognitive processes. Three‑to‑four‑year‑old children progressed through all puzzlebox levels by imitating, teaching, and sharing rewards, whereas capuchins and chimpanzees rarely reached the third level and did not display these behaviors. Citation: Dean et al.

Abstract

Acquire and Share Few would argue with the stance that human social cognition supports an unequaled capacity to acquire knowledge and to share it with others. Dean et al. (p. 1114 ; see the Perspective by Kurzban and Barrett ) compared the extent to which these social and cognitive psychological processes can be elicited in children, capuchins, and chimpanzees through the use of a three-level puzzlebox task. Incentivized by improving rewards, 3- to 4-year-old children progressed from the first to the third level by imitating observed actions, taught other members of their social group how to solve the problem, and shared the rewards obtained. By contrast, neither the capuchins nor chimpanzees, very few of which ever reached the third level, exhibited these charactertistics.