Psychology seminar

Speaker: Tetsuro Matsuzawa (Distinguished professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University)

Title: Origins of the human mind viewed from the study of chimpanzees

Abstract: What is uniquely human? Where did we come from? To answer to those questions I have compared the cognitive development of humans and chimpanzees. This work has involved a laboratory study, known as The Ai Project, which has been ongoing since 1977 and a field study carried out in Bossou-Nimba, Guinea-Conakry, which has been ongoing since 1986.

Humans and chimpanzees are largely similar at early developmental stages; however, there are also crucial differences. Compared to humans, chimpanzees are poor at social referencing and have only very rarely been observed engaging in general imitation and active teaching. Additionally, the working memory of young chimpanzees is exceptional, and often superior to that of human adults. In contrast, chimpanzees’ ability to learn the meaning of symbols is relatively poor.

The development of social cognition in humans may be integrally linked to mother-infant relationships and species-specific ways of rearing children. Specifically, human infants are typically raised by more than just their mothers; the father, siblings, grandparents, and the other members of the community all contribute.

Furthermore, human infants are characterized by a unique stable, supine posture that enables face-to-face communication via facial expressions, vocal exchange, and manual gestures, as well as object manipulation because both hands are free. I propose that this posture in neonates is what makes us human.

In sum, these parallel studies in the field and in the laboratory have helped to understand the cognitive development of chimpanzees and have led to the formulation of possible evolutionary and ontogenetic explanations for the emergence of cognitive abilities that are uniquely human.

Contact

Dr Richard Shillcock