![]() Whether this increase in brain size at the same time predicts an increase in cognitive abilities remains controversial. In recent years, the focus has returned to the idea that primate intelligence evolved in response to the challenges of living in large and complex groups – the so-called “Social Brain” hypothesis –. In the 1980s, the most prominent hypothesis was that the increase in brain size in primates was related to frugivory, that is, the need to find food that is patchily distributed in space and time. The neocortex is important for sensory perception, generation of motor commands, and higher cognition. In particular, the neocortex has experienced considerable expansion. One striking feature within the primate order is a disproportionate increase in relative brain size from monkeys to apes to humans. Taking this phylogenetic information into account is a prerequisite for identifying the dynamics in the evolution of specific adaptations. Within the hominoidea (apes and humans), the last common ancestor of humans and their closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, is dated at about 6 mya, while the split between the Hominoidea and the Cercopithecoidea (Old World monkeys) occurred between 29 and 24 mya. Such analyses thus incorporate information about the phylogenetic relationships between species as well as the putative selective pressures that might have played a role in shaping a species' cognitive skills. There are two major and interrelated streams of research one focuses on the evolution of the brain, while the other aims at elucidating similarities and differences in behaviour. Understanding the evolution of human cognition and communication rests primarily on comparative analyses with other extant members of the primate order. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: This study was funded by the German Initiative of Excellence ( ) and the Leibniz Graduate School for Primate Neurobiology (Neuroprim: The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Received: NovemAccepted: JanuPublished: April 2, 2012Ĭopyright: © 2012 Schmitt et al. ![]() PLoS ONE 7(4):Įditor: Roscoe Stanyon, University of Florence, Italy One limitation, however, is that the initial experiments were devised to tap into human specific skills in the first place, thus potentially underestimating both true nonhuman primate competencies as well as species differences.Ĭitation: Schmitt V, Pankau B, Fischer J (2012) Old World Monkeys Compare to Apes in the Primate Cognition Test Battery. These results question the clear-cut relationship between cognitive performance and brain size and – prima facie – support the view of an accelerated evolution of social intelligence in humans. Single comparisons showed that chimpanzees performed only better than the macaques in experiments on spatial understanding and tool use, but in none of the socio-cognitive tasks. Surprisingly, our tests revealed largely comparable results between Old World monkeys and the Great apes. We tested 18 Old World monkeys (long-tailed macaques and olive baboons) in the so-called Primate Cognition Test Battery (PCTB) (Herrmann et al. To develop a full understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of primate intelligence, however, comparative data for monkeys are needed. ![]() Such analyses revealed that apes and children have relatively similar competencies in the physical domain, while human children excel in the socio-cognitive domain in particular in terms of attention sharing, cooperation, and mental state attribution. Because of the strong interest in human cognition, much previous work has focused on the comparison of the cognitive skills of human toddlers to those of our closest living relatives, i.e. Understanding the evolution of intelligence rests on comparative analyses of brain sizes as well as the assessment of cognitive skills of different species in relation to potential selective pressures such as environmental conditions and social organization. ![]()
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