The Evolution of Social Cognition

Vonk, Jennifer; McGuire, Molly; Johnson-Ulrich, Zoe

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-12697-5_7

Cited by 1 publication

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“…The Social Intelligence Hypothesis holds that social environments are necessary conditions on the development of social cognitive skills like mindreading. To substantiate this hypothesis, it is important to determine whether nonhuman animals that lack the complexity of social groupings seen in similar species also lack analogous social cognition skills (Vonk et al 2015). For instance orangutans, which are relatively solitary in relation to other great apes, are sufficiently similar with regards to social cognitive skills (Herrmann et al 2007).…”

Section: Social Intelligence Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind and Nonhuman Intelligence

Tinklenberg¹

2016

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

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The cognitive ability to predict or explain an indi-11 viduals' behavior through the attribution of men-12 tal states. their implicit, heuristic-based, automatic knowl-207 edge of the causal structure of some physical 208 system, we might discover multiple processing 209 systems for mindreading. Children can correctly 210 verbally identify and track false beliefs at around 211 4 years of age. Even though some nonhuman 212 animals consider others' perceptual perspectives, 213 this ability is not on par with children's ability to 214 verbally reason about others' beliefs. That said, 215 testing false belief responsiveness by measuring 216 preferential looking times has some now thinking 217 that preverbal infants have mindreading skills as 218 well (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005). Infants' sur-219 prising performance in social contexts means 220 could help make sense of the ontogeny and phy-221 logeny of social cognition. Some conjecture that 222 mindreading is not a unitary process, but rather 223 can be decomposed into unique social cognition 224 skills that have divergent evolutionary and devel-225 opmental trajectories. 226 Partial evidence for these views comes from 227 variations in reaction times in belief attribution. 228 By comparing performance across species and 229 developmental stages, researchers aim to identify 230 "signature limits" which reveal the contours of 231 mindreading abilities (Butterfill and Apperly 232 2013). Signature limits indicate restrictions on 233 the performance of some relevant tasks and can 234 help to illuminate the mechanisms involved in 235 performing the task. For example, while we 236 require additional processing to report on some

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Section: Social Intelligence Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind and Nonhuman Intelligence

Tinklenberg¹

2016

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The Evolution of Social Cognition

Cited by 1 publication

References 94 publications

Theory of Mind and Nonhuman Intelligence

Theory of Mind and Nonhuman Intelligence

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