Study finds sense of order sets humans apart from other animals

Washington DC (US), September 7 (ANI): When participating in conversations, organizing daily tasks or going to school, it is essential to remember the order of information.

According to a new study published in the scientific journal PLoS One, this skill is most likely unique to humans. Even humans’ closest relatives, like bonobos, don’t learn command in the same way.

“The study adds another piece of the puzzle to the question of how the mental abilities of humans and other animals differ, and why only humans speak languages, plan space travel and have learned to exploit land so effectively that we now pose a serious problem. threat to countless other forms of life,” says Johan Lind, associate professor of ethology and deputy director of the Center for Cultural Evolution at Stockholm University. Since September he has also been an associate professor of ethology at Linköping University.

Previous research already carried out at Stockholm University has suggested that only humans have the ability to recognize and memorize so-called sequential information and that this ability is a fundamental element underlying unique human cultural abilities.

However, this sequential memory hypothesis has not yet been tested in humans’ closest relatives, the great apes. New experiments now show that bonobos, one of the great apes, have difficulty learning the order of stimuli.

In the recently published book The Human Evolutionary Transition: From Animal Intelligence to Culture (Princeton University Press), ethologists Magnus Enquist and Johan Lind of Stockholm University and Stefano Ghirlanda, a psychology researcher at Brooklyn College in New York, launched a new study. theory of how humans became cultural beings. A central idea concerns the difference in how humans and other animals recognize and remember sequential information.

“We have already analyzed a large number of studies suggesting that only humans recognize and faithfully remember sequential information. But even though we analyzed data from a number of mammals and birds, including monkeys, we found a lack of information about our closest relatives, the other great apes,” explains Johan Lind.

In a series of experiments, the memory abilities of bonobos and humans were tested by having them tap computer screens to, among other things, learn to distinguish short sequences, including pressing right if a square yellow precedes a blue square, or pressing to the left of the blue square appears before the yellow square.

“The study shows that bonobos forget that they have already seen a blue square five to 10 seconds after it disappears from the screen and that they have great difficulty learning to distinguish the sequences blue square before yellow square from square YELLOW. – before the blue square, even though they have been trained for thousands of trials,” says Vera Vinken, an associate at Stockholm University, now a doctoral student in Britain at the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University .

In contrast, the study shows that humans learned to distinguish short sequences almost immediately. However, exactly how our closest relatives can memorize and use sequential information has yet to be demonstrated.

“We now know that our closest relatives do not share the same sequential mental abilities as humans. But even though the results indicate that their working memory functions in principle the same as in rats and pigeons, no one has yet demonstrated this in practice,” says Magnus Enquist, professor emeritus and one of the founders of the Center for Cultural Evolution. .

The new results provide further support for the sequential memory hypothesis, which states that during human prehistory, an ability to remember and process sequences evolved, a necessary mechanism for many uniquely human phenomena such as language. , planning ability and sequential thinking. (ANI)

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