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Understanding Apes to Understand Humans: The Case of Object-Object Relations

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Towards a Theory of Thinking

Part of the book series: On Thinking ((ONTHINKING))

Abstract

Animal cognition has grown exponentially in the last decade and more than ever has established close links with human cognition to jointly explore the mechanisms, ultimate functions, and evolution of cognition. The comparative method plays a key role in this endeavor. Knowledge about object-object relations is a good example of this growth, but just like the rest of animal cognition, it has been dominated by a two-tiered framework (perceptually based vs. conceptually based). Much of animal cognition is routinely reduced to associations between stimuli and responses. I argue that this view is too narrow with regard to apes’ knowledge about object-object relations. Instead, I propose that apes distinguish between arbitrary and causal relations between objects. This means that apes not only associate the presence of certain stimuli with certain events but also attribute a causal role between the presence of those objects and certain events.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Amanda Seed for her helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, D-04103, Germany

    Josep Call

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  1. Josep Call
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Correspondence to Josep Call .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Parmenides Foundation, Kardinal Faulhaber Str. 14 a, Munich, 80333, Germany

    Britt Glatzeder

  2. Dept. Psychology, York University, Keele Street 4700, Toronto, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Vinod Goel

  3. Parmenides Foundation, Kardinal Faulhaber Str. 14 a, Munich, 80333, Germany

    Albrecht Müller

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Call, J. (2010). Understanding Apes to Understand Humans: The Case of Object-Object Relations. In: Glatzeder, B., Goel, V., Müller, A. (eds) Towards a Theory of Thinking. On Thinking. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03129-8_15

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