We explored whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) share one important feature of human essentialist reasoning: the capacity to track category membership across radical featural transformations. Specifically, we examined whether monkeys--like children (Keil, 1989)--expect a transformed object to have the internal properties of its original…

It is currently being debated whether human newborns' preference for faces is due to an unlearned, domain-specific and configural representation of the appearance of a face, or to general mechanisms, such as an up-down bias (favouring top-heavy stimuli, which have more elements in their upper part). Here we show that 2-day-old domestic chicks,…

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

Gaze following is a fundamental component of triadic social interaction which includes events and an object shared with other individuals and is found in both human and nonhuman primates. Most previous work has focused only on the immediate reaction after following another's gaze. In contrast, this study investigated whether gaze following is…

The capacity to reason about the false beliefs of others is classically considered the benchmark for a fully fledged understanding of the mental lives of others. Although much is known about the developmental origins of our understanding of others' beliefs, we still know much less about the evolutionary origins of this capacity. Here, we examine…

We investigated whether great apes, like human infants, monkeys and dogs, are subject to a strong gravity bias when tested with the tubes task, and--in case of mastery--what the source of competence on the tubes task is. We presented 22 apes with three versions of the tubes task, in which an object is dropped down a tube connected to one of three…

Why are snakes such a common target of fear? One current view is that snake fear is one of several innate fears that emerge spontaneously. Another is that humans have an evolved predisposition to learn to fear snakes. In the first study reported here, 9- to 10-month-old infants showed no differential spontaneous reaction to films of snakes versus…

Animal studies demonstrate that maternal touch and contact regulate infant stress, and handling during periods of maternal deprivation attenuates the stress response. To measure the effects of touch on infant stress reactivity during simulated maternal deprivation, 53 dyads were tested in two paradigms: still-face (SF) and still-face with maternal…

How do capuchin monkeys learn to use stones to crack open nuts? Perception-action theory posits that individuals explore producing varying spatial and force relations among objects and surfaces, thereby learning about affordances of such relations and how to produce them. Such learning supports the discovery of tool use. We present longitudinal…

Object recognition research is typically conducted using 2D stimuli in lieu of 3D objects. This study investigated the amount and complexity of knowledge gained from 2D stimuli in adult chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes") and young children (aged 3 and 4 years) using a titrated series of cross-dimensional search tasks. Results indicate that 3-year-old…

Two experiments are reported using a visual familiarization categorization procedure. In both experiments, infants were familiarized with sets of stimuli previously shown to contain asymmetric feature distributions that support an asymmetry in young infants' categorization of cats and dogs (i.e. infants' cat category excludes dogs but their dog…

Understanding the intentional actions of others is a fundamental part of human social cognition and behavior. An important question is therefore whether other animal species, especially our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, also understand the intentional actions of others. Here we show that chimpanzees spontaneously (without training) behave…

Human cognition is founded, in part, on four systems for representing objects, actions, number, and space. It may be based, as well, on a fifth system for representing social partners. Each system has deep roots in human phylogeny and ontogeny, and it guides and shapes the mental lives of adults. Converging research on human infants, non-human…

The development of visual interaction between mother and infant has received much attention in developmental psychology, not only in humans, but also in non-human primates. Recently, comparative developmental approaches have investigated whether the mechanisms that underlie these behaviors are common in primates. In the present study, we focused…

Face recognition impairments are well documented in older children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD); however, the developmental course of the deficit is not clear. This study investigates the progressive specialization of face recognition skills in children with and without ASD. Experiment 1 examines human and monkey face recognition in…