Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins.

Marc D Hauser1, Daniel Weiss, Gary Marcus

  • 1Department of Psychology and Program in Neurosciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. hauser@wjh.harvard.edu

Cognition
|September 5, 2002
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Diagnostic Potential of Apparent Diffusion Coefficient-Based Lymph Node Classification in Breast Cancer Patients Undergoing [<sup>18</sup>F]FDG-PET/MRI.

Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland)·2026
Same author

Age, emotional burden and deep brain stimulation electrode location shape Parkinson's disease quality of life.

NPJ digital medicine·2026
Same author

Cognitive and Emotional Determinants of Subthalamic Oscillations During Freezing While Turning in Parkinson's Disease.

The European journal of neuroscience·2026
Same author

A sentence is worth a thousand pictures: can large language models understand hum4n L4ngu4ge and the W0rld behind W0rds?

Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences·2026
Same author

Blood pressure management in patients receiving rescue stenting after failed endovascular treatment in large vessel occlusion acute ischaemic stroke: a multicentre registry.

European stroke journal·2026
Same author

Peritruncal hematoma volume: is it a neglected prognostic marker in aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage?

Journal of neurosurgery·2026
Same journal

When criterion control in face matching induces correlation: Commentary on Baker et al. (2026).

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Corrigendum to "Productivity matters for the neural processing of novel words, but not existing ones" Cognition Volume 274 (2026) 106593.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Investigating the origins of partisanship: What motivates children to preferentially endorse their ingroups' claims?

Cognition·2026
Same journal

People make graded judgments about the inconceivable.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

The self as an image: Appearance and belief in visual representations of one's own face.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Corrigendum to 'Consonant, vowel, and tone cues in early wordform recognition: Evidence from Cantonese-learning infants' [Cognition 275 (2026) 106624].

Cognition·2026
See all related articles

Cotton-top tamarin monkeys, like human infants, can extract abstract algebraic rules. This suggests the capacity for rule generalization evolved for purposes beyond language acquisition.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Comparative Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology

Background:

  • Human infants demonstrate rapid generalization of abstract algebraic rules, a skill potentially crucial for language acquisition.
  • The evolutionary origin of this rule-generalization capacity is debated: is it unique to humans for language, or a shared trait evolved for other functions?

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether cotton-top tamarin monkeys possess the ability to extract abstract algebraic rules.
  • To determine if the capacity for abstract rule generalization is exclusive to humans or shared with other species.

Main Methods:

  • Subjects were habituated to sequences of consonant-vowel syllables following either an AAB or ABB pattern.
  • Following habituation, tamarins were tested with novel sequences, one matching the habituation pattern and one differing.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Behavioral responses (dishabituation) to novel stimuli were recorded to assess pattern recognition.

    • Main Results:

    • Cotton-top tamarin monkeys showed a greater tendency to dishabituate when presented with a sequence violating the learned abstract rule.
    • Tamarins' performance mirrored that of human infants in similar abstract rule-learning tasks.

    Conclusions:

    • The capacity to generalize abstract algebraic patterns, at the tested level, is not exclusive to humans and likely did not evolve solely for language acquisition.
    • While not unique to language, this cognitive mechanism may still be utilized by human infants during language development.