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Ape metaphysics: object individuation without language.

Natacha Mendes1, Hannes Rakoczy, Josep Call

  • 1Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103, Leipzig, Germany. mendes@eva.mpg.de

Cognition
|June 1, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Great apes can individuate objects by kind and properties, not just location. This ability is not unique to humans or dependent on language, challenging previous assumptions.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Comparative Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology

Background:

  • Infants individuate objects based on spatiotemporal cues and later by kind/properties.
  • The ability to individuate by kind/properties correlates with language, suggesting it might be uniquely human and language-dependent.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate non-linguistic object individuation in great apes.
  • To determine if object individuation by property/kind is unique to humans or requires language.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a refined manual search methodology with three great ape species.
  • Experiment 1: Tested spatiotemporal individuation by observing re-search behavior after finding one of two objects.
  • Experiment 2: Tested property/kind individuation by observing re-search behavior when an object's kind changed unexpectedly.

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Main Results:

  • Great apes demonstrated successful spatiotemporal object individuation.
  • Great apes also showed successful object individuation based on property/kind information.
  • Re-search behavior was significantly higher when the object found was unexpected (different kind) versus expected.

Conclusions:

  • Object individuation by property/kind is not uniquely human.
  • This ability in great apes suggests it is not essentially language-dependent.
  • Further research is needed to determine if this requires sortal concepts or simpler property tracking.