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Humans and great apes share a preference for animate agents, suggesting this bias evolved before language. This finding highlights a universal cognitive prior influencing decision-making and language processing.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Evolutionary Psychology
  • Primatology

Background:

  • Humans predict meaning in speech using prior assumptions and contextual evidence.
  • Attentional preference for agents, particularly animate ones, influences human sentence processing.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate the evolutionary origins of the preference for animate agents.
  • Determine if this preference is unique to humans or shared with other primates.

Main Methods:

  • Presented chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, human children, and adults with video clips of dyadic interactions.
  • Assessed participants' free choices between agent and patient roles in subsequent still images.

Main Results:

  • All participant groups showed a preference for animate agents.
  • This preference was somewhat reduced when patients were also animate.
  • The findings suggest the bias is not solely due to perceptual factors.

Conclusions:

  • A preference for animate agents predates the evolution of language.
  • This universal cognitive prior is observed in both humans and great apes.
  • The bias is not reducible to simple perceptual biases.