Digital Journal — Children are better learners compared to their primate relatives, a German study revealed. In various tests, human toddlers outmatched apes in social cognitive tests, proving that kids aren’t as savage as we once thought.
Humans are superior to simians in understanding non-verbal communications, imitating someone else’s solution to a problem and understanding another’s intention, said Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
She added: “Social cognition skills are critical for learning.”
In the first comprehensive test comparing social and physical skills of children and primates, Herrmann studied 230 subjects — 100 chimps, 30 orangutans and 100 children. The toddlers were two-and-a-half years old, and the apes ranged in age from three to 21.
When it came to tests relating to space, quantities and causality, the children and apes were on equal footing. But in social skills of communication, social learning and theory-of-mind skills, the children were right in about three-quarters of the trials, while the two ape species were correct only about one-third of the time.
One of the tests involved researchers showing subjects how to open a plastic tube containing an object. The children watched and copied the actions. The apes, however, ignored the researchers and tried to pry off the tube’s lid with their teeth.
No surprises there, since human brains are three times larger than the ape brain. But the study also highlighted the impact of cultural intelligence inherent in humans. Herrmann noted that humans differ from apes in physical and social cognitive tasks because they have more “general intelligence.”
The full study will be published in the Sept. 7 issue of Science.
