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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 156.3
EAN num: 9780674022393
ISBN number: 0674022394
Label: Harvard University Press
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: September 01, 2006
Publishing house: Harvard University Press
Sale Popularity Level: 321868
Studio: Harvard University Press
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What can the study of young monkeys and apes tell us about the minds of young humans? In this fascinating introduction to the study of primate minds, Juan Carlos Gomez identifies evolutionary resemblances--and differences--between human children and other primates. He argues that primate minds are best understood not as fixed collections of specialized cognitive capacities, but more dynamically, as a range of abilities that can surpass their original adaptations.
In a lively overview of a distinguished body of cognitive developmental research among nonhuman primates, Gomez looks at knowledge of the physical world, causal reasoning (including the chimpanzee-like errors that human children make), and the contentious subjects of ape language, theory of mind, and imitation. Attempts to teach language to chimpanzees, as well as studies of the quality of some primate vocal communication in the wild, make a powerful case that primates have a natural capacity for relatively sophisticated communication, and considerable power to learn when humans teach them.
Gomez concludes that for all cognitive psychology's interest in perception, information-processing, and reasoning, some essential functions of mental life are based on ideas that cannot be explicitly articulated. Nonhuman and human primates alike rely on implicit knowledge. Studying nonhuman primates helps us to understand this perplexing aspect of all primate minds.
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p. 20 "...one of the crucial tenets of the book. The behavioral flexibility associated with prolonged development is the result of flexibility in forming representations of the world. My argument is that a crucial characteristic of primates is their ability to construct representation of the physical and social world and mediate their behavior by means of those representations."
p. 23 "The debate about continuity of human and nonhuman primates cognition critically hinges on the notion of representation."
Studying perception - show surprise = "look for longer". This can be used to compare age development and species development. Example: adult rhesus monkey with 12 month old child on a certain task.
p. 45 "...human adults typically tend to perceive very first the global outline of a stimulus and only secondarily its local details." This is different for different primates and p. 47 "These results are potentially very important. They point to the possibility of different "cognitive styles" present in different primate species otherwise endowed with similar perceptual abilities."
P. 54 Monkeys prefer watching other monkeys to other things. (I find this interesting in relating it to dogs that prefer to bark at other dogs in the neighborhood then people or cars, but also bark at cats. Even puppies prefer to watch other dogs to watching other things.) Monkeys also learn from watching others solve problems. (p. 55) (Some skills cats and dogs can reach in two weeks compared to human infants around 8 or 9 months! (p. 68) (I wonder if it is because the dogs can still smell the object that is hidden.) I no sooner thought this then the subsequent paragraph refers to tests that avoided olfactory cues. (notes up to page 74.)
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