Abstract
More Rope Tricks Reveal Why More Task Variants Will Never Lead to Strong Inferences About Higher-Order Causal Reasoning in Chimpanzees
Highlights
For roughly two thousand years, humans have known that other species make and use tools (Newmyer, 2005), a fact imperfectly mirrored in animal folk tales from around the world (Povinelli & Barker, 2019)
One of the earliest systematic efforts to collate data on animal tool use in both natural and captive settings was conducted by Darwin (1871), whose efforts were quickly followed by several experimental investigations of animal tool use and manufacture (e.g., Hobhouse, 1915; Klüver, 1933; Köhler, 1925)
Many reports of animal tool use in the wild contain analyses restricted to a functional level of description
Summary
For roughly two thousand years, humans have known (or at least strongly suspected) that other species make and use tools (Newmyer, 2005), a fact imperfectly mirrored in animal folk tales from around the world (Povinelli & Barker, 2019). An important historical shift emerged with Visalberghi's landmark investigations of tool use in captive capuchin monkeys (e.g., Visalberghi & Limongelli, 1994; Visalberghi & Trinca, 1989) These investigations were aimed at distinguishing the kinds of causal information animals rely upon when using tools. The RRH provides a representational-level account of the functional differences between human and animal cognition by distinguishing between the cognitive requirements for first-order, perceptually-based relational reasoning versus higher-order, structural, rolegoverned relational reasoning. First-order, perceptually-based, relational reasoning can be analytically distinguished from higher-order, structural, role-based, aspects of cognition that humans, at least, manifestly wield. Our central objective is to explore whether such an inference is warranted within the current experimental genre of comparative psychology
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