Primate Ontogeny Cognition And Social Behaviour

This volume presents a comprehensive review of the current research in the field of primate thinking, learning and behavioural development. Recent theories of the ways in which primates perceive their world are integrated with the ways that they behave and communicate about each other and their environment. Many different species in both the wild and in captivity are discussed with coverage from the social development of neonates to the behaviour of adults. The common theme to the contributions is an attempt to understand how primates perceive, learn about and manipulate their social and physical environment.

Winner of the William James Book Award “Magisterial...Makes an impressive argument that most distinctly human traits are established early in childhood and that the general chronology in which these traits appear can at least—and at last—be identified.” —Wall Street Journal “Theoretically daring and experimentally ingenious, Becoming Human squarely tackles the abiding question of what makes us human.” —Susan Gelman, University of Michigan Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, it explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child’s life. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality.

Stressing direct connections between human and nonhuman society, this book about the social life of monkeys, apes and humans emphasizes the importance of social information and knowledge in the understanding of primate behavior and organization.

This volume presents a comprehensive review of the current research in the field of primate thinking, learning and behavioural development. Recent theories of the ways in which primates perceive their world are integrated with the ways that they behave and communicate about each other and their environment. Many different species in both the wild and in captivity are discussed with coverage from the social development of neonates to the behaviour of adults. The common theme to the contributions is an attempt to understand how primates perceive, learn about and manipulate their social and physical environment.

This book reviews all that is scientifically known about the cognitive skills of non-human primates and assesses the current state of our knowledge.

This book presents a series of integrated papers on the latest techniques and concepts for understanding the fossil record of primates; including humans. Papers review the dating of primate fossil finds from many areas of the world, as well as the status and importance of recent discoveries of fossils linking the monkeys and apes to humans. Further contributions compare the anatomy and growth of living primates to that of the ancestral animals in order to give an understanding of trends in evolution. A final section discusses the application of recently developed genetic techniques to interpret and explain the evolution of primates. By presenting the most recent research, this volume provides a valuable synthesis of the new developments in primate and human evolution.

This volume brings together leading experts in comparative and evolutionary psychology. Top scholars summarize the histories and possible futures of their disciplines, and the contribution of each to illuminating the evolutionary forces that give rise to unique abilities in distantly and closely related species.

In more ways than we may sometimes care to acknowledge, the human being is just another primate--it is certainly only very rarely that researchers into cognition, emotion, personality, and behavior in our species and in other primates come together to compare notes and share insights. This book, one of the few comprehensive attempts at integrating behavioral research into human and nonhuman primates, does precisely that--and in doing so, offers a clear, in-depth look at the mutually enlightening work being done in psychology and primatology. Relying on theories of behavior derived from psychology rather than ecology or biological anthropology, the authors, internationally known experts in primatology and psychology, focus primarily on social processes in areas including aggression, conflict resolution, sexuality, attachment, parenting, social development and affiliation, cognitive development, social cognition, personality, emotions, vocal and nonvocal communication, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology. They show nonhuman primates to be far more complex, cognitively and emotionally, than was once supposed, with provocative implications for our understanding of supposedly unique human characteristics. Arguing that both human and nonhuman primates are distinctive for their wide range of context-sensitive behaviors, their work makes a powerful case for the future integration of human and primate behavioral research.