2023-09-11 10:33:07
MADRID, 11 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The ability to remember the order of information It is probably unique to human beings, essential for conversing, planning life or receiving education, according to a new study.
Even the closest relatives of humans, such as bonobos, do not learn order in the same way, according to the conclusions of the research, published in PLoS ONE.
“The study adds another piece of the puzzle to the question of how the mental abilities of humans and other animals differ, and why only humans speak languages, plan space travel, and have learned to exploit the Earth so efficiently. that we now represent a serious threat to many other forms of life,” says it’s a statement Johan Lind, associate professor of ethology and deputy director of the Center for Cultural Evolution at Stockholm University.
Previous research at Stockholm University has suggested that Only humans have the ability to recognize and remember so-called sequential information, and that this capacity is a fundamental element underlying unique human cultural capacities. But until now this memory sequence hypothesis had not been tested in humans’ closest relatives, the great apes. The New experiments show that bonobos, one of the great apes, struggle to learn the order of stimuli.
In the recently published book The Human Evolutionary Transition: From Animal Intelligence to Culture (Princeton University Press), ethologists Magnus Enquist and Johan Lind of Stockholm University, and Stefano Ghirlanda, a psychology researcher at Brooklyn College in New York, have launched a new theory of how humans became cultural beings. A central idea concerns the difference in how humans and other animals recognize and remember sequential information.
“We have previously analyzed a large number of studies suggesting that only humans faithfully recognize and remember sequential information. But, although we analyzed data from several mammals and birds, including monkeys, There has been a lack of information about our closest relatives, the other great apes.“says Johan Lind.
In a series of experiments, the memory abilities of bonobos and humans were tested by having them press computer screens to, among other things, learn to distinguish between short sequences, including pressing right if a yellow square appears before a square. blue, or press to the left of the blue square appears before the yellow square.
“The study shows that bonobos forget that they have seen a blue square within five to ten seconds after it has disappeared from the screen, and that they have great difficulty learning to distinguish the sequences blue-square-before-yellow-square from yellow- square-before-square-blue, even though they have been trained for thousands of trials“says Vera Vinken, research associate at Stockholm University.
In contrast, the study shows that humans learned to distinguish short sequences almost immediately. However, it remains to be shown exactly how our closest relatives can remember and use sequential information.
“We now know that our closest relatives do not share the same sequential mental abilities as humans. But even if the results indicate that their working memory functions in principle in the same way as in rats and pigeons, no one has yet proven it in practice“says Magnus Enquist, professor emeritus and one of the founders of the Center for Cultural Evolution.
The new results provide further support for the sequence memory hypothesis, that during human prehistory the ability to remember and process sequences evolved, a mechanism necessary for many uniquely human phenomena such as language, planning ability, and thinking. sequential.
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