Emotional engagements predict and enhance social cognition in young chimpanzees.

ABSTRACT: Social cognition in infancy is evident in coordinated triadic engagements, that is, infants attending jointly with social partners and objects. Current evolutionary theories of primate social cognition tend to highlight species differences in cognition based on human-unique cooperative motives. We consider a developmental model in which engagement experiences produce differential outcomes. We conducted a 10-year-long study in which two groups of laboratory-raised chimpanzee infants were given quantifiably different engagement experiences. Joint attention, cooperativeness, affect, and different levels of cognition were measured in 5- to 12-month-old chimpanzees, and compared to outcomes derived from a normative human database. We found that joint attention skills significantly improved acro

SUBMITTER: Bard KA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4116479 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature