Apes, Monkeys, Children, and the Growth of Mind / / Juan Carlos Gómez.

• VerfasserIn: Gómez, Juan Carlos,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2009]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: The Developing Child
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

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 Gómez 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, Gómez 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. Gómez 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1 Hands, Faces, and Infancy: The Origins of Primate Minds -- 2 Perceiving a World of Objects -- 3 Practical Intelligence: Doing Things with Objects -- 4 Understanding Relations between Objects: Causality -- 5 The Logic of Object Relations -- 6 Objects in the World -- 7 Faces, Gestures, and Calls -- 8 Understanding Other Subjects -- 9 Social Learning, Imitation, and Culture -- 10 Consciousness and Language -- 11 Learning from Comparisons: The Evolution of Cognitive Developments -- References -- Index