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The origins of causal cognition in early hominins

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Abstract

Studies of primate cognition have conclusively shown that humans and apes share a range of basic cognitive abilities. As a corollary, these same studies have also focussed attention on what makes humans unique, and on when and how specifically human cognitive skills evolved. There is widespread agreement that a major distinguishing feature of the human mind is its capacity for causal reasoning. This paper argues that causal cognition originated with the use made of indirect natural signs by early hominins forced to adapt to variable late Miocene and early Pliocene environments; that early hominins evolved an innate tendency to search for such signs and infer their causes; that causal inference required the existence of incipient working memory; and that causal relationships were stored through being integrated into spatial maps to create increasingly complex causal models of the world.

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Notes

  1. Perceptual images can be described as representations, but I reserve the term for their cognitive counterparts because they are not automatic responses bound, as perceptual images are, to external stimuli. Moreover cognitive representations are very often composite, constructed in and influenced by the organising structure of memory, which is not the case for direct experience of sensory imagery.

  2. Evolution of ‘enhanced working memory’ may well be what gave Homo sapiens the edge over the Neandertals by allowing more stored knowledge to be accessed and held in mind, so enabling complex problems to be considered in innovatory ways (Wynn and Coolidge 2004).

  3. Support for the significance of sociality for the evolution of intelligence comes also from studies of other social primates (Kamil 2004).

  4. Note that the structural differentiation of memory into semantic and episodic components was a later development dependent on the evolution of language.

  5. For which both fine muscular coordination (the effector subsystem) and a ‘spatial-praxic’ subsystem to permit visual-spatial mental manipulation would have been necessary (Welshon 2010).

  6. Empirical studies indicate that the brain/mind imposes a hierarchical/recursive structure even when processing descriptions of everyday events (Mesoudi and Whiten 2004).

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Acknowledgments

I should like to record my thanks to Kim Sterelny and an anonymous reviewer for their criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.

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  1. School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Martin Stuart-Fox

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Stuart-Fox, M. The origins of causal cognition in early hominins. Biol Philos 30, 247–266 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9462-y

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