Abstract
The Darwinian view is that human cognition is continuous with non-human cognition. Comparative mental abilities differ quantitatively but not qualitatively. A predominant alternative hypothesis is that language qualitatively separates human beings and other primates. The ensemble hypothesis examined here suggests that language is but one of five human capacities that produce a qualitatively unique form of cognition because of their interactions with each other. Each one taken separately has a likely precursor in non-human cognition, but taken together, their effects on cognition are not additive but interactive. The human mental ensemble proposed here includes an advanced executive attention component of working memory, a theory of mind augmenting social cognition, language, the ability to interpret information using inner speech and causal inference, and an episodic memory capable of mental time travel. Only in the evolution of Homo sapiens did these five components come together to enable non-linear changes in cognition on multiple fronts, resulting in the emergent form of cognition we experientially know and scientifically study today. Empirical evidence from behavioral studies, lesion studies, and studies involving neuroatypical populations provide tentative support for the hypothesis.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, T. A., & Fortin, N. J. (2013). The evolution of episodic memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 110, 10379–10386.
Baddeley, A. D. (1996). Exploring the central executive. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A, 5–28.
Baddeley, A. D. (2012). Working memory: theories, models and controversies. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 1–29.
Baddeley, A. D., Gathercole, S., & Papagno, C. (1998). The phonological loop as a language learning device. Psychological Review, 105, 158–173.
Baldo, J. V., Dronkers, N. F., Wilkins, D., Ludy, C., Raskin, P., & Kim, J. (2005). Is problem solving dependent on language? Brain and Language, 92, 240–250.
Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bar-Yosef, O. (2002). The upper Paleolithic revolution. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 363–393.
Bellugi, U., Järvinen-Pasley, Doyle, T. F., Reilly, J., Reiss, A. L., & Korenberg, J. R. (2007). Affect, social behavior, and the brain in Williams syndrome. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 99–104.
Boesch, C. (1993). Aspects of transmission of tool-use in wild chimpanzees. In K. R. Gibson & T. Ingold (Eds.), Tools, language, and cognition in human evolution (pp. 171–183). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain’s default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 1–38.
Caspari, I., Parkinson, S. R., LaPointe, L. L., & Katz, R. C. (1998). Working memory and aphasia. Brain and Cognition, 37, 205–223.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2001). Executive functions of the frontal lobes and the evolutionary ascendancy of Homo sapiens. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 11, 255–260.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2005). Working memory, its executive functions, and the emergence of modern thinking. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 15, 5–26.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2007). The working memory account of Neandertal cognition—how phonological storage may be related to recursion and pragmatics in modern speech. Journal of Human Evolution, 52, 707–710.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2016). An introduction to cognitive archaeology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25, 386–392.
Corballis, M. C. (2012). The wandering mind: mental time travel, theory of mind, and language. Análise Social, 205, 870–893.
Cowan, N. (1988). Evolving conceptions of memory storage, selective attention, and their mutual constraints within the human information processing system. Psychological Bulletin, 104, 163–191.
Cragg, L., & Nation, K. (2010). Language and the development of cognitive control. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2, 631–642.
d’Errico, F., Henshilwood, C., Lawson, G., Vanhaeren, M., Tillier, A. M., Soressi, M., et al. (2003). Archaeological evidence for the emergence of language, symbolism, and music—an alternative multidisciplinary perspective. Journal of World Prehistory, 17, 1–70.
Darwin, C. (1905). (1871, 1st ed.). The descent of man and selection in relation to sex (2) New York: Collier.
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Emerson, M. J., & Miyake, A. (2003). The role of inner speech in task-switching: a dual-task investigation. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 148–168.
Emery, N. J., & Clayton, N. S. (2009). Comparative social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 87–113.
Engle, R. W., Tuholski, S. W., Laughlin, J. E., & Conway, A. R. A. (1999). Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: a latent variable approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 309–331.
Fagöt, J., & de Lillo, C. (2011). A comparative study of working memory: immediate serial spatial recall in baboons (Papio papio) and humans. Neuropsychologia, 49, 3870–3880.
Fouts, R. S., Fouts, D. H., & Schoenfeld, D. (1984). Sign language conversational interactions among chimpanzees. Sign Language Studies, 42, 1–12.
Gardner, R. A., Gardner, B. T., & Van Cantfort, T. E. (Eds.). (1989). Teaching sign language to chimpanzees. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000). Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: does the corpus callosum enable the human condition? Brain, 123, 1293–1326.
Geary, D. C. (2005). The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Goel, V., Gold, B., Kapur, S., & Houle, S. (1997). The seats of reason? An imaging study of deductive and inductive reasoning. NeuroReport, 8, 1305–1310.
Goodall, J. (1986). The chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gould, S. J. (2002). The structure of evolutionary theory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hare, B. (2007). From nonhuman to human mind: what changed and why? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 60–64.
Hasselhorn, M., Mähler, C., & Grube, D. (2005). Theory of mind, working memory, and verbal ability in preschool children: the proposal of a relay race model of the developmental dependencies. In W. Schneider, R. Schumann-Hengsteler, & B. Sodian (Eds.), Young children’s cognitive development: Interrelationships among executive functioning, working memory, verbal ability, and theory of mind (pp. 219–237). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569–1579.
Hauser, M. D., Yang, C., Berwick, R. C., Tattersall, I., Ryan, M. J., Watumull, J., Chomsky, N., & Lewontin, R. C. (2014). The mystery of language evolution. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 401, 1–12.
Hoffecker, J. F., & Hoffecker, I. T. (2017). Technological complexity and the global dispersion of modern humans. Evolutionary Anthropology, 26, 285–299.
Holland, L., & Low, J. (2010). Do children with autism use inner speech and visuospatial resources for the service of executive control? Evidence from suppression in dual tasks. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28, 369–391.
Isbell, L. A. (2009). The fruit, the tree, and the serpent: Why we see so well. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jones, W., Bellugi, U., Lai, Z., Chiles, M., Reilly, J., Lincoln, A., & Adolphs, R. (2000). Hypersociability in Williams syndrome. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(Supplement), 30–46.
Kellogg, R. T. (2013). The making of the mind: The neuroscience of human nature. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Kirkham, N. Z., Cruess, L., & Diamond, A. (2003). Helping children apply their knowledge to their behavior on a dimension-switching task. Developmental Science, 6, 449–476.
Klein, R. G., & Edgar, B. (2002). The dawn of human culture. New York: Nevraumont Publishing Company.
Kurczek, J., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Duff, M. (2013). Hippocampal contributions to language: evidence of referential processing deficits in amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142, 1346–1354.
Lee, C. S., & Therriault, D. J. (2013). The cognitive underpinnings of creative thought: a latent variable analysis exploring the roles of intelligence and working memory in three creative thinking processes. Intelligence, 41, 306–320.
Losh, M., Bellugi, U., Reilly, J., & Anderson, D. (2000). Narrative as a social engagement tool: the excessive use of evaluation in narratives from children with Williams syndrome. Narrative Inquiry, 10, 265–290.
MacKay, D. G., James, L. E., & Hadley, C. B. (2008). Amnesic H. M.’s performance on the language competence test: parallel deficits in memory and sentence production. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 30, 280–300.
MacKay, D. G., James, L. E., Hadley, C. B., & Fogler, K. A. (2011). Speech errors of amnesic H. M.: unlike everyday slips of the tongue. Cortex, 47, 377–408.
MacKay, D. G., Johnson, W. W., Fazel, V., & James, L. E. (2013). Compensating for language deficits in amnesia I: H.M.’s spared retrieval categories. Brain Sciences, 3, 262–293.
Martin, R. C. (1987). Articulatory and phonological deficits in short-term memory and their relation to syntactic processing. Brain and Language, 32, 159–191.
McBrearty, S., & Brooks, A. S. (2002). The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution, 39, 453–563.
Milner, B., Corkin, S., & Teuber, H. L. (1968). Further analysis of the hippocampal amnesic syndrome: a 14-year follow-up study of H. M. Neuropsychologia, 6, 215–234.
Miyake, A., & Friedman, N. P. (2012). The nature and organization of individual differences in executive functions: four general conclusions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 8–14.
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: a latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 49–100.
Miyake, A., Emerson, M. J., Padilla, F., & Ahn, J. C. (2004). Inner speech as a retrieval aid for task goals: the effects of cue type and articulatory suppression in the random task cuing paradigm. Acta Psychologica, 115, 123–142.
Moscovitch, M., Cabeza, R., Winocur, G., & Nadel, L. (2016). Episodic memory and beyond: the hippocampus and neocortex in transformation. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 105–134.
Nashida, T., & Hiraiwa, M. (1982). Natural history of a tool-using behavior by wild chimpanzees feeding on wood-boring ants. Journal of Human Evolution, 11, 73–99.
Newton, M. A., & Villiers, J. G. (2007). Thinking while talking: adults fail nonverbal false-belief reasoning. Psychological Science, 18, 574–579.
Owen, A. M., McMillan, K. M., Laird, A. R., & Bullmore, E. (2005). N-back working memory paradigm: a meta-analysis of normative functional neuroimaging studies. Human Brain Mapping, 25, 46–49.
Paivio, A. (1991). Dual coding theory: retrospect and current status. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 115, 123–142.
Pinker, S. (2010). The cognitive niche: coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. PNAS, 107, 8893–8999.
Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: what’s special about it? Cognition, 95, 201–236.
Read, D. W. (2008). Working memory: a cognitive limit to non-human primate recursive thinking prior to hominid evolution. Evolutionary Psychology, 6, 676–714.
Reverberi, C., Shallice, T., D’Agnostini, S., Skrap, M., & Bonatti, L. L. (2009). Cortical bases of deductive reasoning: inference, memory, and metadeduction. Neuropsychologia, 47, 1107–1116.
Roberts, W. A. (2002). Are animals stuck in time? Psychological Bulletin, 128, 473–489.
Rogalsky, C., Matchin, W., & Hickok, G. (2008). Broca’s area, sentence comprehension, and working memory: an fMRI study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2, Article 14, 1-13.
Roser, M. E., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2004). Automatic brains—interpretive minds. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 56–59.
Roser, M. E., Fugelsan, J. A., Dunbar, K. N., Corballis, P. M., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2005). Dissociating processes supporting causal perception and causal inference in the brain. Neuropsychology, 19, 591–602.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., & Rumbaugh, D. M. (1993). The emergence of language. In K. R. Gibson & T. Ingold (Eds.), Tools, language, and cognition in human evolution (pp. 86–108). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Springer, S. P., & Deutsch, G. (1998). Left brain right brain: Perspectives from cognitive neuroscience (5th ed.). New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Suddendorf, T., & Corballis, M. C. (2007). The evolution of foresight: what is mental time travel and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 299–313.
Terrace, H. S., & Metcalfe, J. (Eds.). (2005). The missing link in cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tomasello, M. & Herrmann, E. (2010). Ape and human cognition. What's the difference? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 3–8.
Trask, L., Tobias, P. V., Wynn, T., Davidson, I., Noble, W., & Mellars, P. (1998). The origins of speech. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 8, 69–94.
Tulving, E. (2002). Episodic memory: from mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 1–25.
Urbanski, M., Bréchemier, M. L., Garcin, B., Bendetowicz, D., de Schotten, M. T., et al. (2016). Reasoning by analogy requires the left frontal pole: lesion mapping and clinical implications. Brain, 139, 1783–1799.
Vallar, G., & Baddeley, A. D. (1984). Phonological short term store: phonological processing and sentence comprehension: a neuropsychological case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 1, 121–141.
Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.) Cambridge: MIT Press.
Wadley, L. (2013). Recognizing complex cognition through innovative technology in Stone Age and Paleolithic sites. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 23, 163–183.
Whitehouse, A. J., Mayberry, M. T., & Durkin, K. (2006). Inner speech impairments in autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47, 857–865.
Wolford, G., Miller, M. B., & Gazzaniga, M. (2000). The left hemisphere’s role in hypothesis formation. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(6), RC64 1–4.
Wynn, T., & Coolidge, F. L. (2011). The implications of the working memory model for the evolution of modern cognition. International Journal of Evolutionary Biology, https://doi.org/10.4061/2011/741357.
Zelazo, P. D., Frye, D., & Rapus, T. (1996). An age-related dissociation between knowing rules and using them. Cognitive Development, 11, 37–63.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Victoria Litvinova for her assistance in conducting our literature search. We also thank Thomas Wynn and another anonymous reviewer for their helpful critiques of an earlier version of this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kellogg, R.T., Evans, L. The Ensemble Hypothesis of Human Cognitive Evolution. Evolutionary Psychological Science 5, 1–12 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-018-0159-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-018-0159-3