The evolutionary roots of intuitive statistical reasoning. Studies with non-human primates and human infants and adults

直观的统计推理，即对统计问题（如总体和样本的关系）进行直观推断的能力，对许多形式的日常和科学认知都具有根本的重要性。虽然直觉统计最初被认为是在个体发育后期发展的，取决于正规教育，但最近的革命性婴儿研究表明，即使在语言前的婴儿中，这种直觉统计也具有令人印象深刻的能力。然而，从比较心理学的角度来看，迄今为止，人们对这种能力的进化历史和分布几乎一无所知。本项目将是第一个关于非人类动物直觉统计的项目（除了申请人的初步工作之外），特别是我们现存的近亲类人猿。在一系列的研究中，首先，将调查猿和人类婴儿和成人的直觉统计的性质，范围和限制。其次，该项目还将测试直观统计推理与其他类型的认知（直观物理，几何推理等）的功能整合。正如最近在人类婴儿中记录的那样，测试比较认知科学中的主要帐户的假设，即灵长类动物可能与人类共享特定的认知能力（例如直观的统计），但缺乏人类灵活和一般思维所特有的不同能力的跨领域功能整合。因此，该项目将揭示人类和其他灵长类动物在数字认知领域的认知共性和差异，可能对认知结构的比较和进化问题产生更广泛的有趣影响。

Intuitive statistical reasoning, the capacity to make intuitive inferences about statistical matters such as the relations of populations and samples, is of fundamental importance for many forms of everyday and scientific cognition. While intuitive statistics was originally deemed to develop late in ontogeny, depending on formal education, recent revolutionary infant research has shown impressive capacities for such intuitive statistics even in preverbal infants. From the point of view of comparative psychology, however, hardly anything is known so far about the evolutionary history and distribution of such capacities. The present project will be the first (apart from preliminary work by the applicants) on intuitive statistics in non-human animals, in particular our closest living relatives, the great apes. In a series of studies, first, the nature, scopes and limits of intuitive statistics in apes and human infants and adults will be investigated. Second, the project will also test for the functional integration of intuitively statistical reasoning with other kinds of cognition (intuitive physics, geometrical reasoning etc.) as it has recently been documented in human infants, testing the hypotheses of prominent accounts in comparative cognitive science that primates might share with humans specific cognitive faculties (e.g. for intuitive statistics) but lack the cross-domain functional integration of different faculties characteristic for human flexible and general thought. The project will thus shed new light on the cognitive commonalities and differences of humans and other primates in the area of numerical cognition, potentially with interesting implications for broader issues regarding comparative and evolutionary questions of cognitive architecture.