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

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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.