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

直观统计推理的进化根源。

• 批准号: 254064924
• 负责人: Dr. Josep Call
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: School of Psychology and Neuroscience
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2013-12-31 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/254064924?language=en
• 关键词: evolutionary; roots; intuitive; statistical; reasoning.

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.

直观统计推理，即对统计问题(如人口和样本的关系)进行直观推断的能力，对许多形式的日常和科学认知具有基本重要性。虽然直觉统计学最初被认为是个体发育的后期发展，但取决于正规教育，最近的革命性婴儿研究已经显示出即使在说话前的婴儿中也有令人印象深刻的直觉统计能力。然而，从比较心理学的角度来看，到目前为止，关于这种能力的进化历史和分布几乎什么都不知道。除了申请者的初步工作外，本项目将是第一个关于非人类动物，特别是我们现存最接近的近亲--类人猿的直观统计数据的项目。在一系列研究中，首先，将调查类人猿和人类婴儿和成人的直觉统计的性质、范围和限制。其次，该项目还将测试直觉统计推理与其他类型的认知(直觉物理、几何推理等)的功能整合。正如最近在人类婴儿身上记录的那样，测试比较认知科学中的重要账户的假设，即灵长类动物可能与人类共享特定的认知能力(例如，直觉统计)，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，可能对认知架构的比较和进化问题的更广泛问题产生有趣的影响。