Comparative Cognitive Science of Intelligence

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This study aimed to clarify the evolution of inntelligence. The study team has concentrated on visual cognition in chimpanzees. The approach may be described as Comparative Cognitive Science (CCS).This new discipline aims to understand human cognition from an evolutionary perspective. The research method is characterized by the comparison of the performance of different species based on an unified objective scale. For that purpose, human performance and chimpanzee performance were compared using the same test apparatus and following the same test procedure. Our colleagues and us have studied the visual world of chimpanzees in comparison with that of hamans. The long-term project started in 1978 when the main subject named "Ai" was about one and a half year old. We have 10 chimpanzees in a group now at Primate Research Institute. The question was, how do chimpanzees see the world? We have studied color perception, form perception, visual acuity, complex pattern recognition, face recogni … More tion, and the concept of number in both humans and chimpanzees under the same test situation using a computer-controlled apparatus. In a recent study, two chimpanzees were trained to touch a video-monitor screen to draw a letter of the alphabet. Both subjects successfully drew letters on a screen when a sample letter with thin white lines appeared on a screen. One of them, Ai, can draw a parallel line with the same length when a sample line and a starting point were shown on the monitor.These skills are a step for the chimpanzees actually to construct visual symbols. In addition to these efforts, we also carried out lngitudinal observation of chimpanzee behavior in Arhnem colony. We also invited foreign researcher for discussing the research technique like visual search. We had a semi-closed symposium in the IEC meeting on the evolution of intelligence. Future research based on Comparative Cognitive Science will focus on the continuity and discontinuity of intelligence in humans and nonhman primates. Less