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（如群体和样本的关系）做出直观推断的能力，对许多日常和科学认知形式都至关重要。虽然直觉统计最初被认为是在个体发育后期发展起来的，取决于正规教育，但最近的革命性婴儿研究表明，即使在学龄前婴儿中，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。目前的项目将是第一个（除了申请人的初步工作）对非人类动物的直观统计，特别是我们最亲近的亲戚，类人猿。在一系列的研究中，首先，将调查直观统计在类人猿和人类婴儿和成人中的性质、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认知（直观物理，几何推理等）的功能整合，因为它最近在人类婴儿中被记录。验证比较认知科学中著名的假设，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，该项目将为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提供新的线索，可能会对认知建筑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.