The ontogeny and phylogeny of human cooperative problemsolving and social preferences in cooperative contexts.

我提议的博士学位将探索人类在进化和发展背景下解决合作问题。我将使用一个以前从未在儿童身上使用过但在非人类动物认知研究人员中很受欢迎的实验范式，探索在儿童合作解决问题的发展中社会智力和问题解决能力之间的关系。我预计，孩子们在社交和解决问题的技能成熟之前，将无法解决这项任务。我还将探讨社会偏见在合作文本中的作用和发展。最近的一项假设表明，这种偏见和偏好应该在整个发育过程中发生变化，因为孩子将从高度依赖他们的成年照顾者，发展成有助于以后生存的同伴关系。我将通过一项针对2至6岁儿童的伴侣选择实验和一项使用不同观察者评估对声誉的担忧的实验来测试这一点。我希望年幼的孩子应该更愿意合作，更关心自己在成年人身边的声誉，但随着孩子的发展，他们对合作伙伴关系和声誉的担忧应该转变为更多地以同龄人为导向。最后，我将在进化的背景下探索人类合作解决问题的能力，在同一任务中测试两种具有截然不同的社会结构的乌鸦(一种以高智商著称的鸟类)。这将有助于阐明选择性压力对社会认知的作用在人类合作解决问题的进化过程中的作用。

My proposed PhD will explore human cooperative problem-solvingin both evolutionary and developmental contexts. Using anexperimental paradigm never before used with children, butpopular amongst researchers of non-human animal cognition, I willexplore the relationship between social intelligence and problemsolvingability in the development of cooperative problem-solvingin children. I expect that children will be unable to solve the taskuntil both social and problem-solving skills have matured. I will alsoexplore the role and development of social biases in cooperativecontexts. A recent hypothesis suggests that such biases andpreferences should change throughout development as childrenwill go from being highly dependent upon their adult carers, toneeding to develop peer relationships that will aid survival in laterlife. I will test this using a partner-choice experiment with childrenbetween the ages of 2 and 6 years old, and an experiment thatevaluates concerns for reputations using different observers. Iexpect that young children should prefer to cooperate and bemore concerned for their reputation around adults, but that, aschildren develop, their concerns for cooperative partnership andreputation should switch to being more peer-oriented. Finally, Iwill explore human cooperative problem-solving abilities in anevolutionary context, testing two species of corvid (a bird familyknown for their high levels of intelligence) with vastly differentsocial structures, in the same task. This will help to clarify the roleof selective pressures on social cognition in the evolution of humancooperative problem-solving.