Do Some Taxa Have Better Domain-General Cognition than others? A Meta-Analysis of Nonhuman Primate Studies

By R. Deaner, C. V. van Schaik, Valen E. Johnson. 2006

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although much recent attention has focused on identifying domain-specific taxonomic differences in cognition, little effort has been directed towards investigating whether domain-general differences also exist. We therefore conducted a meta-analysis of published nonhuman primate cognition studies, testing the prediction that some taxa outperform others across a range of testing situations. First, within each of nine experimental paradigms with interspecific variation, we grouped studies by their procedures and the characteristics of their study subjects. Then, using Bayesian latent variable methods, we tested whether taxonomic differences consistently held within or across paradigms. No genus performed especially well within particular paradigms, but genera differed significantly in overall performance. In addition, there was evidence of variation at higher taxonomic levels; most notably, great apes significantly outperformed other lineages. These results cannot be readily explained by perceptual biases or any other contextual confound and instead suggest that primate taxa differ in some kind of domain-general ability.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Developmental Biology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ccc5c008b058c1cb48dbab89cc0151b592f0ccb

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Heritability and the evolution of cognitive traits (2015, background): “Similarly, there is ongoing debate whether cognitive traits evolve together (Deaner et al. 2006; Lefebvre and Sol 2008) as a cognitive complex, referred to as general cognitive ability or Spearman’s g (sensu Rushton and Ankney 2009; Reader et al.”
Complex relationship between multiple measures of cognitive ability and male mating success in satin bowerbirds, Ptilonorhynchus violaceus (2011, background): “Distinct from this line of research has been the finding across multiple taxonomic groups that species counts of feeding innovations are associated with other measures thought to indicate aspects of cognitive ability (Lefebvre et al. 2002; Reader & Laland 2002; Deaner et al. 2006).”
Mate choice for cognitive traits: a review of the evidence in nonhuman vertebrates (2011, background): “Although the concept of g has been developed at the intraspecific level, positive correlations between cognitive abilities across species, genera and parvorders have led several authors (Reader and Laland 2002; Lefebvre et al. 2004; Deaner et al. 2006; Lefebvre 2010) to posit concerted evolution of ”