Comparative cognition between children and animals

How does the human mind develop over the individual’s lifetime? This is the central question of the study of cognitive development. How does the human mind work in relation to other animal minds? This is the central question of comparative psychology. Developmental comparative psychology integrates the two questions. It tries to understand how the human mind works by understanding how it came about over time, both ontogenetically (in each individual’s life history) and phylogenetically (over the course of evolution). To do so, it compares the cognitive capacities and processes of individuals across different developmental time points as well as across species. When comparing humans to other species, the main focus is usually on our closest living relatives: the other primates, in particular the nonhuman great apes, such as chimpanzees. But for many questions, other species are of great theoretical interest too. For example, when it comes to future planning or tool use, the species cognitively most similar to humans seem to be various bird species. Developmental comparative research informs us, on the one hand, about deep cognitive continuities and commonalities of human and other minds. Such commonalities can refer to homologous cognitive faculties, which share both function and evolutionary origin in the sense that they go back to the same ancestor. This is usually the case when we find shared cognitive capacities in human and nonhuman primates (such as, to take a noncognitive example, the eyes of different primate species). But commonalities can also reflect merely analog cognitive faculties, which share a function but not the same evolutionary history and the same ancestor (like the different kinds of eyes found in mammals, insects, and many other species that share a function but no common ancestor or history). Rather, these faculties have then probably emerged independently in separate evolutionary lines—in so-called convergent evolution. At the same time, developmental comparative psychology informs us about potential discontinuities between human and other animal minds. That adult human thinking is special and very different from other forms of animal cognition is obvious. But developmental comparative psychology can help us to understand how it is that our cognition turns out to be so radically different from that of nonhuman primates despite the fact that the biological and genetic differences are ultimately not large. Humans may differ radically in their cognition from other primates, and these differences may simply be a matter of brute biology. We have a certain capacity but other species do not. The story may be more complex, however. The hardwired and biological differences may initially not be that big. Rather, what is special and unique about human cognition may arise step by step over developmental time. And this may be a matter not so much of individual maturation and learning alone; instead, language and other social and cultural influences and tools may be crucial. This entry gives an introduction to the newly emerging field of developmental comparative psychology. It summarizes central empirical findings concerning commonalities and differences in humans and other species in the next two sections. The most important theoretical approaches in the field are discussed in the final section.