Animal Cognition and the Origins of Human Thinking

Cognitive science and psychology are mostly concerned with human thinking. But humans are primates, and human cognition is a particular form of primate cognition. By comparing ourselves to other animals, we can reconstruct the evolutionary origins of our own minds. To this end, studying our closest living animal relatives, the nonhuman primates (e.g., macaques, orangutans, bonobos, chimpanzees), is particularly informative. In this talk, I introduce the field of comparative cognition and walk through several studies from the field, including my own work on how primates handle conflict over resources. I will discuss how psychological agency and cognitive flexibility evolved to deal with uncertainty in both social and physical environments.