Héctor Marín Manrique

University of Zaragoza | UNIZAR · Department of Psychology and Sociology

A view continues to gain momentum that regards investigation of the cognition of great apes in captive settings as affording us a model for human cognitive evolution. Researchers from disciplines such as comparative psychology, anthropology, and even archaeology, seem eager to put their theories to the test by using great apes as their chosen exper...

A prerequisite for copying innovative behaviour faithfully is the capacity of observers’ brains, regarded as ‘hierarchically mechanistic minds’, to overcome cognitive ‘surprisal’ (see 2.), by maximising the evidence for their internal models, through active inference. Unlike modern humans, chimpanzees and other great apes show considerable limitati...

A prerequisite for copying innovative behaviour is the capacity of observers’ brains, regarded as hierarchically mechanistic minds, to overcome cognitive ‘surprisal’ (see 2.), by maximising the evidence for their internal models, via ‘active inference’. Unlike modern humans, chimpanzees and other great apes show considerable limitations in their ab...

The argument is developed that autism spectrum disorder can be interpreted economically in terms of a deficit in polymodal integration, which limits awareness by babies and infants of the time-contingency for generating their motor responses to information gleaned from witnessing the actions of care-givers. This gives rise to difficulties with imit...

Previous studies showed a bilingual advantage in metacognitive processing (tracking one's own cognitive performance) in linguistic tasks. However, bilinguals do not constitute a homogeneous population, and it was unclear which aspects of bilingualism affect metacognition. In this project, we tested the hypothesis that simultaneous acquisition and u...

Reasoning by analogy is a form of inductive reasoning that in humans has been linked to fluid intelligence. It is a powerful driver of creativity as it allows us to make inferences in unknown domains by drawing parallels to domains we are familiar with, thus offering safe ground for speculation. Given that some of the most ingenious minds in human...

A scientific paradigmatic account suffices to interpret behavioral evolution in early Homo. Cognitive surprises, favoring anomalous behavioral propensities to sporadic expression, can explain "snakes-and-ladders" appearances and disappearances of Paleolithic skills in the Early and Middle Pleistocene record. The account applies the principle of sta...

In Basque-Spanish bilinguals, statistical learning (SL) in the visual modality was more efficient on nonlinguistic than linguistic input; in the auditory modality, we found the reverse pattern of results. We hypothesize that SL was shaped for processing nonlinguistic environmental stimuli and only later, as the language faculty emerged, recycled fo...

Fifty-one 23-to-55-month-old-infants faced two apparatuses that required the use of a rigid (box apparatus) or flexible (hose apparatus) stick-like tool to retrieve a toy stuck inside. Before attempting the extraction, however, they had to pick the only one tool (of three) on display that had the appropriate rigidity/flexibility to be effective. To...

In this article we review publications relevant to addressing widely reported claims in both the academic and popular press that chimpanzees working memory (WM) is comparable to, if not exceeding, that of humans. WM is a complex multidimensional construct with strong parallels in humans to prefrontal cortex and cognitive development. These parallel...

When one individual helps another, it benefits the recipient and may also gain a reputation for being cooperative. This may induce others to favour the helper in subsequent interactions, so investing in being seen to help others may be adaptive. The best-known mechanism for this is indirect reciprocity (IR), in which the profit comes from an observ...

Humans care about having a positive reputation, which may prompt them to help in scenarios where the return benefits are not obvious. Various game-theoretical models support the hypothesis that concern for reputation may stabilize cooperation beyond kin, pairs or small groups. However, such models are not explicit about the underlying psychological...

Previous research has shown that behavioural mimicry fosters affiliation, and can be used to infer whether people belong to the same social unit. However, we still know very little about the generalizability of these findings and the individual factors involved. The present study intends to disentangle two important variables and assess their impor...

In a previous study, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and capuchin monkeys faced a task that required the use of a rigid stick-like tool to displace an out-of-reach food reward, which was located outside the cage either hanging on a string (e.g., apes) or on a table (e.g., capuchins). Three unfamiliar stick-like tools were placed on a wooden platf...

We investigated the possible restorative effects of exposure to awe-evoking scenes (natural/built) compared with mundane scenes (natural/built). A careful selection of visual stimuli was carried out, followed by an experiment with 250 participants. We included a mentally fatigued condition and a not mentally fatigued condition (i.e., control group)...

Outlines about ancient Paleolithic artifacts and early Homo (2-1 Ma) skeletons precede considerations about cognitive versatility and developmental limitations of evolving brains. The adaptive behavior included technical skilfulness, reflected by artifact diversity, and manual dexterity requiring backward “haptic” touch memory, needed for habitual...

Evidence for tool use and tool-making by great apes in the wild is contrasted against the earliest stoneartifacts and signs of their use before 2 million years ago by hominins who had attained a cognitive capacity both to envisage how by manipulating one object they could modify another in order to transform it into a tool, and to remember the manu...

The cognition of green jays (Cyanocorax yncas), a non Corvus corvid species, was investigated by using the string-pulling paradigm. Five adult green jays performed a vertical string-pulling task in which they had to retrieve a worm attached to the end of a vertical hanging string while sitting on their perch. In the first experiment, three of the s...

The ability to suppress and/or change behaviour on the basis of negative feedback, often conceptualized as cognitive flexibility, has rarely been investigated in nonhuman great apes across a broad age range. In this study, 25 chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, eight bonobos, Pan paniscus, seven orang-utans, Pongo abelii, and three gorillas, Gorilla gori...

Previous studies have shown that a few bird and primate species successfully use two or more tools sequentially to obtain a goal. Our study incorporated some novel features: we aimed to assess whether captive capuchins (Sapajus spp.; N = 10) are able to sequentially use tools differing in rigidity to obtain a reward. A 90° angled plexiglas tube fil...

Innovation has been defined as a solution to a novel problem or a novel solution to an old problem. The second part of this definition requires the inhibition of previously learnt solution strategies before a novel solution can be found. Therefore, inventing novel solutions for an old problem is considered to be particularly difficult. We investiga...

Wild capuchin monkeys select stone tools to crack open nuts on the basis of their weight and friability, two non-visual functional properties. Here, we investigated whether they would select new stick-like tools on the basis of their rigidity. In Experiment 1, subjects faced an out-of-reach reward and a choice of three unfamiliar tools differing in...

Great apes can use multiple tools to extract food embedded in substrates and can invent new ways to exploit those resources. We tested five bonobos, five chimpanzees, and six orangutans in a task in which they had to use (and modify) a tool as a straw to drink the juice located inside a container. Experiment 1 showed that four orangutans and one ch...

Wild chimpanzees select tools according to their rigidity. However, little is known about whether choices are solely based on familiarity with the materials or knowledge about tool properties. Furthermore, it is unclear whether tool manipulation is required prior to selection or whether observation alone can suffice. We investigated whether chimpan...

Considerable evidence indicates that brain ethanol metabolism mediated by catalase is involved in modulating some of the behavioral and physiological effects of this drug, which suggests that the first metabolite of ethanol, acetaldehyde, may have central actions. Previous results have shown that acetaldehyde administered into the lateral ventricle...

The antioxidant enzyme catalase by reacting with H(2)O(2), forms the compound known as compound I (catalase-H(2)O(2)). This compound is able to oxidise ethanol to acetaldehyde in the CNS. It has been demonstrated that 3-nitropropionic acid (3-NPA) induces the activity of the brain catalase-H(2)O(2) system. In this study, we tested the effect of 3-N...

The involvement of catalase in ethanol-induced locomotion has been clearly proven. However, studies addressing the role of this enzyme in the effects that ethanol exerts on memory are lacking. In the present study, the social recognition test (SRT) was used to evaluate ethanol effects on memory. In this test, the reduction in investigation time of...