Marc D Hauser

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Social communication draws on several cognitive functions such as perception, emotion recognition and attention. The association of audio‐visual information is essential to the processing of species‐specific communication signals. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to identify the subcortical areas involved in the...

For as long as human history has been recorded, and most likely well before, millions of children living in the city or countryside, in poor or wealthy countries, with or without formal education, and with the full diversity of racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds that human evolution has afforded, have suffered from toxic adversities includin...

Social communication draws on several cognitive functions such as perception, emotion recognition and attention. In a previous study, we demonstrated that macaques associate audio-visual information when processing their species-specific communicative signals. Specifically, cortical activation is inhibited when there is a mismatch between vocalisat...

Social communication draws on several cognitive functions such as perception, emotion recognition and attention. In a previous study, we demonstrated that macaques associate audiovisual information when processing their species-specific communicative signals. Specifically, cortical activation is inhibited when there is a mismatch between vocalisati...

Social interactions rely on the interpretation of semantic and emotional information, often from multiple sensory modalities. Nonhuman primates send and receive auditory and visual communicative signals. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the association of visual and auditory information based on their common social meaning are unknown. Usi...

Social interactions rely on the interpretation of semantic and emotional information, often from multiple sensory modalities. In primates, both audition and vision serve the interpretation of communicative signals. Autistic individuals present deficits in both social communication and audio-visual integration. At present, the neural mechanisms subs...

Social interactions rely on the ability to interpret semantic and emotional information, often from multiple sensory modalities. In human and nonhuman primates, both the auditory and visual modalities are used to generate and interpret communicative signals. In individuals with autism, not only are there deficits in social communication, but in the...

For educators to help children exposed to adverse life experiences, it is necessary to understand how adversity impacts different mechanisms of learning, emotion, and planning as these capacities underpin success in schools and beyond. The goal of this paper is to review essential findings on how early life adversity transforms the brain which, in...

Heart rate (HR) is extremely valuable in the study of complex behaviours and their physiological correlates in non-human primates. However, collecting this information is often challenging, involving either invasive implants or tedious behavioural training. In the present study, we implement a Eulerian video magnification (EVM) heart tracking metho...

Background Heart rate is extremely valuable in the study of complex behaviours and their physiological correlates in non-human primates. However, collecting this information is often challenging, involving either invasive implants or tedious behavioural training. New Method In the present study, we implement a Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM) he...

Children often show signs of dysregulation, impulsivity, and risk-taking—behaviors that interfere with learning and growth. Commonly implicated in such interfering behaviors are problems of self-control. Several decades of research in the mind and brain sciences inform understanding of self-control, both as a trait and state. This research has sign...

The mind and brain sciences have uncovered important details about the mechanisms underlying goal attainment, including strategies to overcome obstacles. A suite of self‐regulatory strategies have made relatively little contact with education, despite cost‐effective methods and striking results in both educational contexts as well as other areas th...

Burkart et al.'s proposal is based on three false premises: (1) theories of the mind are either domain-specific/modular (DSM) or domain-general (DG); (2) DSM systems are considered inflexible, built by nature; and (3) animal minds are deemed as purely DSM. Clearing up these conceptual confusions is a necessary first step in understanding how genera...

(in press) Journal of Neurolinguistics, Special Issue " Language evolution: on the origin of the lexical and syntactic structures " Many have argued that the expressive power of human thought comes from language. Language plays this role, so the argument goes, because its generative computations construct hierarchically structured, abstract represe...

Set representations are explicitly expressed in natural language. Forexample, many languages distinguish between sets and subsets (all vs.some), as well as between singular and plural sets (a cat vs. some cats).Three experiments explored the hypothesis that these representations arelanguage specific, and thus absent from the conceptual resources of...

This article explores the evolution of language, focusing on insightsderived from observations and experiments in animals, guided by currenttheoretical problems that were inspired by the generative theory ofgrammar, and carried forward in substantial ways to the present bypsycholinguists working on child language acquisition. We suggest that overth...

Fundamental questions in cognitive science concern the origins and natureof the units that compose visual experience. Here, we investigate thecapacity to individuate and store information about non-solid portions,asking in particular whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)quantify portions of a non-solid substance presented in discrete...

Andics et al (1) use fMRI data to claim that dogs perform lexical and prosodic computations, concluding that these capacities evolved in the absence of language. The evidence does not support these conclusions.

Gender, age, and culturally specific beliefs are often considered relevant to observed variation in social interactions. At present, however, the scientific literature is mixed with respect to the significance of these factors in guiding moral judgments. In this study, we explore the role of each of these factors in moral judgment by presenting the...

Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially...

Several theoretical proposals for the evolution of language have sparked a renewed search for comparative data on human and non-human animal computational capacities. However, conceptual confusions still hinder the field, leading to experimental evidence that fails to test for comparable human competences. Here we focus on two conceptual and method...

The importance of game theoretic models to evolutionary theory has been in formulating elegant equations that specify the strategies to be played and the conditions to be satisfied for particular traits to evolve. These models, in conjunction with experimental tests of their predictions, have successfully described and explained the costs and benef...

It is a truism that conceptual understanding of a hypothesis is required for its empirical investigation. However, the concept of recursion as articulated in the context of linguistic analysis has been perennially confused. Nowhere has this been more evident than in attempts to critique and extend Hauseretal's. (2002) articulation. These authors pu...

Dediu & Levinson (Dediu and Levinson 2013) link two extraordinary claims: first, humans and Neanderthals were one and the same species and second, “Speech and language ... are ancient, being present in a modern-like form over half a million years ago in the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, the result of evolution in the prior one...

Individuals often deliver rapid, automatic judgments of right and wrong, suggesting that there is an implicit system of knowledge that may guide our moral judgments. Some authors have argued that the principles guiding this system are universal, part of our human endowment. Tests of this hypothesis require rich cross-cultural evidence which is pres...

This chapter builds from the many excellent chapters in this volume to suggest that pathological altruism has its origins in two evolutionarily ancient and adaptive mechanisms: in-group favoritism and self-deception. These two mechanisms have coevolved and can, under the right circumstances, be subjected to Fisherian runaway selection, leading to p...

Bullying behavior is an immoral action because it humiliates and oppresses innocent victims. Presently unclear is whether bullies bully because of deficiencies in moral competence (knowledge of right and wrong), moral compassion (emotional awareness and conscience concerning moral transgressions), or some combination of these two processes; the sam...

Means-based harms are frequently seen as forbidden, even when they lead to a greater good. But, are there mitigating factors? Results from five experiments show that judgments about means-based harms are modulated by: 1) Pareto considerations (was the harmed person made worse off?), 2) the directness of physical contact, and 3) the source of the th...

Altruistic self-sacrifice is rare, supererogatory, and not to be expected of any rational agent; but, the possibility of giving up one's life for the common good has played an important role in moral theorizing. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson (200835. Thomson , J . 2008 . Turning the trolley . Philosophy and Public Affairs , 36 ( 4 ) : 359 – 37...

Studies of dogs report that individuals reliably respond to the goal-directed communicative actions (e.g., pointing) of human experimenters. All of these studies use some version of a multi-trial approach, thereby allowing for the possibility of rapid learning within an experimental session. The experiments reported here ask whether dogs can respon...

The present case report provides a description of the emergence of an innovative, highly beneficial for- aging behavior in a single rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Selectively choosing the island's cement dock and nearby surrounding rocky terrain, our focal subject (ID: 84 J) opens coconuts using two type...

In their letter, Harris and Chan (1) challenge our conclusion that serotonin modulates moral judgment and behavior (2). Unfortunately, their argument is based on a narrow definition of moral judgment, one that is out of touch with empirical research. Harris and Chan (1) seem to subscribe to a rationalist view of moral judgment that defines moral ju...

The Argument from Disagreement (AD) ( Mackie, 1977) depends upon empirical evidence for ‘fundamental’ moral disagreement (FMD) ( Doris and Stich, 2005; Doris and Plakias, 2008). Research on the Southern ‘culture of honour’ ( Nisbett and Cohen, 1996) has been presented as evidence for FMD between Northerners and Southerners within the US. We raise s...

All socially living animals are confronted with the challenge of competing over limited resources. When resources are movable a relatively open empirical question concerns how potential competitors recognize that another individual has a claim on a resource and when such claims should be respected. Here we address these dual features of competition...

When listening to speech from one's native language, words seem to be well separated from one another, like beads on a string. When listening to a foreign language, in contrast, words seem almost impossible to extract, as if there was only one bead on the same string. This contrast reveals that there are language-specific cues to segmentation. The...

Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotransmitter serotonin directly alters both moral judgment and behavior through increasing subjects' aversion to personally harming others. We enhanced serotonin in healthy volunteers with citalopram (a sel...

Rules, and exceptions to such rules, are ubiquitous in many domains, including language. Here we used simple artificial grammars to investigate the influence of 2 factors on the acquisition of rules and their exceptions, namely type frequency (the relative numbers of different exceptions to different regular items) and token frequency (the number o...

The present case report provides a description of the emergence of an innovative, highly beneficial foraging behavior in a single rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Selectively choosing the island's cement dock and nearby surrounding rocky terrain, our focal subject (ID: 84 J) opens coconuts using two types...

In the original study by Hauser et al. [[1][1]], we reported videotaped experiments on action perception with free-ranging rhesus macaques living on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. It has been discovered that the video records and field notes are incomplete for two of the conditions.

It is hard to imagine a class of neurons that has generated more excitement than mirror neurons, cells discovered by Rizzolatti and colleagues [1 • Rizzolatti G. • Craighero L. The mirror-neuron system.Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 2004; 27: 169-192 • Crossref • PubMed • Scopus (4802) • Google Scholar ] in macaque area F5 that fire both during action exec...

Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral ju...

All species in the genus Macaca produce a set of harmonically rich vocalizations known as “coos”. Extensive acoustic variation occurs within this call type, a large proportion of which is thought to be associated with different social contexts such as mother-infant separation and the discovery of food. Prior studies of these calls have not taken in...

Field playback experiments were conducted in the Kibale Forest, Uganda to determine whether three monkeys (redtail monkeys, blue monkeys, and red colobus monkeys) and one bird (great blue turaco) [1] respond with flight and/or increased vigilance to exemplars of calls given by potential predators (crowned eagle, chimpanzee) and [2] respond differen...

Developmental psychologists have long argued that the capacity to distinguish moral and conventional transgressions develops across cultures and emerges early in life. Children reliably treat moral transgressions as more wrong, more punishable, independent of structures of authority, and universally applicable. However, previous studies have not ye...

Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to...

Considerable debate has surrounded the question of the origins and evolution of religion. One proposal views religion as an adaptation for cooperation, whereas an alternative proposal views religion as a by-product of evolved, non-religious, cognitive functions. We critically evaluate each approach, explore the link between religion and morality in...

Moral judgments, whether delivered in ordinary experience or in the courtroom, depend on our ability to infer intentions. We forgive unintentional or accidental harms and condemn failed attempts to harm. Prior work demonstrates that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) deliver abnormal judgments in response to moral dil...

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions). Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic...

Human neonates prefer listening to speech compared to many nonspeech sounds, suggesting that humans are born with a bias for speech. However, neonates' preference may derive from properties of speech that are not unique but instead are shared with the vocalizations of other species. To test this, thirty neonates and sixteen 3-month-olds were presen...

Let me start out with an experience that I assume is relatively familiar. You have just landed in a foreign country, speak only the most minimalist version of the local language, and try to get by, generating telegraphic utterances about toilets, banks, and places to eat. Largely, you feel deeply misunderstood and frustrated, but occasionally enjoy...

The way language as a human faculty has evolved is a question that preoccupies researchers from a wide spread of disciplines. In this book, a team of writers has been brought together to examine the evolution of language from a variety of such standpoints, including language's genetic basis, the anthropological context of its appearance, its formal...

Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: (1) Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; (2) educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex informat...

Taking a biologist's perspective on language evolution, this chapter advocates the use of a comparative method for exploring the various other components that make up the human language ability. It argues that studying animals, in particular nonhuman primates, is the only way to determine which components of language may be unique to humans and whi...

Introduction When given a choice between receiving $100 in 30 days and $110 in 31 days, most people wait for the larger, more delayed reward. However, when the choice is between $100 today and $110 tomorrow, many people shift their preferences to the smaller, immediate reward despite the same difference of $10 and one day. Reward properties—such as...

A wide variety of organisms produce actions and signals in particular temporal sequences, including the motor actions recruited during tool-mediated foraging, the arrangement of notes in the songs of birds, whales and gibbons, and the patterning of words in human speech. To accurately reproduce such events, the elements that comprise such sequences...

Darwin never provided a satisfactory account of altruism, but posed the problem beautifully in light of the logic of natural selection. Hamilton and Williams delivered the necessary satisfaction by appealing to kinship, and Trivers showed that kinship was not necessary as long as the originally altruistic act was conditionally reciprocated. From th...

Humans speak, monkeys grunt, and ducks quack. How do we come to know which vocalizations animals produce? Here we explore this question by asking whether young infants expect humans, but not other animals, to produce speech, and further, whether infants have similarly restricted expectations about the sources of vocalizations produced by other spec...

Perceptual systems often force systematically biased interpretations upon sensory input. These interpretations are obligatory, inaccessible to conscious control, and prevent observers from perceiving alternative percepts. Here we report a similarly impenetrable phenomenon in the domain of language, where the syntactic system prevents listeners from...

Molecular Psychiatry publishes work aimed at elucidating biological mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders and their treatment

Legal scholars and philosophers have long debated the moral standing of the act-omission distinction, with some favoring the view that actions ought to be considered as morally different from omissions, while others disagree. Several empirical studies suggest that people judge actions that cause harm as worse than omissions that cause the same harm...

The first step in figuring out how the human mind arose is determining what distinguishes our mental processes from those of other creatures

Insights from evolutionary developmental biology and the mind sciences could change our understanding of the human capacity to think and the ways in which the human mind constrains cultural expressions.

Human language, and grammatical competence in particular, relies on a set of computational operations that, in its entirety, is not observed in other animals. Such uniqueness leaves open the possibility that components of our linguistic competence are shared with other animals, having evolved for non-linguistic functions. Here, we explore this prob...

Plot of prior density overlaid on posterior histogram of important model parameter. (0.57 MB TIF)

Matrix of probabilities that given task has a higher loading on the general factor than any other task. (0.04 MB DOC)

Plot of prior density overlaid on posterior histogram of important model parameter. (0.58 MB TIF)

Complete description of the cognitive tasks and more complete description of the statistical modeling. (0.07 MB DOC)

Rank data of animal performance on cognitive tasks. (0.00 MB DOC)

Descriptive statistics of task performance. (0.37 MB DOC)

The human capacity for music consists of certain core phenomena, including the tendency to entrain, or align movement, to an external auditory pulse [1-3]. This ability, fundamental both for music production and for coordinated dance, has been repeatedly highlighted as uniquely human [4-11]. However, it has recently been hypothesized that entrainme...

Though nonhuman animals lack anything like a set of grammatical structures in their natural vocalizations, studies now suggest that at least some animals can extract patterns from a structured input that appear abstract and rule-like. The authors continue this line of research by adding three new methodological contributions, specifically, tests of...

Individual differences in human cognitive abilities show consistently positive correlations across diverse domains, providing the basis for the trait of "general intelligence" (g). At present, little is known about the evolution of g, in part because most comparative studies focus on rodents or on differences across higher-level taxa. What is neede...

We synthesize the contrasting predictions of motor simulation and teleological theories of action comprehension and present evidence from a series of studies showing that monkeys and apes-like humans-extract the meaning of an event by (a) going beyond the surface appearance of actions, attributing goals and intentions to the agent; (b) using detail...

Recent work in the cognitive and neurobiological sciences indicates an important relationship between emotion and moral judgment. Based on this evidence, several researchers have argued that emotions are the source of our intuitive moral judgments. However, despite the richness of the correlational data between emotion and morality, we argue that t...

This book presents a state-of-the-art account of what we know and would like to know about language, mind, and brain. Chapters by leading researchers in linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience, comparative cognitive psychology, and evolutionary biology are framed by an introduction and conclusion by Noam Chomsky...

This book presents a state-of-the-art account of what we know and would like to know about language, mind, and brain. Chapters by leading researchers in linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience, comparative cognitive psychology, and evolutionary biology are framed by an introduction and conclusion by Noam Chomsky...

To maximize transmission in noisy environments, vocalizing animals have evolved capacities to avoid the masking effects of biotic and abiotic sound sources, such as changing the structure and timing of acoustic signals. Here we explore this problem from a new angle, asking whether animals can extract predictive acoustic cues from an intermittently...

Neurobiology and genetics are helping to generate insights about the evolution of language.

Six leading experts speak about the future of cognitive science.

Some argue that action comprehension is intimately connected with the observer's own motor capacities, whereas others argue that action comprehension depends on non-motor inferential mechanisms. We address this debate by reviewing comparative studies that license four conclusions: monkeys and apes extract the meaning of an action (i) by going beyon...

Many philosophers, including perhaps most famously G.E. Moore, have argued that morality is non-natural. Here, Paul Kurtz defends the view that it is, in fact, natural and can in fact be justified empirically.

What explains our moral intuitions? How to Cite This Article Link to This Abstract Blog This Article Copy and paste this link Highlight all http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S147717560800002X Citation is provided in standard text and BibTeX formats below. Highlight all BibTeX Format @article{THI:1892704,author = {Hauser,Marc D.},title = {WHEN YOUR...

Set representations are explicitly expressed in natural language. For example, many languages distinguish between sets and subsets (all vs. some), as well as between singular and plural sets (a cat vs. some cats). Three experiments explored the hypothesis that these representations are language specific, and thus absent from the conceptual resource...

There is a surprising degree of overlapping structure evident across the languages of the world. One factor leading to cross-linguistic similarities may be constraints on human learning abilities. Linguistic structures that are easier for infants to learn should predominate in human languages. If correct, then (a) human infants should more readily...

We here engagewith a long-lasting debate in the cognitive sciences concerning domainspecific mechanisms for acquiring and processing different systems of knowledge, focusing on the problem of morality. We ask whether there are mechanisms that uniquely evolved in humans, and uniquely for the domain of morality. We discuss behavioral and neurophysiol...

Human and non-human animals tend to avoid risky prospects. If such patterns of economic choice are adaptive, risk preferences should reflect the typical decision-making environments faced by organisms. However, this approach has not been widely used to examine the risk sensitivity in closely related species with different ecologies. Here, we experi...

Replying to: G. Kahane & N. Shackel Nature 452, doi:10.1038/nature06785 (2008)

A forced-choice social foraging method was used to explore how free-ranging rhesus monkeys make inferences about other individuals' goals and intentions. Subjects saw an experimenter perform an action towards one of two potential food sources, then were allowed to approach and choose one of those sources. Results showed that subjects selectively pi...