Tomas Persson

• PhD
• Lund University

Brain size variability in primates has been attributed to various domain-specific socio-ecological factors. A recently published large-scale study of short-term memory abilities in 41 primate species (ManyPrimates 2022 Anim. Behav. Cogn. 9, 428–516. (doi:10.26451/abc.09.04.06.2022)) did not find any correlations with 11 different proxies of externa...

Brain size variability in primates has been attributed to various domain-specific socio-ecological factors. A recently published large-scale study of short-term memory abilities in 41 primate species [1] did not find any correlations with 11 different proxies of external cognitive demands. Here we found that the interspecific variation in test perf...

Humans have an irresistible inclination to coordinate actions with others, leading to species-unique forms of cooperation. According to the highly influential Shared Intentionality Theory (SITh), human cooperation is made possible by shared intentionality (SI), typically defined as a suite of socio-cognitive and motivational traits for sharing psyc...

The idea to create pictorial narratives seems to have occurred long after humans learned to produce iconic images, that is, depictions based on visual similarity to external objects. In Scandinavia, e.g. in Gärde, Sweden or Stykket and Bøla, Norway, early Mesolithic images (e.g. rock carvings from before c.5000 BCE) often feature animals that are s...

There has recently been a growing interest in investigating rhythm cognition and behavior in nonhuman animals as a way of tracking the evolutionary origins of human musicality – i.e., the ability to perceive, enjoy and produce music. During the last two decades, there has been an explosion of theoretical proposals aimed at explaining why and how hu...

Researchers have long discussed whether Scandinavian rock art reflects narratives. Their interpretations have frequently been based on inspections of rock art panels combined with knowledge from ethnographic and historical sources. Here, the authors adopt a more focused narratological approach that takes the concept of (visual) narrativity into con...

There has recently been a growing interest to investigate rhythm cognition in nonhuman animals as a way of tracking the evolutionary origins of human musicality - i.e., the ability to perceive, enjoy and produce music. During the last two decades, there has been an explosion of theoretical proposals aimed at explaining why and how humans have evolv...

Although orangutans are closely related to humans, very little is known about their ontogenetic development. In particular, there is a lack of systematic research on the maternal behaviors that mediate skill development in early infancy. To address this topic, we conducted a longitudinal study in which a Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) mother-inf...

Affective forecasting–predicting the emotional outcome of never-before experienced situations–is pervasive in our lives. When facing novel situations, we can quickly integrate bits and pieces of prior experiences to envisage possible scenarios and their outcomes, and what these might feel like. Such affective glimpses of the future often steer the...

The present study looked at the extent to which 2-year-old children benefited from information conveyed by viewing a hiding event through an opening in a cardboard screen, seeing it as live video, as pre-recorded video, or by way of a mirror. Being encouraged to find the hidden object by selecting one out of two cups, the children successfully pick...

Scandinavian petroglyphs have given rise to vivid interpretations, often related to Old Norse religion and Indo‐European mythology. However, we still do not know if, how or to what extent these images are really telling stories. In this paper, we shall analyse the ways in which Scandinavian northern and southern traditions (in Alta, Northern Norway...

The experience of being imitated is theorised to be a driving force of infant social cognition, yet evidence on the emergence of imitation recognition and the effects of imitation in early infancy is disproportionately scarce. To address this lack of empirical evidence, in a within-subjects study we compared the responses of 6-month old infants whe...

This paper discusses rock art in southern Scandinavia as a multisensory format, where both sight and touch would have contributed to the comprehension of the images. From a structural semiotic point of view, we suggest that rock art can be construed as an organised set of features, such as visual and tactile elements, organised into heterogeneous u...

Ambiguous figures, as described in visual perceptual psychology, are single pictures that contain several possible, mutually exclusive, motifs. When looking at a rock-art panel, petroglyphs at a first glance can seem to be distributed randomly, but when physically moving around on the panel new patterns can start to emerge. We discovered that some...

The experience of being imitated is theorised to be a driving force of infant social cognition, yet evidence on the emergence of imitation recognition and the effects of imitation in early infancy is disproportionately scarce. To address this lack of empirical evidence, in a within-subjects study we compared the responses of 6-month old infants whe...

In Europe, Scandinavia holds the largest concentration of rock art (i.e. petroglyphs), created c. 5000–first century bc , many of them showing figurative and seemingly narrative representations. In this paper, we will discuss possible narratological approaches applied to these images. We might reasonably distinguish between three levels of pictoria...

Adult humans spontaneously associate visual features, such as size and direction of movement, with phonetic properties like vowel quality and auditory pitch. A number of recent studies have claimed that looking time in preverbal infants reveals the same associations, which would indicate that some cross-modal correspondences are the result of perce...

This study aims to shed new light on the petroglyphs found at the site of Aspeberget 12 at the World Heritage site of Tanum, Sweden, from a semiotic perspective. We demonstrate the semiotics of power inherent in the arrangement of the petroglyphs. We start by describing the site in an archaeological way, in order to give an overview of the empirica...

Recent research on human nonverbal vocalizations has led to considerable progress in our understanding of vocal communication of emotion. However, in contrast to studies of animal vocalizations, this research has focused mainly on the emotional interpretation of such signals. The repertoire of human nonverbal vocalizations as acoustic types, and th...

Imitation is a cornerstone of human development, serving both a cognitive function (e.g. in the acquisition and transmission of skills and knowledge) and a social-communicative function, whereby the imitation of familiar actions serves to maintain social interaction and promote prosociality. In nonhuman primates, this latter function is poorly unde...

Many questions in animal intelligence and cognition research are challenging. One challenge is to identify mechanisms underlying reasoning in experiments. Here, we provide a way to design such tests in non-human animals. We know from research in skill acquisition in humans that reasoning and thinking can take time because some problems are processe...

Affective forecasting is an ability that allows the prediction of the hedonic outcome of never-before experienced situations, by mentally recombining elements of prior experiences into possible scenarios, and pre-experiencing what these might feel like. It has been hypothesised that this ability is uniquely human. For example, given prior experienc...

This study introduces a corpus of 260 naturalistic human nonlinguistic vocalizations representing nine emotions: amusement, anger, disgust, effort, fear, joy, pain, pleasure, and sadness. The recognition accuracy in a rating task varied greatly per emotion, from <40% for joy and pain, to >70% for amusement, pleasure, fear, and sadness. In contrast,...

Contagious yawning has been reported for humans, dogs and several non-human primate species, and associated with empathy in humans and other primates. Still, the function, development and underlying mechanisms of contagious yawning remain unclear. Humans and dogs show a developmental increase in susceptibility to yawn contagion, with children showi...

The topic of cognitive foresight in non-human animals has received considerable attention in the last decade. The main questions concern whether the animals can prepare for upcoming situations which are, to various degrees, contextually or sensorially detached from the situation in which the preparations are made. Studies on great apes have focused...

Contagious yawning is a well-documented phenomenon in humans and has recently attracted much attention from developmental and comparative sciences. The function, development and underlying mechanisms of the phenomenon, however, remain largely unclear. Contagious yawning has been demonstrated in dogs and several non-human primate species, and theore...

Online Resource Photo to the left shows the integration enclosure (to the right in the photo) which is interconnected with the chimpanzee enclosures with an entry only the infant could fit through. The photo to the right shows how JF looks through the entry into the integration enclosure where the infant and the human caregiver were located during...

Rejections of infants among non-human primates occasionally occur in the wild as well as in captive settings. Controlled adoptions of orphans and introductions of individuals into new groups are therefore sometimes necessary in captivity. Consequently, behavioral research on integration procedures and on the acceptance of infants by adoptive mother...

We find problems with Vaesen's treatment of the primatological research, in particular his analysis of foresight, function representation, and social intelligence. We argue that his criticism of research on foresight in great apes is misguided. His claim that primates do not attach functions to particular objects is also problematic. Finally, his a...

For us human beings, interpreting pictures is as much an act of imagination as one of face-value recognition. Pictures are therefore a promising avenue for studying mental worlds. Can this be extended to the study of animal minds? True pictorial competence is here defined as a referential and differentiated apprehension of pictures, where reference...

Pictures and other iconic media are used extensively in psychological experiments on nonhuman primate perception, categorisation, etc. They are also used in everyday interaction with primates, and as pure entertainment. But in what ways do primates understand iconic artefacts? What implications do these different ways have for the conclusions we ca...

We find that the nature and origin of the proposed “dialogical cognitive representations” in the target article is not sufficiently clear. Our proposal is that (triadic) bodily mimesis and in particular mimetic schemas – prelinguistic representational, intersubjective structures, emerging through imitation but subsequently interiorized – can provid...