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Development
Jonas Langer
Psychology Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA,
USA
jonas@socrates.berkeley.edu
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Jonas Langer
displacement is a mechanism whereby consecutively developing ancestral cognitive domains were transformed in phylogenesis into simultaneously developing descendant cognitive
domains in human ontogeny. Heterochrony produced the reorganization of comparatively nonaligned ancestral cognitive
development in monkeys into partly aligned descendant cognitive development in great apes and into fully aligned descendant cognitive development in human infancy.
This heterochronic reorganization of cognitive development opened up multiple cascading possibilities for full
information flow between logicomathematical (e.g., classificatory) and physical (e.g., causal) constructions in human infancy
(e.g., making it possible to form a logic of experimentation).
These cognitive domains are predominantly segregated from
each other in time and, therefore, in information flow in the
early development of monkeys. They are partially segregated
from each other in time and, therefore, in information flow in
the early development of great apes.
The possibilities opened up for further development vary
accordingly and, I would propose, reciprocally constrain the
direction of progressive cognitive ontogeny in primate phylogeny. As we have seen, logicomathematical and physical
cognitive development is already quite substantial in monkeys. However, their asynchronic early cognitive development
hampers much further progress with age. The partially synchronic and relatively advanced early cognitive development
of great apes multiplies the possibilities for substantial, if still
limited, further progress with age, of which two-category classifying is representative. Humans synchronic and still more
extensive early cognitive ontogeny opens up comparatively unlimited, permanent, and cascading possibilities for further intellectual development. On this evolutionary hypothesis about
the descent of cognitive development, human cognitive development is the source of the history of ideas that can be
transmitted between generations to construct our unique cultural heritage.
Heuristic Conclusion
Our explorations of the evolution of primate development point
to two research directions. The first is generating comprehensive comparative primate research on their attendant brain and
cognitive development from birth to maturity. The second is
generating formal analyses of phylogenetic changes in ontogenetic covariation between cognitive features, thereby modeling
the heterochronic evolution of primate cognitive development.
References
Antinucci F, ed (1989) Cognitive Structure and Development of Nonhuman
Primates. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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