The evolutionary and developmental origins of human thought.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2018.Across cognitive domains, evolutionarily primitive mechanisms and cultural innovations combine to form complex human thought. However, the precise role of each of these factors as well as how and when they are combined are less well understood. Comparisons of how human children, adults from various backgrounds, and non-human animals think and understand the world can provide insight into how humans develop, how they evolved, and which aspects of human cognition are fundamental (common across all humans and shared with other species), uniquely human, or cultural specific. This thesis takes a comparative and developmental approach to test whether number logic (Chapter 2), recursive sequencing (Chapter 3), logical inference (Chapter 4), and metacognition (Chapter 5), are present in non-human primates as well as humans with different ages, education levels, and cultural backgrounds. The data provides evidence that the foundations for complex human logic and thought have early developing and evolutionarily primitive origins. Additionally, the results show that uniquely human factors like language, education, and human culture affect and build upon the basic foundations present in non-human primates and young children to form complex, uniquely human thought