Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis
The Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis proposes that humans “traded” some aspects of cognitive development by re-purposing areas of the brain that had evolved in the context of other uses. Specifically, it talks about the trading of short-term or working memory in favor of enhanced language skills. The theory was first brought forth by Japanese primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a former director of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University (KUPRI).
Matsuzawa suggests that at a certain point in evolution, because of limitations in brain capacity, the human brain may have acquired new function in parallel with losing others – such as acquiring language while losing visuospatial temporal storage ability.
Relevant research[edit]
Matsuzawa, whose research focuses on chimpanzee intelligence, suggests the Trade-off Hypothesis as a possible explanation as to why chimpanzees have better memory than humans for immediately capturing and retaining visual stimuli in his paper "Symbolic representation of number in chimpanzees"[1] The following rationalization is his attempt to explain the reasoning behind the hypothesis: "The common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may have had the same kind of memory skill. However, in the course of human evolution, we lost the skill while we acquired other language‐related skills: representation, chunking, hierarchical organization, syntactic rules, etc. Brain volume capacity was limited at a certain point in evolution, so we had to lose some function to get a new function."[2]
As a part of The Ai Project, some chimpanzees at Matsuzawa's lab at KUPRI were trained to play a game that involved memorizing a series of numerals that flash on the screen for a brief period of time, as well as their respective positions. The study found that the chimpanzees completed the task with a higher level of accuracy and speed than did the human subjects, suggesting that their working memory capabilities are more powerful.
While the chimpanzees outperformed human adults in memorizing briefly presented numbers that appeared on the screen,[1] the researchers found that chimpanzees were less proficient at a variety of other cognitive tasks including imitation, cross-modal matching, symmetry of symbols and referents, and one-to-one correspondence. Matsuzawa came up with the Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis to explain this difference in cognitive capabilities of human beings and chimpanzees, their closest living relatives.
Response and criticism[edit]
In his paper, Matsuzawa claims that his trade-off theory has support from a phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic perspective. In human beings, the youth often outperform adults on certain memory tasks. In the course of cognitive development, human children may acquire linguistic skills at the cost of possessing a chimpanzee-like photographic memory.
However, Matsuzawa has gotten the attention of some critics who have brought up research contradicting the ideas proposed by the Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis. First, there is not necessarily a need to have lost certain functions to gain new facilities, as the human brain is about three times larger than the brain of the chimpanzee. Moreover, the cerebral cortex of the human brain – which plays a key role in memory, attention, awareness and thought – contains twice as many cells in humans as the same region in chimpanzees.[3] Secondly, the recent evolution of chimpanzees and humans has been in completely different environments, with different survival needs. Therefore, the difference in working memory capabilities and other cognitive functions discussed by Matsuzawa might be adaptive rather than "trade-offs".
Finally, the strongest evidence against the hypothesis comes from studies conducted by researchers at American University, Washington that suggest 'training' to be the key behind the impressive short-term memory performance of the apes. These studies bring up the issue of how Ayumu had many sessions of practice on the memory task before terminal performances were measured while the human subjects had to perform the task with no prior experience or practice. These studies go on to show that "when two humans are given practice in the Inoue and Matsuzawa memory task, their accuracy levels match those of Ayumu",[4] which casts major doubts over the validity of Matsuzawa's hypothesis.
As such, the hypothesis remains largely discounted by the psychological community.
See also[edit]
- Ai (chimpanzee)
- The Ai Project
- Ayumu
- Animal consciousness
- Neuropsychological Tests
- Primate Intelligence
- Working memory
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 {Matsuzawa, T. (2009). Symbolic representation of number in chimpanzees. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 19(1), 92-98.}
- ↑ {Matsuzawa, Tetsuro. (2007). Comparative Cognitive Development. Developmental Science, 10(1), 97-103.}
- ↑ Mora-Bermúdez, Felipe; Badsha, Farhath; Kanton, Sabina; Camp, J Gray; Vernot, Benjamin; Köhler, Kathrin; Voigt, Birger; Okita, Keisuke; Maricic, Tomislav (2016-09-26). "Differences and similarities between human and chimpanzee neural progenitors during cerebral cortex development". eLife. 5. doi:10.7554/elife.18683. ISSN 2050-084X. PMC 5110243. PMID 27669147.
- ↑ {Silberberg, A., & Kearns, D. (2009). Memory for the order of briefly presented numerals in humans as a function of practice. Animal Cognition, 12(2), 405-407.}
External links[edit]
- Vsauce (5 December 2018). "The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis". Retrieved 5 April 2019.
- Matsuzawa, T. (2003). The Ai project: Historical and ecological contexts. Animal Cognition, 6(4), 199-211.
- Briggs, H. (2007, December 03). Science/Nature | Chimps beat humans in memory test. Retrieved April 5, 2019, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7124156.stm
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