Abstract:

Enquist et al. (2023) suggested that human cumulative cultural evolution was enabled by enhanced abilities to process and remember sequential information, leading to cultural and cognitive achievements unprecedented in other animals. This hypothesis mainly rests on results of sequence discrimination learning tasks, showing that unlike for humans, learning to discriminate between sequences is difficult for non-human animals, requiring them hundreds, often thousands of trials. It is unclear whether animals’ difficulty in these tasks reflect difficulties with remembering sequences per se or is mainly due to the arbitrary ordering of the sequence items, thus underestimating their sequencing abilities. To disentangle these effects, we investigate sequence discrimination learning with a physical task in which we contrast an “arbitrary” condition with one in which we use causal relations between stimuli to indicate which sequence yields a reward, aiming to facilitate encoding of sequential information. We present results from zoo-housed primates (23 squirrel and 24 capuchin monkeys, 13 chimpanzees), 77 human adults and 239 children (3-11 years) in an “AB vs BA, BB, AA” task, providing the first sequence discrimination study with chimpanzees and children, demonstrating that a lack of meaningful relations between sequence stimuli impedes learning in humans and potentially also great apes.

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