“Uniquely Human Intelligence Arose from Expanded Information Capacity”, 2024-04-02 ():
Most theories of how human cognition is unique propose specific representational capacities or biases, often thought to arise through evolutionary change. In this Perspective, we argue that the evidence that supports these domain-specific theories is confounded by general information-processing differences.
We argue that human uniqueness arises through genetic quantitative increases in the global capacity to process information and share it among systems such as memory, attention and learning. This change explains regularities across numerous subdomains of cognition, behavioral comparisons between species and phenomena in child development.
This strict evolutionary continuity theory of human intelligence is consistent with comparative evidence about neural evolution and computational constraints of memory on the ability to represent rules, patterns and abstract generalizations.
We show how these differences in the degree of information processing capacity yield differences in kind for human cognition relative to other animals.
…Our theory yields 3 concrete predictions. First, it predicts some degree of success for all species even in domains that are argued to reflect unique human ability. To address this prediction, we review the comparative cognitive and child development literature, demonstrating a continuity of success across humans and non-human animals. Second, the theory predicts quantifiable differences between humans and other species on basic information processing measures. To this end, we review literature documenting predictable and systematic performance gaps between species across most cognitive tasks, including simple memory and learning paradigms. Last, our account predicts that small changes in information capacity could yield big, qualitative changes in behavior. We present mathematical analysis, machine learning models and cognitive models for which capacity constraints have profound consequences.