A universal preference for animate agents in hominids
Sarah Brocard,
Vanessa A.D. Wilson,
Chloé Berton,
Klaus Zuberbühler,
Balthasar Bickel
Affiliations
Sarah Brocard
Department of Comparative Cognition, Institute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland; Corresponding author
Vanessa A.D. Wilson
Department of Comparative Cognition, Institute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland; Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Chloé Berton
Department of Comparative Cognition, Institute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland
Klaus Zuberbühler
Department of Comparative Cognition, Institute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland; Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland (UK)
Balthasar Bickel
Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary: When conversing, humans instantaneously predict meaning from fragmentary and ambiguous mspeech, long before utterance completion. They do this by integrating priors (initial assumptions about the world) with contextual evidence to rapidly decide on the most likely meaning. One powerful prior is attentional preference for agents, which biases sentence processing but universally so only if agents are animate. Here, we investigate the evolutionary origins of this preference, by allowing chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, human children, and adults to freely choose between agents and patients in still images, following video clips depicting their dyadic interaction. All participants preferred animate (and occasionally inanimate) agents, although the effect was attenuated if patients were also animate. The findings suggest that a preference for animate agents evolved before language and is not reducible to simple perceptual biases. To conclude, both humans and great apes prefer animate agents in decision tasks, echoing a universal prior in human language processing.
