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How animal minds can help reveal the human mind

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, pages 687–688 (2022)Cite this article

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The field of animal cognition does far more than simply extend cognition into zoology. Studying animal cognition helps researchers to comprehend the human mind.

Psychologists and cognitive scientists seek to understand human capacities such as abstraction, memory and cooperation. Consider abstraction — the ability to recognize concepts, relationships or properties that have meaning but are not physical. This ability has been considered uniquely human, and some researchers have proposed that language is necessary for abstraction. Tests of this proposal could take various forms. A neuropsychologist might find a human who lacked language and test their capacity for abstraction. A cognitive neuroscientist might look at whether and how regions of the brain that contribute to language also contribute to abstract thought. Although these approaches would give interesting data, they are fundamentally limited in answering whether abstraction requires language because they are restricted to a single species which might not display the full range of possibilities for realizing abstraction.

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  1. School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Andrew B. Barron

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  1. Andrew B. Barron
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Correspondence to Andrew B. Barron.

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Barron, A.B. How animal minds can help reveal the human mind. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 687–688 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00122-3

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