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  • Perspective
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Uniquely human intelligence arose from expanded information capacity

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 3, pages 275–293 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

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, behavioural 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.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank H. Clatterbuck for substantive comments and conceptual feedback on this manuscript, and C. Kaicher for help with scholarship, editing and formatting the article. This work was supported by the National Institute of Health (NIH) (grant number R01HD107840) and National Science Foundation (NSF) (grant numbers DRL2201843 and DRL2026416).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Jessica F. Cantlon

  2. Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Jessica F. Cantlon

  3. Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Steven T. Piantadosi

  4. Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Steven T. Piantadosi

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Cantlon, J.F., Piantadosi, S.T. Uniquely human intelligence arose from expanded information capacity. Nat Rev Psychol 3, 275–293 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00283-3

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