Causal cognition emerges early in development and confers an important advantage for
survival. But does this mean that it is universal in humans? Our cross-disciplinary review …

Highlights•Cognitive research run in zoos is topically representative of the field
generally.•Most zoo research is with primates, but there is little work with other species.•Zoos …

A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to human
psychological agency. Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every …

Humans reason not only about actual events (what is), but also about possible events (what
could be). Many key operations of human cognition involve the representation of …

Elucidating the nature, use, and origin of knowledge in animals is one of the major
endeavors of comparative psychology. Two aspects of knowledge used in inferential …

Contact causality is one of the fundamental principles allowing us to make sense of our
physical environment. From an early age, humans perceive spatio-temporally contiguous …

Causal understanding is a defining characteristic of human cognition. Like many animals,
human children learn to control their bodily movements and act effectively in the …

Great apes are able to request objects from humans by pointing. It is unclear, however,
whether this is an associated response to a certain set of cues (eg the presence and …

When human infants are intentionally addressed by others, they tend to interpret the
information communicated as being relevant to them and worth acquiring. For humans, this …

Abstract Reasoning by exclusion allows us to form more complete representations of our
environments,“filling in” inaccessible information by ruling out known alternatives. In two …