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A universal preference for animate agents in hominids

Brocard, Sarah; Wilson, Vanessa A D; Berton, Chloé; Zuberbühler, Klaus; Bickel, Balthasar (2024). A universal preference for animate agents in hominids. iScience, 27(6):109996.

Abstract

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.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Department of Comparative Language Science
Special Collections > NCCR Evolving Language
Special Collections > Centers of Competence > Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution
06 Faculty of Arts > Zurich Center for Linguistics
Dewey Decimal Classification:410 Linguistics
890 Other literatures
490 Other languages
Scopus Subject Areas:Health Sciences > Multidisciplinary
Language:English
Date:21 June 2024
Deposited On:25 Jun 2024 07:31
Last Modified:27 Feb 2025 02:44
Publisher:Cell Press (Elsevier)
ISSN:2589-0042
OA Status:Gold
Free access at:Publisher DOI. An embargo period may apply.
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.109996
Project Information:
  • Funder: NCCR Evolving Language
  • Grant ID:
  • Project Title:
  • Funder: Swiss National Science Foundation
  • Grant ID:
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  • Content: Published Version
  • Language: English
  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

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