ArticleScience advances2020
Recursive sequence generation in monkeys, children, U.S. adults, and native Amazonians.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Structure Beneath the Symbols: How Children Develop an Understanding of Place Value.Current directions in psychological science · 2026Article
- Article
- Children use algorithm induction to discover patterns in data.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Impact of Education and Music Training on the Development of Abstract Thinking in the First Years of Schooling.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Neural representation of action symbols in primate frontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Do Humans Use Push-Down Stacks When Learning or Producing Center-Embedded Sequences?Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Acquisition and Utilization of Recursive Rules in Motor Sequence Generation.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Third-order self-embedded vocal motifs in wild orangutans, and the selective evolution of recursion.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- A bounded hierarchy framework for the evolution of syntax.Biology & philosophy · 2025Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Recognizing structure in novel tunes: differences between human and rats.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Article
- Nonadjacent dependencies and sequential structure of chimpanzee action during a natural tool-use task.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Associative learning accounts for recursive-structure generation in crows.Learning & behavior · 2023Article
- Article
- Generative cultural learning in children and adults: the role of compositionality and generativity in cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recursive Pattern Processing in Human Adults.Cognitive science · 2023Article
- Origins of Hierarchical Logical Reasoning.Cognitive science · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The question of what computational capacities, if any, differ between humans and nonhuman animals has been at the core of foundational debates in cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and animal behavior. The capacity to form nested hierarchical representations is hypothesized to be essential to uniquely human thought, but its origins in evolution, development, and culture are controversial. We used a nonlinguistic sequence generation task to test whether subjects generalize sequential groupings of items to a center-embedded, recursive structure. Children (3 to 5 years old), U.S. adults, and adults from a Bolivian indigenous group spontaneously induced recursive structures from ambiguous training data. In contrast, monkeys did so only with additional exposure. We quantify these patterns using a Bayesian mixture model over logically possible strategies. Our results show that recursive hierarchical strategies are robust in human thought, both early in development and across cultures, but the capacity itself is not unique to humans.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.