ArticleiScience2024
A universal preference for animate agents in hominids.
Article in iScience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Broadening the Agent Preference Hypothesis Through Experiencers: Eye-Tracking and EEG Evidence of Proto-Agents and Proto-Patients.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The Agent Preference in Ontogeny: Predictability of Agent and Patient Roles in Child-Directed Utterances Across Languages.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- The perception of prosocial agents by chimpanzees and humans.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Fast mapping in hominids.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Decoding words during sentence production with ECoG reveals syntactic role encoding and structure-dependent temporal dynamics.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Spontaneous Encoding of Event Roles in Hominids.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- A comparative study of causal perception in Guinea baboons (Papio papio) and human adults.PloS one · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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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.