Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans readily learn language, mathematics, music, and a host of other sequentially structured conceptual systems beginning in early childhood. By contrast, even with extensive training, other species learn only the basics of many of these domains. One proposed explanation for this difference is that only humans are capable of using recursive operations to learn complex sequential concepts. Here, we build on recent work on recursive cognition to test the evolutionary and developmental origins of this ability. We tested adults, children, and rhesus macaques on a binary sequence learning task that can be learned using statistical learning recursively. Adults readily applied this recursive statistical learning strategy, but children did not, and macaques showed mixed evidence of doing so. We consider the possible reasons for the results of the children and macaques, as well as their possible implications for theories of cognition.