Production of Supra-regular Spatial Sequences by Macaque Monkeys
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Understanding and producing embedded sequences in language, music, or mathematics, is a central characteristic of our species. These domains are hypothesized to involve a human-specific competence for supra-regular grammars, which can generate embedded sequences that go beyond the regular sequences engendered by finite-state automata. However, is this capacity truly unique to humans? Using a production task, we show that macaque monkeys can be trained to produce time-symmetrical embedded spatial sequences whose formal description requires supra-regular grammars or, equivalently, a push-down stack automaton. Monkeys spontaneously generalized the learned grammar to novel sequences, including longer ones, and could generate hierarchical sequences formed by an embedding of two levels of abstract rules. Compared to monkeys, however, preschool children learned the grammars much faster using a chunking strategy. While supra-regular grammars are accessible to nonhuman primates through extensive training, human uniqueness may lie in the speed and learning strategy with which they are acquired.
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Recursion is absent or very limited in other animals; they may acquire language-like symbolic abilities slowly and to a limited level.
“Such recursion is absent or very limited in other animals; although they may acquire some language-like symbolic abilities, they do so at a very slow pace and up to a limited level (Jiang et al., 2018; Yang, 2013).”
From Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis (2020) · cites this paper as Jiang et al., 2018
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Jiang, X., Long, T., Cao, W., Li, J., Dehaene, S., & Wang, L.
- Affiliations
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Université Paris-Sud (FR)
- Corresponding author
- Wang, Liping
- Venue
- Current Biology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2018-06
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 1851-1859.e4
- ISSN
- 0960-9822 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6606444
- OpenAlex
- W2805791143
- Cited by
- 89
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 2
- FWCI
- 12.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Current Biology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- CAS Pioneer Hundreds of Talents Program
- Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (QYZDY-SSW-SMC001)
- Shanghai Key Basic Research Project (16JC14202001)
- Collège de France
- Fondation Bettencourt-Schueller (ERC, NeuroSyntax)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Primate Behavior and Ecology
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Keywords
- sequence generation, macaque, nonhuman primate cognition, chunking strategies, human uniqueness, sequence learning, spatial sequence, preschool children
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Child, Child, Preschool, China, Female, Humans, Learning, Linguistics, Macaca mulatta, Male, Memory
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