Agent Preference in Chasing Interactions in Guinea Baboons (Papio papio): Uncovering the Roots of Subject–Object Order in Language

Languages tend to describe “who is doing what to whom” by placing subjects before objects. This may reflect a bias for agents in event cognition: Agents capture more attention than patients in human adults and infants. We investigated whether this agent preference is shared with nonhuman animals. We...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inPsychological science Vol. 36; no. 6; pp. 465 - 477
Main Authors Meewis, Floor, Fagot, Joël, Claidière, Nicolas, Dautriche, Isabelle
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.06.2025
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Association for Psychological Science
Subjects
Adults
Agents
Animal biology
Animals
Attention - physiology
Babies
Behavior, Animal - physiology
Change agents
Cognition
Cognitive science
Cognitive Sciences
Evolution
Female
Infants
Language
Languages
Life Sciences
Linguistics
Male
Neurons and Cognition
Papio papio - psychology
Primates
Vertebrate Zoology
language evolution
event cognition
linguistic universal
thematic roles
agent–patient
themaBc roles
agent-paBent themaBc roles event cogniBon language evoluBon linguisBc universal syntax
language evoluBon
linguisBc universal
agent-paBent
syntax
agent-patient
event cogniBon
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Languages tend to describe “who is doing what to whom” by placing subjects before objects. This may reflect a bias for agents in event cognition: Agents capture more attention than patients in human adults and infants. We investigated whether this agent preference is shared with nonhuman animals. We presented Guinea baboons (Papio papio; N = 13) with a change-detection paradigm on chasing animations. The baboons were trained to respond to a color change that was applied to either the chaser/agent or the chasee/patient. They were faster to detect a change to the chaser than to the chasee, which could not be explained by low-level features in our stimuli such as the chaser’s motion pattern or position. An agent preference may be an evolutionarily old mechanism that is shared between humans and other primates that could have become externalized in language as a tendency to place the subject first.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
content type line 23
ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
1467-9280
DOI:10.1177/09567976251344581