Transitions in cognitive evolution.

The evolutionary history of animal cognition appears to involve a few major changes that opened up new phylogenetic possibilities for cognition. Here, we review and contrast current transitional accounts of cognitive evolution. We discuss how an important feature of an evolutionary transition should be that it changes what is evolvable, so that the possible phenotypic spaces before and after a transition are different.

Direct Human-AI Comparison in the Animal-AI Environment.

Artificial Intelligence is making rapid and remarkable progress in the development of more sophisticated and powerful systems. However, the acknowledgement of several problems with modern machine learning approaches has prompted a shift in AI benchmarking away from task-oriented testing (such as Chess and Go) towards -oriented testing, in which AI systems are tested on their capacity to solve certain of novel problems. The Animal-AI Environment is one such benchmark which aims to apply the ability-oriented testing used in comparative psychology to AI systems.

The limits of machine intelligence: Despite progress in machine intelligence, artificial general intelligence is still a major challenge.

Despite recent breakthroughs in machine learning, current artificial systems lack key features of biological intelligence. Whether the current limitations can be overcome is an open question, but critical to answer, given the implications for society.

The goal of ape pointing.

Captive great apes regularly use pointing gestures in their interactions with humans. However, the precise function of this gesture is unknown. One possibility is that apes use pointing primarily to direct attention (as in "please look at that"); another is that they point mainly as an action request (such as "can you give that to me?").

Domains of generality.

We argue that general intelligence, as presented in the target article, generates multiple distinct and non-equivalent characterisations. Clarifying this central concept is necessary for assessing Burkart et al.'s proposal that the cultural intelligence hypothesis is the best explanation for the evolution of general intelligence.

The ontogenetic ritualization of bonobo gestures.

Great apes communicate with gestures in flexible ways. Based on several lines of evidence, Tomasello and colleagues have posited that many of these gestures are learned via ontogenetic ritualization-a process of mutual anticipation in which particular social behaviors come to function as intentional communicative signals. Recently, Byrne and colleagues have argued that all great ape gestures are basically innate.