Looking for the Real Difference Between Humans and Apes

Professor Kim Bard, a comparative developmental psychologist from the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Psychology, received a three-year £135,000 Leverhulme Trust grant, which will allow her to examine cross-group variations in great apes' and human abilities and development.

Bard says that all previous comparative research are flawed, as they tend to compare the abilities of a Western child raised in a close family with an ape who had been living in an orphanage.

Kim Bard has been studying great apes all her life, and she knows mostly everything about their cognitive development and what differentiates them from humans.

If her research has the expected results, it would be a major breakthrough for the research of the cognitive abilities of both humans and apes.

She plans to retrace all available studies that focused on 'joint attention', as it is the key indicator of brain development.

'Joint attention' is when a child engages with another about an object, for example; the communication can be made by pointing or shifting looks from an object to an individual and back again.

But in order for her research results to be correct, she must develop a new analysis method that will allow her to efficiently measure cognitive, social and emotional abilities of great apes and humans.

“The claim that joint attention is a uniquely human trait has been developed by studying Western human infants compared to great ape adults,” she said.

“Results of my own such ‘niche environment’ studies have shown apes can be more or less clever than Western human infants depending on their rearing conditions.

“What none of these or other studies have measured, though, is the comparative differences when you take out all the confounding variables of type of parenting and culture.

“That is what my new research aims to do – to reveal what really sets humans and great apes apart; I think I will find that great apes are capable of ‘joint attention’.”

Professor Bard believes that the theory of evolution must be revisited and she hopes that this grant will allow her “to contribute to a major paradigm shift in our understanding and future research into developmental processes underlying great ape cognitive outcomes.”