Cognition of Infants

"It is unclear whether nonhuman primates engage in protoconversations or neonatal mimicking in the same way as humans.... Whether very young human infants are social in ways unique to the species - or whether human social uniqueness awaits further developments at nine months of age or beyond - is thus an open question at this point." (60)

This issue posed by Tomasello fascinated me, causing me to think about what really is the cause of such cognitive abilities as human children have that other nonhuman primates lack. The fact that there is so much cognitive ability that cannot be easily explained away genetically is absolutely intriguing. But it also begs a question of what causes this sort of ability.

Is the social conditioning that human infants receive so radically different as to instill these new cognitive abilities? If as Tomasello suggests on page 60, chimpanzees can mimic the social behaviors of human infants when provided with an appropriate level of attention from a parent figure (in this case human parent figures), does this suggest that they are capable of similar cognitive processes if this really is rooted in the social behaviors that human children became versed in at such a young age?