"Humaniqueness"

(That word makes me cringe. It sounds like a shampoo name.)

Anyway, Marc Hauser of Harvard has identified four ways that make human thinking different from all other animals. (This is fun in light of the recent Nova episode on how humans are different from the great apes.) These aspects of human uniqueness, he says, are the abilities to

• combine and recombine different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new understanding


• apply the same "rule" or solution to one problem to a different and new situation


• create and easily understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory input


• detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input

Or, to be more succinct about it, humans can do cross-domain cognitive mapping, and other animals apparently cannot. It reminds me of Fauconnier & Turner's conceptual blending.

The full news article in Harvard's Science Daily.