Steven PIANTADOSI (UC Berkeley Psychology, Computation and Language Lab) has given a talk. 

http://colala.berkeley.edu/

Short abstract:​​

The reason why human cognition differs qualitatively from other      species has been widely debated. Most theories of human      distinctiveness propose specific new representational capacities      or biases, often thought to arise through a small evolutionary      change. Here, we review these “silver bullet” theories and argue      that evidence supporting them is confounded by more general      information-processing differences. We instead argue that human      distinctiveness arises through a broad, domain-general ability to      process information and share it among systems like memory,      attention, and learning. Such a change explains regularities      across numerous subdomains of cognition, behavioral comparisons between species, phenomena in human development, and the      persistent role of capacity constraints in adult cognition. This      theory is also consistent with comparative evidence about neural evolution and integrates computational results showing how memory      fundamentally constrains the ability of any system to represent      hierarchies, patterns, and abstract generalizations.

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