Navigation as the evolutionary origin for recursive processing in human cognition

The aspects of our cognition that can be regarded as specific to humans are also expected to have evolved from precursors shared with other animals. This review aims to propose that the hippocampal mechanism for navigating the world could have served as the scaffolding for the evolution of our domain-general ability for processing recursive structures, a hallmark of human cognition. We show that navigation abilities and recursion-like behaviors correlate in humans but also in other species. We further show that the hippocampus (in connection with other brain structures) plays an important role in both navigation abilities and recursive-like processing in different species. We propose that in humans, an improved hippocampal navigation system, including more sophisticated intra- and inter-connections with other brain areas, was exapted into a domain-general recursive computation as part of our evolutionary trend towards a less aggressive phenotype (aka human self-domestication hypothesis).