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Chimpanzees understand psychological states - The question is which ones and to what extent
Abstract
New data suggest that relatively drastic revisions are needed in our theoretical accounts of what other animal species understand about the psychological states of others. Specifically, chimpanzees seem to understand some things about what others do and do not see, or have and have not seen in the immediate past, as well as some things about others' goal-directed activities. This is especially so in competitive situations. They clearly do not have a human-like theory of mind, however, and so the challenge is to specify precisely how ape and human social cognition are similar and different.
... Some researchers thought so because they argued that only humans were considered capable of recognizing others as intentional agents. This capacity would have enabled them to cooperate, to communicate and to socially learn from their group mates in unique ways (Premack & Woodruff, 1978;Heyes, 1998;Gòmez, 1996;Tomasello et al. 2003;Povinelli & Vonk, 2003). However, in the last 55 years, ethologists and, especially, primatologists have discovered that great apes also understand others as intentional agents: they understand that others have goals, they understand that others perceive the world and they understand that overt behaviour is driven by unobservable mental processes (Tomasello et al., 2003 for work on chimpanzees; see also Bloom & Veres, 1999;Bloom & German, 2000; see also Tomasello & Call, 2008 for a review). ...
... This capacity would have enabled them to cooperate, to communicate and to socially learn from their group mates in unique ways (Premack & Woodruff, 1978;Heyes, 1998;Gòmez, 1996;Tomasello et al. 2003;Povinelli & Vonk, 2003). However, in the last 55 years, ethologists and, especially, primatologists have discovered that great apes also understand others as intentional agents: they understand that others have goals, they understand that others perceive the world and they understand that overt behaviour is driven by unobservable mental processes (Tomasello et al., 2003 for work on chimpanzees; see also Bloom & Veres, 1999;Bloom & German, 2000; see also Tomasello & Call, 2008 for a review). This capacity is broadly labelled 'perspective taking' (Hare et al. 2000, Tomasello et al. 2003Bräuer et al., 2007). ...
... However, in the last 55 years, ethologists and, especially, primatologists have discovered that great apes also understand others as intentional agents: they understand that others have goals, they understand that others perceive the world and they understand that overt behaviour is driven by unobservable mental processes (Tomasello et al., 2003 for work on chimpanzees; see also Bloom & Veres, 1999;Bloom & German, 2000; see also Tomasello & Call, 2008 for a review). This capacity is broadly labelled 'perspective taking' (Hare et al. 2000, Tomasello et al. 2003Bräuer et al., 2007). 4 The notion of shared intentionality first appeared in the philosophical literature in the late '80s (see Searle, 1990). ...
... Con esto en mente, se ha reflexionado si esto cuenta o no como tener capacidad de mentalización, en el sentido de atribuir creencias, intenciones, deseos, etc. En ese sentido, para defender la afirmación de que los chimpancés entienden el ver relacionado a la mentalización, los autores se refieren al hecho de que estos monitorean la mirada de sus congéneres y reaccionan de acuerdo con ella. Además, en investigaciones y experimentos controlados, cuando un experimentador humano está mirando fijamente un punto en específico que no contiene un objeto, los chimpancés primero seguirán la mirada del experimentador y, luego, después de no ver nada interesante que mirar, se volverán a mirar al experimentador (Call, 2001;Hare et al., 2000Hare et al., , 2001Hare et al., , 2003Tomasello et al., 2003). ...
... Si los chimpancés son capaces de entender que los demás realizan acciones intencionales, entonces deben ser capaces de entender que los demás tienen creencias. Es decir, si un agente A1 realiza la acción R con el objetivo/intención de X, entonces A1 espera que cuando A2 haga R también conduzca a X (Buttelmann et al., 2017;Call y Krupenye, 2019;Call y Tomasello, 2008;Kano et al., 2017;Krupenye et al., 2016;Lurz, 2011a;Tomasello et al., 2003). ...
... Los defensores de la lectura comportamental argumentan que los investigadores comparativos deberían explorar la posibilidad de que los chimpancés puedan razonar sobre el mundo de una manera sofisticada y coherente con la inferencia, sin ser necesariamente capaces de razonar sobre entidades inobservables como los estados mentales. Sin embargo, la hipótesis de la reinterpretación de Povinelli ha sido catalogada como conductismo derivado y lectura sofisticada de la conducta, y ampliamente criticada como infalsable (Andrews, 2005;Call y Tomasello, 2008;Metcalfe y Terrace, 2013;Popper, 1963;Tomasello et al., 2003). La postura conductista sobre la lectura de la conducta ha desempeñado un papel crucial en el debate sobre la mentalización, puesto que ha ayudado a reconocer la importancia de las inferencias basadas en categorías no mentales, además de los procesos de aprendizaje puramente asociativo. ...
La mentalización es una capacidad que puede definirse como la habilidad de atribuir estados mentales que intervienen entre el comportamiento observable y la acción futura de otros. Esta capacidad ha sido estudiada durante décadas, pero las investigaciones al respecto no han logrado consolidar si es exclusivamente humana. Una vez dicho esto, surge la pregunta: ¿los chimpancés son capaces de atribuir estados mentales que intervienen entre el comportamiento observable y la acción futura o solo son capaces de leer el comportamiento? La respuesta a esta pregunta no ha logrado ser determinada debido a que la hipótesis de la mentalización y la hipótesis de lectura de comportamiento poseen las mismas variables experimentales para justificarse, lo cual da forma al problema lógico del debate entre ambas hipótesis. Este artículo introduce la discusión entre las hipótesis de la mentalización y la hipótesis de la lectura comportamental para explicar el comportamiento de los chimpancés. Para lograrlo, se analizará primero lo que se ha dicho sobre la mentalización y la lectura de comportamiento en filosofía, luego se delimitarán ambas hipótesis y, finalmente, se explicarán los enfoques experimentales que han investigado la resolución del problema lógico.
... This behavior was akin to the process of visual perspective-taking, which is an ability to appreciate the visual experience of another person and that has been thoroughly studied in human ToM research (Apperly and Butterfill 2009;Apperly 2010). However, these results were immediately followed by discussion whether chimpanzees use low-level cues or ToM to solve tasks like this (Povinelli and Vonk 2003;Tomasello et al. 2003). Similarly, a well-known paper measured eye-movements (in the so-called anticipatory looking test) to claim that infants understand false beliefs (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005). ...
... ToM is a central facet of human intelligence (Apperly 2010;Tomasello 2010Tomasello , 2014Heyes and Frith 2014;Scott-Phillips 2014;Mercier and Sperber 2017). Inspired by the success of DL in understanding biological vision (Güçlü and van Gerven 2015;Seibert et al. 2016;Cichy et al. 2016;Kriegeskorte 2015;Yamins and DiCarlo 2016) and language processing (Schrimpf et al. 2021;Caucheteux and King 2022;Goldstein et al. 2022), over the last years a challenge has emerged to develop DL agents that can mimic aspects of ToM. ...
Theory of Mind (ToM) is an essential ability of humans to infer the mental states of others. Here we provide a coherent summary of the potential, current progress, and problems of deep learning (DL) approaches to ToM. We highlight that many current findings can be explained through shortcuts. These shortcuts arise because the tasks used to investigate ToM in deep learning systems have been too narrow. Thus, we encourage researchers to investigate ToM in complex open-ended environments. Furthermore, to inspire future DL systems we provide a concise overview of prior work done in humans. We further argue that when studying ToM with DL, the research’s main focus and contribution ought to be opening up the network’s representations. We recommend researchers to use tools from the field of interpretability of AI to study the relationship between different network components and aspects of ToM.
... A dominant perspective in cognitive science is that our ordinary predictions of others' behavior rely primarily on which beliefs we attribute (e.g., Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2009;Rakoczy, 2009;Tomasello, Call, & Hare, 2003). For example, we predict that a traveler will take his umbrella because we attribute to him the belief that it will rain and the desire to stay dry. ...
... It is this form of knowledge that can be evident in infant false-belief tasks (Carpendale & Lewis, 2015). This means of understanding others is also evident in research with chimpanzees, which shows that in competitive situations they can anticipate dominant co-specifics' actions such as moving toward food depending on whether they have seen it (e.g., Tomasello, Call, & Hare, 2003). ...
We summarize research and theory to show that, from early in human ontogeny, much information about other minds can be gleaned from reading the eyes. This analysis suggests that eyes serve as uniquely human windows into other minds, which critically extends the target article by drawing attention to what might be considered the neurodevelopmental origins of knowledge attribution in humans.
... For the authors that accepted Theory-of-Mind around 2003, its primitive mode was the ability to know what the other sees (/does not see)-or has (/has not) seen immediately before. This ability is possessed, not only by children much younger than four years but also (as M. Tomasello et al., 2003 showed) by chimpanzees. These results, soon extended to goats or ravens (see Bugnyar & Heinrich, 2005;Bugnyar et al., 2016) were explained by a very simple mechanism, namely, that the subject both tracks a line from the (visually or acoustically) perceived location of a conspecific to the relevant object and is aware of the (possible) opaque barriers obstructing that straight line. ...
Is there a qualitative difference between apes’ and humans ‘ability to estimate others’ mental states’, a.k.a. ‘Theory-of-Mind’? After opting for the idea that expectations are empty profiles that recognize a particular content when it arrives, I apply the same description to ‘vicarious expectations’—very probably present in apes. Thus, (empty) vicarious expectations and one’s (full) contents are distinguished without needing meta-representation. Then, I propose: First, vicarious expectations are enough to support apes’ Theory-of-Mind (including ‘spontaneous altruism’). Second, since vicarious expectations require a profile previously built in the subject that activates them, this subject cannot activate any vicarious expectation of mental states that are intrinsically impossible for him. Third, your mental states that think of me as a distal individual are intrinsically impossible states for me, and therefore, to estimate them, I must estimate your mental contents. This ability (the original nucleus of the human Theory-of-Mind) is essential in the human lifestyle. It is involved in unpleasant and pleasant self-conscious emotions, which respectively contribute to ‘social order’ and to cultural innovations. More basically, it makes possible human (prelinguistic or linguistic) communication, since it originally made possible the understanding of others’ mental states as states that are addressed to me, and that are therefore impossible for me.
Keywords: human lifestyle; language evolution; mentalese; self-conscious emotions; Theory-of-Mind; vicarious expectations
... The triadic phase of communication is called the engagement between subjects and objects, in a process of interaction (Tomasello, 2003). This stage is reached when the child begins to perceive the other as an intentional agent and starts to get involved in situations that demand the sharing of attention between the subjects. ...
This study presents the findings of research conducted with bilingual Pomeranian children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) living in Santa Maria de Jetibá, Espírito Santo—known as the most Pomeranian city in Brazil. A significant portion of the local population exhibits characteristics of simultaneous bilingualism, specifically in Portuguese and Pomeranian. This pioneering research explores ASD within traditional communities in Brazil, focusing on the unique features of communicative interactions among children whose language development occurs in a simultaneous bilingual context.
The study suggests that its findings can inform the development of inclusive public education policies for the bilingual Pomeranian population with ASD. Furthermore, it offers valuable insights that may benefit bilingual children with ASD from other traditional cultures or immigrant communities, enhancing their language development and inclusion.
... But critics have argued that denying nonhuman primates a theory of mind does indeed, in very practical ways, shift nonhuman primates from mental creatures to behavioural creatures and from more to less mentally complex forms of existence (cf. Povinelli, Vonk 2003;2004;Tomasello, Call, Hare 2003). To be sure, we can ask whether it is possible to neutralize hierarchies of value while retaining hierarchies of semiotic complexity and whether the evolution of mind from sense discrimination to self-awareness necessitates a hierarchy of complexity. ...
This essay is part of a book project, tentatively titled, Do We Need a Semiotics After Geontopower? The essay begins with an overview of the atmospheric conditions of an old debate about how to liberate theories of mind, communication and language from their humanist enclosure. It does so by highlighting a few scientific and public debates about what constitutes evidence of prehuman, and nonhuman animal and plant forms of mind and communication. The purpose of this brief foray into complicated debates is to conjure the sense-intuitions circulating around these arguments about the political and ethical stakes of describing a kind of existence as having this or that quality of language and mind. The essay then puts pressure on how these sense-intuitions about communication and mind are scaled—how a sense of the stakes of mind to the treatment of existence becomes a quest to model a general theory of a post-humanist mind. This takes me to the commonalities between a certain way of producing a posthumanist mind and the strategies of environmental protect within the movement for the rights of nature. Why do these approaches feel to some like they are the best way of verifying that prehuman, nonhuman animal and plant forms, and nonlife have semiotic capacities as one supports First Nation and Indigenous earthkin?The essay ends by summarizing the broader content and stakes of Do We Need a Semiotics After Geontopower?
... This long standing fascination with the cognitive parallels and divergences between humans and animals has spurred extensive research in comparative cognition [1]. Since the age of Charles Darwin the prevailing tendency in psychological science has been to highlight the similarities between human and nonhuman minds, suggesting any differences are a matter of degree rather than fundamental nature [2][3][4][5][6]. Among the many cognitive capacities examined, considerable evidence suggests that humans have a unique cognitive ability known as relational abstraction -the capacity to perform abstract reasoning and identify abstract relationships between physical objects or symbols [1, 7,8]. ...
Humans have a unique cognitive ability known as relational abstraction, which allows us to identify logical rules and patterns beyond basic perceptual characteristics. This ability represents a key difference between how humans and other animals learn and interact with the world. With current large language models rivaling human intelligence in many regards, we investigated whether relational abstraction was an emergent chat completion capacity in various models. We find that despite their impressive language processing skills, all tested language models failed the relational match-to-sample (RMTS) test, a benchmark for assessing relational abstraction. These results challenge the assumption that advanced language skills inherently confer the capacity for complex relational reasoning. The paper highlights the need for a broader evaluation of AI cognitive abilities, emphasizing that language proficiency alone may not be indicative of certain higher-order cognitive processes thought to be supported by language.
... Otro asunto es la capacidad de razonar y comprender la causalidad detrás de los fenómenos más simples. Algunos investigadores (Call, 2006;Tomasello, Call, y Hare, 2003), han obtenido algunas conclusiones: simios (y posiblemente otros animales) son en realidad bastante buenos en la comprensión y el razonamiento acerca de ciertas propiedades físicas del mundo, mientras que, al mismo tiempo, son bastante malos al asociar estímulos arbitrarios y respuestas. En otras palabras, si dos estímulos tienen una conexión causal (como cuando el alimento suena dentro de una taza al sacudirlo), los simios obtienen mejores resultados que si los estímulos tienen una relación arbitraria (como cuando un ruido sin relación indica alimento). ...
La atribución de pensamientos y mente a animales no humanos sigue generando debates y controversias entre los estudiosos del comportamiento animal. Sumado a ello, los mecanismos sociales -el juego como un comportamiento producto de la selección natural con valor de supervivencia- llaman poderosamente la atención de etólogos cognitivos, psicólogos y filósofos de la mente a la hora de establecer hasta dónde nos es permitido abrazar el antropomorfismo científico sin caer en analogías apresuradas del antropomorfismo ingenuo y desinformado. Este artículo aborda el problema de cómo estudiar algunas estrategias de supervivencia en grupos sociales, cómo justificar el antropomorfismo científico y hasta qué punto podemos hablar de procesos mentales en otros animales, apelando al concepto de mecanismos sociales, entre otros, en de Waal.
... Some current emergentists, such as, psychologist Michael Tomasello (TOMASELLO, 2003), emphasize the role of "theory of mind" and the ability to use symbols to change mental states as the traces of uniquely human pre-adaptations for acquisition, use, and the invention of language. In "Ultra-Social Animal," Tomasello (TOMASELLO, 2014) presented an evolutionary perspective on the characteristics of human sociability, such as, prosocial behavior, cooperation, conformity, and group mentality about compliance and enforcement of moral norms. ...
Background: The problem of the origin of language and its relationship with advanced communication systems in non-human animals.
Hypothesis: A correct reformulation of the language problem within the relevant debate on the topic may be important for its solution.
Methodology: This is basic research that based its results on comparing the arguments and experimental foundations of the generative, adaptationist, and emergentist models.
Objectives: Indicate how the debate between explanatory models unfolds; Compare the strength of the arguments, empirical corroboration, and predictive capacity of the models.
Results: The suggestion is that the adaptationist model has some explanatory advantages over rival models;
Conclusion: Finally, syntax must be an exclusive interface of language in humans, but it must be understood in a dimension of social evolution.
... This long standing fascination with the cognitive parallels and divergences between humans and animals has spurred extensive research in comparative cognition [1]. Since the age of Charles Darwin the prevailing tendency in psychological science has been to highlight the similarities between human and nonhuman minds, suggesting any differences are a matter of degree rather than fundamental nature [2][3][4][5][6]. Among the many cognitive capacities examined, considerable evidence suggests that humans have a unique cognitive ability known as relational abstraction -the capacity to perform abstract reasoning and identify abstract relationships between physical objects or symbols [1, 7,8]. ...
Humans have a unique cognitive ability known as relational abstraction, which allows us to identify logical rules and patterns beyond basic perceptual characteristics. This ability represents a key difference between how humans and other animals learn and interact with the world. With current large language models rivaling human intelligence in many regards, we investigated whether relational abstraction was an emergent chat completion capacity in various models. We find that despite their impressive language processing skills, all tested language models failed the relational match-to-sample (RMTS) test, a benchmark for assessing relational abstraction. These results challenge the assumption that advanced language skills inherently confer the capacity for complex relational reasoning. The paper highlights the need for a broader evaluation of AI cognitive abilities, emphasizing that language proficiency alone may not be indicative of certain higher-order cognitive processes thought to be supported by language.
... Empathie, Perspektivenübernahme, "Theorie des Geistes" (Theory of Mind, kurz: ToM) und die Mentalisierung sind -hier nur stark vereinfacht wiedergegebene -Konzepte zur Beschreibung der Fähigkeit, sich reflexiv in andere hineinversetzen zu können: zu verstehen oder zu vermuten, was ein Gegenüber denkt, welche Ansichten sie*er vertritt und worin der Antrieb für deren*dessen Handlungen liegt (Baron-Cohen, 1991;Heyes, 1998;Horowitz, 2011;Mitchell, 1997;Premack & Woodruff, 1978;Tomasello et al., 2003). Eine entwickelte ToM, die es einem Individuum ermöglicht, die Auffassungen anderer als korrekt oder falsch zu beurteilen, entwickelt sich bei H.-sapiens-Kindern im vierten bis fünften Lebensjahr. ...
Getting the Stone Rolling – Reflections on the Early Phylogeny of Man: The categorization of living beings into humans on the one hand and animals on the other has always played an important role throughout human history. For the present and recent past posed by philosophy and in particular by human-animal studies, the question “human or animal?” ultimately leads back to the beginning of human phylogeny. Using a selected find, the “Makapansgat pebble”, the present text casts an archaeological spotlight on the process of becoming human in the taxonomic environment of the genera Australopithecus and Homo. It examines the implications that this early manuport might have for assessing the cognitive abilities of these early hominins. While the archaeological evidence of the earliest simple stone tools is not sufficient to clearly separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, the Makapansgat pebble points to the cognitive competence of pre-human australopithecines to assign
value to non-functional objects. This find could therefore play an
important role in our knowledge of the process of hominization.
... We consequently gear our research efforts explicitly to detecting these abilities or, more commonly, their precursors, in monkeys and apes, either as a check on our own uniqueness and/or as a means of identifying how our own skills in these domains have been derived from evolutionarily simpler mechanisms (e.g. Dunbar 1996;Bergman et al. 2003;Povinelli & Vonk 2003;Tomasello et al. 2003;Zuberbuhler 2003;Cheney & Seyfarth 2005). ...
Why are humans so clever? The ‘Social intelligence’ hypothesis explores the idea that this cleverness has evolved through the increasing complexity of social groups. Our ability to understand and control nature is a by-product of our ability to understand the mental states of others and to use this knowledge to co-operate or deceive. These abilities have not emerged out of the blue. They can be found in many social animals that co-operate and compete with one another, birds as well as mammals. This book brings together contributions from an impressive list of authorities in the field, appropriately concluding with a chapter by Nick Humphrey (one of the pioneers in this field). This volume examines social intelligence in many different animal species and explores its development, evolution and the brain systems upon which it depends. Better understanding and further development of social intelligence is critical for the future of the human race and the world that we inhabit. Our problems will not be solved by mere cleverness, but by increased social co-operation.
... The present results refute this. Relational information has often figured as a fault line between researchers who view nonhuman species as capable of highlevel abilities, such as causal reasoning (Beckers, Miller, De Houwer, & Urushihara, 2006;Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006;Call, 2004), theory of mind (Tomasello, Call, & Hare, 2003), imitation (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005) or mental time travel (Clayton & Dickinson, 2009;Martin-Ordas, Berntsen, & Call, 2013), on the one hand, and those who view seeming demonstrations of such abilities as the product of simpler associative processes (Dwyer, Starns, & Honey, 2009;Heyes, 1998Heyes, , 2001Penn & Povinelli, 2007). In this context, the present results emphasise the need to distinguish carefully between relations embedded within object and/or event representations and true higher-order relational reasoning (Penn et al., 2008). ...
How we judge the similarity between objects in the world is connected ultimately to how we represent those objects. It has been argued extensively that object representations in humans are 'structured' in nature, meaning that both individual features and the relations between them can influence similarity. In contrast, popular models within comparative psychology assume that nonhuman species appreciate only surface-level, featural similarities. By applying psychological models of structural and featural similarity (from conjunctive feature models to Tversky's Contrast Model) to visual similarity judgements from adult humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, we demonstrate a cross-species sensitivity to complex structural information, particularly for stimuli that combine colour and shape. These results shed new light on the representational complexity of nonhuman apes, and the fundamental limits of featural coding in explaining object representation and similarity, which emerge strikingly across both human and nonhuman species.
... Records came from gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans as well as chimpanzees, so this seems to be an aptitude general in great apes. These data were for many years controversial, since experimental tests failed to reveal any ability to understand false belief in nonhuman great apes Hare, Call, & Tomasello, 2001;Kaminski, Call, & Tomasello, 2008;Tomasello & Call, 1997;Tomasello, Call, & Hare, 2003), but recently false-belief understanding has been demonstrated in great apes (Krupenye et al., 2016). These experimenters used a method devised to explore knowledge in preverbal children, anticipatory looking, to find out whether chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans could understand the consequences of another individual's false belief. ...
Where did our intelligence come from? That is, what evolutionary drivers caused such specialization in cognition among humans? Only by adopting a comparative approach, considering the brains and cognitive skills of other animal species, can we discover how, when, and even perhaps why human intellectual skills evolved. Here we apply a process of evolutionary reconstruction to ancestors we share with other species, from the earliest primates at 74 Ma (million years ago) to the relatively recent ancestor shared with chimpanzees. Doing so highlights the importance of both social and ecological (nutritional) pressures in evolving intellect. Complex sociality was supported by increased perception, learning, and memory skills, long before the development of any ability to understand other beings as causal agents with independent minds. The latter, we argue, was driven by a need to feed more efficiently in ancestors we share with all living great apes.
... Le premier sert la thèse d'une différence de nature (par ex. Penn & Povinelli, 2007) quand le second peut être convoqué pour illustrer une différence de degré (Tomasello et al., 2003) entre cognition humaine et cognition animale. Ces deux syllogismes ont une conséquence fâcheuse sur l'appréhension de « la » cognition animale, dès lors qu'elle est réduite à une substance ou une capacité qu'il s'agit de mettre à jour : ils reconduisent d'irréductibles débats sur la possession, par l'une ou l'autre espèce animale, de formes de raisonnement, qu'on appellera tantôt théorie de l'esprit (Premack & Woodruff, 1978), tantôt capacités à forger des représentations et des inférences (Penn & Povinelli, 2007 ;Proust, 1997) ou à attribuer des états mentaux à autrui (Whiten, 1996 ;Hare et al., 2001). ...
... I would now like to point out that the following middle ground should be explored: action understanding could be a minimal form of mindreading. A minimal form of mindreading occurs when minimal forms of mental statesi.e., mental states less cognitively demanding than propositional attitudes-are ascribed (see, e.g., Tomasello et al. 2003;Nanay 2013;Whiten 2013; Butterfi ll and Apperly 2013). ...
How do we understand other individuals’ actions? Answers to this question cluster around two extremes: either by ascribing to the observed individual mental states such as intentions, or without ascribing any mental states. Thus, action understanding is either full-blown mindreading, or not mindreading. An intermediate option is lacking, but would be desirable for interpreting some experimental findings. I provide this intermediate option: actions may be understood by ascribing to the observed individual proto-intentions. Unlike intentions, proto-intentions are subject to context-bound normative constraints, therefore being more widely available across development. Action understanding, when it consists in proto-intention ascription, can be a minimal form of mindreading.
... Infant observation has provided evidence for the presence early in infancy of this level of intentionality and, by virtue of that, of primary forms of intersubjective sharing. This second level does not require the capacity to explicitly represent believes as such and can be observed in many species, including animals' deceitful and playful behaviors (Tomasello et al., 2003;Jamieson and Bekoff, 1996). The third level of intentionality (which is instead most typical of human beings) is characterized by a reflective form of intentional attributions, in which an individual is able not only to have a belief about another individual's belief but also to see whether the other's belief corresponds or not to actual reality (Dennett, 1991). ...
The notion of intersubjectivity has achieved a primary status in contemporary psychoanalytic debate, stimulating new theoretical proposals as well as controversies. This paper presents an overview of the main contributions on inter-subjectivity in the field of neurosciences. In humans as well as—probably—in other species, the ability for emotional resonance is guaranteed early in development. Based on this capacity, a primary sense of connectedness is established that can be defined inter-subjective in that it entails sharing affective states and intentions with caregivers. We propose to define such a form of inter-subjectivity as contingent , since the infant’s early abilities for resonance do not imply the more generalized capacity to permanently conceive of the relationship outside the realm of current interactions and the infant-caregiver’s mutual correspondence of internal states. This form of connection, hence, results in a self-referential, bodily, and affectively codified, context- and time dependent, like-me experience of interactions. The gradual maturation of brain structures and processes as well as interactive experiences allow proper intersubjectivity exchanges, grounded on new intentional and representational capacities, to evolve. In this more mature form of intersubjectivity, the individual is allowed to conceive of her own psychic space both as distinct and as possibly connected with the other’s contents and experience, even in the absence of current behavioral indicators of such correspondence. This multi-layered model of intersubjectivity, which is embraced by current neuroscience research, seems to allow for new interpretations of psychoanalytic models of human relatedness based upon classic clinical observations.
... First, great ape (orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo) intelligence indicates that they achieve the developmental stage of first-order symbolic behavior across cognitive domains, entertain symbolic and perceptual representations concurrently, and are capable of limited hierarchization with combinatorial mechanisms (Russon, 2004: 92-93). Chimpanzees have a capacity for a cognitive theory of mind somewhere between that of monkeys and humans, variously called first-order intentional states, behavioral abstractions, or partial theory of mind (Bräuer, Call, & Tomasello, 2005;Call & Tomasello, 2008;Herrmann, Call, Hernández-Lloreda, Hare, & Tomasello, 2007;Povinelli, Bering, & Giambrone, 2000;Tomasello, Call & Hare, 2003) or full theory of mind (Boesch & Boesch-Achermann, 2000: 242-252). They can distinguish with respect to intentionality notions such as 'unable' versus 'unwilling' (Call, Hare, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2004). ...
Note. This is an updated and expanded version of Harrod (2021). This version3 adds a section on the Olduvai Gorge Oldowan DK site stone circle; updates with new findings on the role of different tree species in the chimpanzee ritual (Kalan, et al., 2019); adds still images and links for several Kühl, et al. (2016) movies of chimpanzees performing the ritual; revises the concept of 'deep ethics' by adding aspects homologous to human art, music and other expressive art therapies; further explores the ritual's implications for the evolution of art and music in hominin evolution; and adds hyperlinks for reference pages.
Abstract.
What might constitute early evidence for the evolution of ethics? To answer this, it would be useful to know whether chimpanzees or an early species of Homo are associated with any primatological or archaeological evidence for what might be categorized as ethics or ethical-moral behavior.
The report of chimpanzee stone accumulation behavior at four sites in West Africa (Kühl, et al., 2016) is a strong candidate for such evidence. The authors hypothesized the behavior qualified as a form of ritualized behavioral display. They suggested several explanatory hypotheses, but found them inadequate and the behavior puzzling and enigmatic. I develop a hypothesis to explain and interpret the behavioral pattern based on positing its behavioral contexts and re-analyzing its relation to the everyday aggression display and other communicative behaviors. The ritual is explained as an ethological ritualization that down-regulates aggression toward the alpha or indirectly toward a scapegoat. The ritual appears to be a performance that enacts non-violent resistance to being a victim of high-ranking male abuse, and performs this resistance with a ritualization that may be termed 'deep ethics', involving aspects homologous to human expressive art-making, music-making, and dance/movement behaviors.
I further identify a possible hominid homologue to the chimpanzee stone accumulation ritual, namely the circle of stone heaps at the Olduvai DK site, with Oldowan tools and fossil Homo habilis, ~1.8 million years ago. This suggests such behaviors descend from the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, ca. 8-13 million years ago. This has implications for hypothesizing stages in the evolution of ethics, morality and art in humans and other species.
... More recently, many researchers in animal psychology have come to use 'theory of mind' as a 'generic label … covering a wide range of processes of social cognition' (Tomasello et al., 2003b, p.239; see also Tomasello, Call, & Hare, Tomasello et al., 2003a). On this construal, different animals have different theory of mind abilitiesfor example, Tomasello, Call, and Hare claim that chimpanzees can understand seeing, but not believing. ...
In recent philosophy of science there has been much discussion of both pluralism, which embraces scientific terms with multiple meanings, and eliminativism, which rejects such terms. Some recent work focuses on the conditions that legitimize pluralism over eliminativism – the conditions under which such terms are acceptable. Often, this is understood as a matter of encouraging effective communication – the danger of these terms is thought to be equivocation, while the advantage is thought to be the fulfilment of ‘bridging roles’ that facilitate communication between different scientists and specialisms. These theories are geared towards regulating communication between scientists qua scientists. However, this overlooks an important class of harmful equivocation that involves miscommunication between scientists and nonscientists, such as the public or policymakers. To make my case, I use the example of theory of mind, also known as ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentalizing’, and broadly defined as the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. I begin by showing that ‘theory of mind’ has multiple meanings, before showing that this has resulted in harmful equivocations of a sort and in a way not accounted for by previous theories of pluralism and eliminativism.
... Our ability to make attributions about the mental states (desires, beliefs, intentions) of others based on complex behavioural cues has also been studied in the context of research on 'theory of mind' or 'mentalizing'. This line of research was inspired by primatology (e.g., Premack and Woodruff 1978;Tomasello et al. 1993Tomasello et al. , 2003Povinelli and Bering 2002;Povinelli and Vonk 2003), developmental psychology (Astington 2001;Leslie 1987;Wimmer and Perner 1983;Wellman 2001), as well as by neuropsychological research on autism (Baron-Cohen 1995;. In particular, it has been hypothesized that autistic children lack a theory of mind. ...
... After a period where little evidence of nonhuman animal mindreading accrued, compelling evidence began to emerge that nonhuman animals could in some sense be mindreaders (Premack & Wooduff 1978;Call & Tomasello 2008;Tomasello, Call, & Hare 2003a;2003b). However, several authors, most notably Povinelli and Vonk (2003;2004) and Penn and Povinelli (2007) argued that the evidence was not compelling because it did not rule out relevant alternative hypotheses (see Heyes 1998;Lurz 2011;. ...
... Regarding ToM, this problem of a shortcut is not specific to DL. Namely, there is a long-lasting discussion about whether chimpanzees possess some ToM-like skills or whether they are using low-level cues (i.e., shortcuts) to solve these tasks [28][29][30][31]. Given that experiments with chimpanzees are not conclusive on whether these animals with similar brains to us are using ToM or shortcuts, we should be wary of attributing ToM-like skills to artificial agents performing simpler tests. ...
Theory of Mind is an essential ability of humans to infer the mental states of others. Here we provide a coherent summary of the potential, current progress, and problems of deep learning approaches to Theory of Mind. We highlight that many current findings can be explained through shortcuts. These shortcuts arise because the tasks used to investigate Theory of Mind in deep learning systems have been too narrow. Thus, we encourage researchers to investigate Theory of Mind in complex open-ended environments. Furthermore, to inspire future deep learning systems we provide a concise overview of prior work done in humans. We further argue that when studying Theory of Mind with deep learning, the research's main focus and contribution ought to be opening up the network's representations. We recommend researchers use tools from the field of interpretability of AI to study the relationship between different network components and aspects of Theory of Mind.
... This paper aimed to understand labor rejection of the Omnibus Law, especially the Work Creation Bill articles, and predict what the protesters will have to do if submitting a judicial review to the Constitutional Court becomes an alternative solution, how the protesters come across to truth the Constitution Court as a fair solution (Hartley et al., 2010;Huda et al., 2021). The results of this project will add new insights to the legal and sociopolitical understanding of a new constitutional order for the public, especially intellectuals, and a new understanding approach for the researchers themselves, particularly regarding constitutional law and the citizenship rights of Indonesian citizens as a country currently in the best democratic practices in the world (Tomasello et al., 2003;Zacharakis & Meyer, 1998). Thus state law understanding and citizen awareness will enhance both law and state justice (Isra et al., 2017;Yodha, 2018;Suhardjanto et al., 2018;Suyanto et al., 2018). ...
The purpose of this legal and constitutional study was to deeply understand the causes and impacts of rejection of the ratification of the Omnibus Bill and its derivatives of the Job Creation Bill by demonstrators consisting of students and laborers throughout Indonesia. To make it easier for us to understand the above problems, we have carried out a series of data collections since the Omnibus Bill was discussed until it was passed by Parliament and rejected by demonstrators. For data, secondary legal information in the form of legal publications, textbooks, journals, and court decisions related to the Omnibus Law and other information in the form of articles published in the mass media has also been used as data. Finally, we can conclude that the findings include: Several laws originating from the Omnibus law have legitimized environmental destruction, ignoring customary rights that are more environmentally friendly and sustainable. The majority of the Omnibus Law committee comes from the elite who do not think about the civilian element, including the new law derivative people.
... La actividad cortical está modulada por hormonas como la oxitocina y por la acción de ciertos genes que pueden afectar las diferencias individuales de comportamiento. Todo aquello que los individuos juzgan correcto o incorrecto en términos sociales se basa en el procesamiento emocional, inferencial, automático y reflexivo cuya función principal es favorecer la reciprocidad, lo justo, la lealtad y el respeto en los otros individuos (Tomasello et al., 2003;Adolphs, 2009). ...
En este capítulo realizaremos una revisión bibliográfica de la evolución,
función y mecanismos neurales de las emociones sociales como parte
de los procesos de cognición social. Por ello, pondremos las emociones
sociales como parte de los mecanismos de cognición social, evolucionados a partir de la compleja dinámica de la vida en sociedad. Enseguida, se describe la evolución del procesamiento socioemocional y su función. Entenderemos función como el valor adaptativo de una característica (su valor en términos de sobrevivencia y reproducción), es decir, las consecuencias últimas (función adaptativa) ya que, entre éstas y el comportamiento que nos interesa puede haber una larga cadena de consecuencias inmediatas o intermedias. Se identifican sus componentes, los cuales se desarrollan a partir del mecanismo de la autorregulación centrado en el control de atención que, a su vez, involucra dos procesos: la regulación emocional y la memoria de trabajo.
Asimismo, también revisaremos si estas emociones sociales son parte
de las experiencias y competencias socioemocionales humanas tan importantes en términos del desempeño de los humanos en el ambiente
social. También revisaremos los principales avances de la neurociencia cognitiva en relación con el desarrollo socioemocional, el cual se considera un concepto que deriva de la cognición social, ya que, en él, intervienen procesos que modulan las respuestas apropiadas en las interacciones sociales, donde se ponen en juego los intereses de un grupo inmediato e incluso de la especie. Para ello, desde una perspectiva de las diferencias individuales, se aborda cómo los fenómenos y las habilidades socioemocionales engloban funciones que integran la cognición-emoción. Se presentan los diversos modelos multidimensionales de la competencia socioemocional y posteriormente se describe la ontogenia de estas habilidades socioemocionales; ya que si bien el cerebro humano, debido a la evolución, al nacer viene equipado para regular su metabolismo, cuenta con dispositivos básicos para obtener conocimientos y comportamientos sociales. De tal manera que, se considera el papel de la sociedad y la cultura como parte del desarrollo socioemocional del ser humano así como su enorme capacidad de flexibilidad neuronal. Por ello, finalmente, se argumenta
desde un enfoque interdisciplinar la plausibilidad y viabilidad de estrategias de intervención para el aprendizaje socioemocional.
Many of the most prominent digital devices, platforms, and apps are engineered to distract us, to create habits of ever-increasing use, and to transform these habits into full-scale dependence. Before we can muster effective resistance to agency-eroding forms of distraction and dependence, we need to understand their mechanisms. This chapter addresses the AI-enabled attention economy from a neuroscientific and psychological perspective, illustrating how digital platforms exploit prominent human proclivities to maximize engagement and hijack attention.
Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York in Albany (USA), the inventor of the mirror test for self-recognition in animals (see Chap. 10), has argued that self-consciousness also implies the attribution of consciousness in others [636]. The self, he argues, is social at its core, understanding itself from its position in the social matrix [637]. Empirical confirmation of this view comes from studies of patients. People who have difficulty imagining the thoughts and desires of others also have difficulty seeing into themselves, introspectively reflecting on their own actions, or anticipating the consequences of their own actions [638]. Of course, it is also conceivable to have self-awareness and yet not be able to think or feel one’s way into others. However, such a consciousness would be empty, trapped in a solipsistic mind, unable to exchange with others, coordinate its actions with those of others, or even cooperate with them. Yet, this is precisely the hallmark of human reason. Human culture is inconceivable without a theory of mind.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
Questions on early sapiens cognition, the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, are intriguing but notoriously hard to tackle. Leaving no hard traces in the archeological record, these abilities need to be inferred from indirect evidence, informed by our understanding of present-day cognition. Most of such attempts acknowledge the role that culture, as a faculty, has played for human evolution, but they underrate or even disregard the role of distinct cultural traditions and the ensuing diversity, both in present-day humans and as a dimension of past cognition. We argue that culture has exerted a profound impact on human cognition from the start in a dual manner: It scaffolds cognition through both development and evolution, and it thereby continually diversifies the form and content of human thinking. To unveil early sapiens cognition and retrace its evolutionary trajectories, this cognitive diversity must be considered. We present two strategies to achieve this: large-scale extrapolation and phylogenetic comparison. The former aims at filtering out diversity to determine what is basic and universal versus culturally shaped (illustrated for theory of mind abilities). The latter capitalizes on the diversity to reconstruct evolutionary trajectories (illustrated for religious beliefs). The two methods, in combination, advance our understanding of the cognitive abilities of our early sapiens ancestors and of how these abilities emerged and evolved. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this approach for our insights into early cognition itself and its scientific investigation.
This handbook lays out the science behind how animals think, remember, create, calculate, and remember. It provides concise overviews on major areas of study such as animal communication and language, memory and recall, social cognition, social learning and teaching, numerical and quantitative abilities, as well as innovation and problem solving. The chapters also explore more nuanced topics in greater detail, showing how the research was conducted and how it can be used for further study. The authors range from academics working in renowned university departments to those from research institutions and practitioners in zoos. The volume encompasses a wide variety of species, ensuring the breadth of the field is explored.
Although some current AIs surpass human abilities especially in closed worlds such as board games, their performance in the messy real world is limited. They make strange mistakes and do not notice them. They cannot be instructed easily, fail to use common sense, and lack curiosity. They do not make good collaborators. Neither systems built using the traditional manually-constructed symbolic AI approach nor systems built using generative and deep learning AI approaches including large language models (LLMs) can meet the challenges. They are not well suited for creating robust and trustworthy AIs. Although it is outside of mainstream AI approaches, developmental bootstrapping shows promise. In developmental bootstrapping, AIs develop competences like human children do. They start with innate competences. Like humans, they interact with the environment and learn from their interactions. They incrementally extend their innate competences with self-developed competences. They interact and learn from people and establish perceptual, cognitive, and common grounding. Following a bootstrapping process, they acquire the competences that they need. However, developmental robotics has not yet produced AIs with robust adult-level competences. Projects have typically stopped at the Toddler Barrier corresponding to human infant development at about two years of age, before speech is fluent. They also do not bridge the Reading Barrier, where they can skillfully and skeptically tap into the vast socially developed recorded information resources that power LLMs. The next competences in human cognitive development involve intrinsic motivation, imitation learning, imagination, coordination, and communication. This paper lays out the logic, prospects, gaps, and challenges for extending the practice of developmental bootstrapping to create robust and resilient AIs.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The attempts to make moral and evolution compatible have assimilated moral capacity either with complex self-control in favour of one's own goals or with spontaneous altruism. Those attempts face an easy problem, since those two senses of moral are adaptively advantageous resources. But let us focus on the decisions made in favour of another person which the subject, when making them, feels are contrary to his own goals: Could a base for this capacity arise in evolution, however poor and weak? I propose that such base, while it is not an adaptive advantage but quite the opposite, arises from the convergence between two abilities which in their respective origins were adaptively very advantageous: the advanced mode of 'theo-ry-of-mind' (ToM) and inner speech. Keywords: others' mental contents; speech directed to oneself; spontaneous altruism; Advanced Theory of Mind; vicarious expectations. Resumen: Los intentos de hacer compatibles la moral y la evolución han asimilado la capacidad moral con el autocontrol complejo en favor de las metas propias o con el altruis-mo espontáneo. Esos intentos se en-frentan a un problema fácil, puesto que esos dos sentidos de la moral son adaptativamente ventajosos. En cambio, las decisiones que van contra las propias metas de uno son desven-tajosas. A pesar de ello, ¿pudo surgir en la evolución una base, por pobre y débil que fuera, para esta capacidad? Propongo que tal base, si bien no es una ventaja adaptativa en principio, sino más bien lo contrario, surge de la convergencia entre dos habilidades que en sus respectivos orígenes sí eran muy ventajosas adaptativamen-te: el modo avanzado de la teoría de la mente (ToM) y el habla interior. Palabras clave: contenidos mentales de los otros; discurso dirigido a uno mismo; altruismo espontáneo; Teoría de la Mente; expectativas vicarias. 1 I am very grateful to the reviewers for their helpful comments.
Researchers have studied non-human primate cognition along different paths, including social cognition, planning and causal knowledge, spatial cognition and memory, and gestural communication, as well as comparative studies with humans. This volume describes how primate cognition is studied in labs, zoos, sanctuaries, and in the field, bringing together researchers examining similar issues in all of these settings and showing how each benefits from the others. Readers will discover how lab-based concepts play out in the real world of free primates. This book tackles pressing issues such as replicability, research ethics, and open science. With contributors from a broad range of comparative, cognitive, neuroscience, developmental, ecological, and ethological perspectives, the volume provides a state-of-the-art review pointing to new avenues for integrative research.
What is a self? What does it mean to have selfhood? What is the relationship between selfhood and identity? These are puzzling questions that philosophers, psychologists, social scientists, and many other researchers often grapple with.
Self and Identity is a book that explores and brings together relevant ideas on selfhood and identity, while also helping to clarify some important and long standing scientific and philosophical debates. It will enable readers to understand the difference between selves in humans and other animals, and the different selves that we come to possess from when we are born to when we become old. It also explains how and why the self might break down due to mental illness, thereby providing insight into how we might treat illnesses such as dementia and depression, both of which are conditions that fundamentally affect our selfhood.
Taking an important step towards clarifying our understanding of human selfhood and applying it to mental illness, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students exploring philosophical questions of selfhood, as well as those examining the connection to clinical disorders.
Microorganisms represent the vast majority of non-human species. Most of them are unicellular, invisible to the naked eye, and they are characterized by astonishing diversity. We can classify them from the simplest prokaryotic, with no cell nucleus (i.e., bacteria), to the eukaryotic microorganisms (i.e., fungi, algae, protozoa) having a cellular structure with a distinct nucleus, like in superior species. A separate category is that of viruses, not considered living organisms, but reproduced themselves as parasites by exploiting other organisms' genetic material.
How we judge the similarity between objects in the world is connected ultimately to how we represent those objects. It has been argued extensively that object representations in humans are ‘structured’ in nature, meaning that both individual features and the relations between them can influence similarity. In contrast, popular models of comparative cognition assume that non-human species appreciate only surface-level, featural similarities. By applying psychological models of structural and featural similarity to visual similarity judgements from adult humans, chimpanzees and gorillas, we demonstrate a cross-species sensitivity to complex, structural information, particularly for stimuli that combine ecologically familiar properties (colour and shape). These results shed new light on the representational complexity of non-human apes, and also on the fundamental limits of featural coding in explaining similarity, which emerge strikingly across both human and non-human species.
Mirror self-recognition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) is typically delayed until 4½–8 years of age. Also, species capable of mirror self-recognition may be capable of some forms of mental state attribution related to intentions and knowledge. Previous investigations of knowledge attribution by chimpanzees used adolescents and adults but did not explicitly test for self-recognition. We report an investigation of knowledge attribution in 6 young chimpanzees previously tested for self-recognition. Subjects were required to discriminate between a person who had seen where food was hidden and another person who had not. The results are consistent with the proposition that most chimpanzees younger than 4½ years of age show neither mirror self-recognition nor knowledge attribution. The results are also consistent with the idea that, just as in humans, development of self-recognition in chimpanzees may precede development of knowledge attribution.
Many primate species reliably track and follow the visual gaze of conspecifics and humans, even to locations above and behind the subject. However, it is not clear whether primates follow a human's gaze to find hidden food under one of two containers in an object-choice task. In a series of experiments six adult female chimpanzees followed a human's gaze (head and eye direction) to a distal location in space above and behind them, and checked back to the human's face when they did not find anything interesting or unusual. This study also assessed whether these same subjects would also use the human's gaze in an object-choice task with three types of occluders: barriers, tubes, and bowls. Barriers and tubes permitted the experimenter to see their contents (i.e., food) whereas bowls did not. Chimpanzees used the human's gaze direction to choose the tube or barrier containing food but they did not use the human's gaze to decide between bowls. Our findings allowed us to discard both simple orientation and understanding seeing-knowing in others as the explanations for gaze following in chimpanzees. However, they did not allow us to conclusively choose between orientation combined with foraging tendencies and understanding seeing in others. One interesting possibility raised by these results is that studies in which the human cannot see the reward at the time of subject choice may potentially be underestimating chimpanzees' social knowledge.
Observations of chimpanzee gestural communication are reported. The observations represent the third longitudinal time point
of an ongoing study of the Yerkes Primate Center Field Station chimpanzee group. In contrast to observations at the first
two time points, the current observations are of a new generation of infants and juveniles. There were two questions. The
first concerned how young chimpanzees used their gestures, with special focus on the flexibility or intentionality displayed.
It was found that youngsters quite often used the same gesture in different contexts, and different gestures in the same context.
In addition, they sometimes used gestures in combinations in a single social encounter, these combinations did not convey
intentions that could not be conveyed by the component gestures, however. It was also found that individuals adjusted their
choice of signals depending on the attentional state of the recipient. The second question was how chimpanzees acquired their
gestural signals. In general, it was found that there was little consistency in the use of gestures among individuals, especially
for non-play gestures, with much individual variability both within and across generations. There were also a number of idiosyncratic
gestures used by single individuals at each time point. It was concluded from these results that youngsters were not imitatively
learning their communicatory gestures from conspecifics, but rather that they were individually conventionalizing them with
each other. Implications of these findings for the understanding of chimpanzee communication and social learning are discussed.
Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.
. Chimpanzees and young children understand much about what other individuals have and have not seen. This study investigates
what they understand about their own visual perception. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2.5-year-old children were presented
with a finding game in which food or stickers were hidden in one of two or three tubes. We varied whether subjects saw the
baiting of the tubes, whether subjects could see through the tubes, and whether there was a delay between baiting and presentation
of the tubes to subjects. We measured not only whether subjects chose the correct tube but also, more importantly, whether
they spontaneously looked into one or more of the tubes before choosing one. Most apes and children appropriately looked into
the tubes before choosing one more often when they had not seen the baiting than when they had seen the baiting. In general,
they used efficient search strategies more often than insufficient or excessive ones. Implications of subjects' search patterns
for their understanding of seeing and knowing in the self are discussed.
Mirror self-recognition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) is typically delayed until 4 1/2-8 years of age. Also, species capable of mirror self-recognition may be capable of some forms of mental state attribution related to intentions and knowledge. Previous investigations of knowledge attribution by chimpanzees used adolescents and adults but did not explicitly test for self-recognition. We report an investigation of knowledge attribution in 6 young chimpanzees previously tested for self-recognition. Subjects were required to discriminate between a person who had seen where food was hidden and another person who had not. The results are consistent with the proposition that most chimpanzees younger than 4 1/2 years of age show neither mirror self-recognition nor knowledge attribution. The results are also consistent with the idea that, just as in humans, development of self-recognition in chimpanzees may precede development of knowledge attribution.
Previous experimental research has suggested that chimpanzees may understand some of the epistemological aspects of visual perception, such as how the perceptual act of seeing can have internal mental consequences for an individual's state of knowledge. Other research suggests that chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates may understand visual perception at a simpler level; that is, they may at least understand seeing as a mental event that subjectively anchors organisms to the external world. However, these results are ambiguous and are open to several interpretations. In this Monograph, we report the results of 15 studies that we conducted with chimpanzees and preschool children to explore their knowledge about visual perception. The central goal of these studies was to determine whether young chimpanzees appreciate that visual perception subjectively links organisms to the external world. In order to achieve this goal, our research incorporated three methodological objectives. First, we sought to overcome limitations of previous comparative theory of mind research by using a fairly large sample of well-trained chimpanzees (six to seven animals in all studies) who were all within 8 months of age of each other. In contrast, previous research has typically relied on the results of one to four animals ranging widely in age. Second, we designed our studies in order to allow for a very sensitive diagnosis of whether the animals possessed immediate dispositions to act in a fashion predicted by a theory of mind view of their psychology or whether their successful performances could be better explained by learning theory. Finally, using fairly well-established transitions in preschool children's understanding of visual perception, we sought to establish the validity of our nonverbal methods by testing predictions about how children of various ages ought to perform. Collectively, our findings provide little evidence that young chimpanzees understand seeing as a mental event. Although our results establish that young chimpanzees both (a) develop algorithms for tracking the visual gaze of other organisms and (b) quickly learn rules about the configurations of faces and eyes, on the one hand, and subsequent events, on the other, they provide no clear evidence that these algorithms and rules are grounded in a matrix of intentionality. Particularly striking, our results demonstrate that, even though young chimpanzee subjects spontaneously attend to and follow the visual gaze of others, they simultaneously appear oblivious to the attentional significance of that gaze. Thus, young chimpanzees possess and learn rules about visual perception, but these rules do not necessarily incorporate the notion that seeing is "about" something. The general pattern of our results is consistent with three different possibilities. First, the potential existence of a general developmental delay in psychological development in chimpanzees (or, more likely, an acceleration in humans) leaves open the possibility that older chimpanzees may display evidence of a mentalistic appreciation of seeing. Second, chimpanzees may possess a different (but nonetheless mentalistic) theory of attention in which organisms are subjectively connected to the world not through any particular sensory modality such as vision but rather through other (as-of-yet unspecified) behavioral indicators. Finally, a subjective understanding of visual perception (and perhaps behavior in general) may be a uniquely evolved feature of the human lineage.
This study investigates the understanding of others' intentions in 2- and 3-year-old children, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). During training, subjects learned to use a discriminative cue to select a baited box. During testing, the experimenter placed a marker on top of the baited box to inform the subject of the reward's location. However, the experimenter also accidentally dropped the marker on top of an unbaited box, so that during any given trial the experimenter marked 2 boxes, 1 intentionally and 1 accidentally. All 3 species preferentially selected the box the experimenter had marked intentionally (especially during the initial trials), with 3-year-old children presenting the most robust results. These findings suggest that subjects understood something about the experimenter's intentions. The authors speculate that understanding of others' intentions may precede the understanding of others' beliefs both at the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels.
A recent meta-analysis performed by Wellman, Cross, and Watson clears the air surrounding young children's performance on tests of false belief by showing that it is highly likely that there is some type of conceptual development between 3 and 5 years of age that supports improved task performance. The data concerning the evolutionary origin of these abilities, however, is considerably less clear. Nonetheless, there is some reason to suspect that theory of mind is unique to our species, and that its original function was to provide a more abstract level of describing ancient behavioral patterns (such as deception, reconciliation, and gaze following)-behaviors that humans share in common with many other species. Thus, the initial selective advantage of theory of mind may have been because it increased the flexibility of already-existing behaviors, not because it generated scores of radically new ones.
Dogs are more skillful than great apes at a number of tasks in which they must read human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food. In this study, we found that wolves who were raised by humans do not show these same skills, whereas domestic dog puppies only a few weeks old, even those that have had little human contact, do show these skills. These findings suggest that during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of social-cognitive abilities that enable them to communicate with humans in unique ways.
Chimpanzees undoubtedly form concepts related to the statistical regularities in behavior. But do they also construe such abstractions in terms of mental states - that is, do they possess a 'theory of mind'? Although both anecdotal and experimental data have been marshaled to support this idea, we show that no explanatory power or economy of expression is gained by such an assumption. We suggest that additional experiments will be unhelpful as long as they continue to rely upon determining whether subjects interpret behavioral invariances in terms of mental states. We propose a paradigm shift to overcome this limitation.
Observations of the gestural communication of two groups of captive chimpanzees are reported. For one group the observations represent a fourth longitudinal time point over a 12 year period; the other group was observed for the first time. There were two main questions. The first concerned how young chimpanzees use their gestures, with special foci on the flexibility displayed in signal use and on the sensitivity to audience displayed in signal choice. It was found that chimpanzees are very flexible in their signal use (different signals for same goal, same signal for different goals) and somewhat sensitive to audience (signal choice based on attentional state of recipient). The second question was how chimpanzees acquire their gestural signals. Comparisons between the two groups showed much individual variability both within and between groups. In addition, when each of the two contemporary groups was compared with the previous longitudinal time points for one of the groups, no differences in concordance were found. It was concluded that youngsters were not imitatively learning their communicatory gestures from conspecifics, but rather that they were individually ritualizing them with one another in social interaction. An experimental study in which two individuals were taught new gestures and returned to their groups — with no subsequent signs of imitation — corroborated this conclusion. Implications of the current findings for the understanding of chimpanzee communication and social learning are discussed.
Many researchers assume that the answer to the question of imitation in apes is more positive due to two complicating factors. First, there are many different ways to ape. A number of theorists have demonstrated that the same behavioral outcome may result from very different processes of learning and social learning. This potential ambiguity in what it means to “ape,” thus, makes the current question less than totally straightforward, and it means that a certain amount of theoretical work must be done before the relevant research literature may be usefully examined. The second complicating factor is that research on the social learning of apes comes from very different sources. These studies have the virtue of ecological validity, but their lack of experimental control means that they are of limited usefulness in determining with any precision the learning processes that are responsible for the observed population differences. This chapter closes with the conclusion that captive chimpanzees raised by their mothers are a better model for wild chimpanzees than chimpanzees that are raised in human-like ways. This means that the answer to the more general question of whether apes ape is—only when trained by humans, either formally or informally, to do so. It is possible that there are further important distinctions to be made in various types of social understanding and learning that one has yet to recognize.
Experiments vary in their ability to distinguish between competing hypotheses. In tests on primate cognition the majority
of this variation is due to an experimenter's ability to test primates in valid settings while providing the adequate amount
of experimental control. While experimenters studying primate cognition can use methods of control perfected in captivity,
it is still very unclear how to design and then objectively evaluate the external validity of new experimental paradigms.
I recommend that more effort be allocated to specify how to create relevant test settings for primates. Primate social life
is highly competitive. This means that all aspects of primates themselves, including their cognitive abilities, have likely
been shaped by the need to out-compete conspecifics. Based on this hypothesis, sophisticated cognitive abilities of primates
might best be demonstrated in competitive contexts. Thus, it is suggested that one possible measure of validity is whether
investigators integrate a competitive component into their experimental designs. To evaluate this methodological prediction
I review the literature on chimpanzee perspective-taking as a case study including several recent studies that include a competitive
component in their experimental designs.
(from the chapter) Joint attention is not just two individuals looking at the same thing at the same time. Joint attention requires that each of the individuals knows that the other is attending to the same thing as they are attending to; that is what makes it a joint, rather than merely a simultaneous, activity. To engage in joint attention, therefore, an individual must at the very least be able to understand that another individual may see or attend to something. Whereas that assumption is mainly uncontroversial in human infants over 12 to 18 months of age, there is currently some controversy about whether chimpanzees--as the closest primate relatives of human beings--know that others can see or attend to things. This question is addressed in this paper. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved).
Primate Cognition What can we learn from ape behaviour experiments about consciousness? Are apes a model for humans - are they conscious at our level at all? Not finally answered here but a good overview.
Individuals from five primate species were tested experimentally for their ability to follow the visual gaze of conspecifics to an outside object. Subjects were from captive social groups of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys torquatus, rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, stumptail macaques, M. arctoides, and pigtail macaques, M. nemestrina. Experimental trials consisted of an experimenter inducing one individual to look at food being displayed, and then observing the reaction of another individual (the subject) that was looking at that individual (not the food). Control trials consisted of an experimenter displaying the food in an identical manner when the subject was alone. Individuals from all species reliably followed the gaze of conspecifics, looking to the food about 80% of the time in experimental trials, compared with about 20% of the time in control trials. Results are discussed in terms of both the proximate mechanisms that might be involved and the adaptive functions that might be served by gaze-following. Copyright 1998 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Copyright 1998 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
A nonverbal task of false belief understanding was given to 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 28) and to two species of great ape: chimpanzees and orangutans (N = 7). The task was embedded in a series of finding games in which an adult (the hider) hid a reward in one of two identical containers, and another adult (the communicator) observed the hiding process and attempted to help the participant by placing a marker on the container that she believed to hold the reward. An initial series of control trials ensured that participants were able to use the marker to locate the reward, follow the reward in both visible and invisible displacements, and ignore the marker when they knew it to be incorrect. In the crucial false belief trials, the communicator watched the hiding process and then left the area, at which time the hider switched the locations of the containers. When the communicator returned, she marked the container at the location where she had seen the reward hidden, which was incorrect. The hider then gave the subject the opportunity to find the sticker. Successful performance required participants to reason as follows: the communicator placed the marker where she saw the reward hidden; the container that was at that location is now at the other location; so the reward is at the other location. Children were also given a verbal false belief task in the context of this same hiding game. The two main results of the study were: (1) children's performance on the verbal and nonverbal false belief tasks were highly correlated (and both fit very closely with age norms from previous studies), and (2) no ape succeeded in the nonverbal false belief task even though they succeeded in all of the control trials indicating mastery of the general task demands.
Two experiments on chimpanzee gaze following are reported. In the first, chimpanzee subjects watched as a human experimenter looked around various types of barriers. The subjects looked around each of the barriers more when the human had done so than in a control condition (in which the human looked in another direction). In the second experiment, chimpanzees watched as a human looked towards the back of their cage. As they turned to follow the human's gaze a distractor object was presented. The chimpanzees looked at the distractor while still following the human's gaze to the back of the cage. These two experiments effectively disconfirm the low-level model of chimpanzee gaze following in which it is claimed that upon seeing another animate being's gaze direction chimpanzees simply turn in that direction and look around for something interesting. Rather, they support the hypothesis that chimpanzees follow the gaze direction of other animate beings geometrically to specific locations, in much the same way as human infants. The degree to which chimpanzees have a mentalistic interpretation of the gaze and/or visual experience of others is still an open question. Copyright 1999 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
We report a series of experiments on social problem solving in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. In each experiment a subordinate and a dominant individual were put into competition over two pieces of food. In all experiments dominants obtained virtually all of the foods to which they had good visual and physical access. However, subordinates were successful quite often in three situations in which they had better visual access to the food than the dominant, for example, when the food was positioned so that only the subordinate (and not the dominant) could see it. In some cases, the subordinate might have been monitoring the behaviour of the dominant directly and simply avoided the food that the dominant was moving towards (which just happened to be the one it could see). In other cases, however, we ruled out this possibility by giving subordinates a small headstart and forcing them to make their choice (to go to the food that both competitors could see, or the food that only they could see) before the dominant was released into the area. Together with other recent studies, the present investigation suggests that chimpanzees know what conspecifics can and cannot see, and, furthermore, that they use this knowledge to devise effective social-cognitive strategies in naturally occurring food competition situations. Copyright 2000 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
We conducted three experiments on social problem solving by chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. In each experiment a subordinate and a dominant individual competed for food, which was placed in various ways on the subordinate's side of two opaque barriers. In some conditions dominants had not seen the food hidden, or food they had seen hidden was moved elsewhere when they were not watching (whereas in control conditions they saw the food being hidden or moved). At the same time, subordinates always saw the entire baiting procedure and could monitor the visual access of their dominant competitor as well. If subordinates were sensitive to what dominants did or did not see during baiting, they should have preferentially approached and retrieved the food that dominants had not seen hidden or moved. This is what they did in experiment 1 when dominants were either uninformed or misinformed about the food's location. In experiment 2 subordinates recognized, and adjusted their behaviour accordingly, when the dominant individual who witnessed the hiding was replaced with another dominant individual who had not witnessed it, thus demonstrating their ability to keep track of precisely who has witnessed what. In experiment 3 subordinates did not choose consistently between two pieces of hidden food, one of which dominants had seen hidden and one of which they had not seen hidden. However, their failure in this experiment was likely to be due to the changed nature of the competition under these circumstances and not to a failure of social-cognitive skills. These findings suggest that at least in some situations (i.e. competition with conspecifics) chimpanzees know what conspecifics have and have not seen (do and do not know), and that they use this information to devise effective social-cognitive strategies. Copyright 2001 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
In the late 1970s, Premack and Woodruff asked whether chimpanzees had a theory of mind. The answer to this question has remained elusive. Whereas some authors argue that chimpanzees are capable of mental state attribution, others maintain that they simply learn certain cues in ertain situations. Recent studies challenge both views. On the one hand, chimpanzees know much more about seeing than cue-based explanations suggest; on the other hand, this knowledge does not necessarily entail understanding of the mental states of others. The hypothesis I put forward here is that chimpanzees learn cues in social situations but that they are also capable of knowledge abstraction to solve novel problems.
Doapes andchildrenknowwhat they have seen? A nonverbal false belief task: The performance of children and great apes Can competitive paradigms increase the validity of experiments on primate social cognition The domestication of social cognition in dogs
- J Call
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Chimpanzee social cognition (Commentary)
- Tomasello
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- J Searle
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Toward a science of other minds: Escaping the argument by analogy
- Povinelli