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Abstract
Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking suggests that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative learning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such arguments are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept “see.” Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and to suggest alternatives.
... [10][11][12][13]). To overcome this conceptual limitation, Heyes [14] proposed the 'goggles test' as a means to test an animal's mind reading through experience projection-using the own experience with visual barriers, the goggles, to infer what others could see. These goggles appear identical from the outside, except for their colour, but one is see-through and the other opaque. ...
... To test whether dogs' level I perspective-taking ability (the ability to represent others' visual access [40,41]) rests on behaviour or mind reading, we confronted dogs in this study with two adaptations of the goggles test [14]. Previous studies, in which dogs discriminated between knowledgeable and ignorant experimenters, involved at least some, albeit sometimes subtle, behavioural differences between conditions. ...
... With this study, we adapted the methodology proposed by Heyes [14] to test whether dogs can infer what others can or cannot see, in a situation where behavioural and geometrical cues are not diagnostic and the only cue dogs can rely on to infer the mental state of 'seeing' is their own experience with novel visual barriers. Based on a previous study with 18-month-old humans [15], we had predicted that dogs would have followed more often a human experimenter's gaze when her line of sight to a target was unobstructed compared with when it was obstructed. ...
Despite extensive research into the Theory of Mind abilities in non-human animals, it remains controversial whether they can attribute mental states to other individuals or whether they merely predict future behaviour based on previous behavioural cues. In the present study, we tested pet dogs (in total, N = 92) on adaptations of the ‘goggles test’ previously used with human infants and great apes. In both a cooperative and a competitive task, dogs were given direct experience with the properties of novel screens (one opaque, the other transparent) inserted into identical, but differently coloured, tunnels. Dogs learned and remembered the properties of the screens even when, later on, these were no longer directly visible to them. Nevertheless, they were not more likely to follow the experimenter’s gaze to a target object when the experimenter could see it through the transparent screen. Further, they did not prefer to steal a forbidden treat first in a location obstructed from the experimenter’s view by the opaque screen. Therefore, dogs did not show perspective-taking abilities in this study in which the only available cue to infer others’ visual access consisted of the subjects’ own previous experience with novel visual barriers. We conclude that the behaviour of our dogs, unlike that of infants and apes in previous studies, does not show evidence of experience-projection abilities.
... Drugačija interpretacija empirijskih podataka, a koja također dovodi u pitanje tradicionalno gledište teorije uma, utemeljena je na tvrdnji da izvedba na zadatcima u kojima se mjere neverbalni odgovori nema nikakve veze s teorijom uma (Heyes, 2014b(Heyes, , 2015Ruffman i Perner, 2005). Slično je gledište poznato u području koje se bavi komparativnom kognicijom, gdje se nalazi o teoriji uma kod životinja često odbacuju i interpretiraju kao rezultat nekoga drugoga kognitivnog mehanizma (Heyes, 1998;Penn i Povinelli, 2007). Stoga su sve tri naknadno predstavljene verzije takvih nementalističkih teorija općenito utemeljene na ideji da uspješna izvedba na zadatku nije nužno dokaz složene kognitivne sposobnosti -npr. ...
... Izraz čitanje ponašanja prvi su upotrijebili Premack i Woodruff (1978), a otada je u fokusu detaljnih rasprava u području komparativne kognicije (Heyes, 1998;Lurz, 2011;Penn i Povinelli, 2007). Prema objašnjenju koje je utemeljeno na čitanju ponašanja zadatci teorije uma mogu se riješiti pomoću znanja o tome da određeno ponašanje prethodi drugomu ponašanju. ...
... Lurz i Krachun, 2019). Međutim, to se odnosi samo na situacije u kojima je iskustvo o kojemu je riječ novo jer u suprotnome ispitanici mogu koristiti ranije naučene odnose između situacijskih čimbenika i ponašanja drugih osoba da bi predvidjeli kako će se druga osoba ponašati (Heyes, 1998). Glavna je metoda koja se predlaže kao test projekcije iskustva tzv. ...
Teorija uma je sposobnost pripisivanja mentalnih stanja drugima. Do prije otprilike 20 godina empirijska istraživanja upućivala su na to da je teorija uma kognitivno zahtjevna sposobnost koja se razvija oko četvrte godine života. Međutim, sve veći broj istraživanja koja koriste zadatke koji ne zahtijevaju verbalne odgovore upućuje na to da sposobnost koja nalikuje na teoriju uma postoji i izvan kognitivne kontrole te da je pokazuju već i djeca stara devet mjeseci. Ovaj pregledni rad predstavit će tri glavna tipa teorija koje pokušavaju objasniti te novije empirijske rezultate i raspraviti o njima. Nadalje, u radu će biti istaknuti empirijski nalazi koji idu u prilog svakoj od tih teorija ili je opovrgavaju. Iako postoje prijedlozi za kritične eksperimente koji bi trebali moći napraviti razliku između teorija, trenutačno ti prijedlozi još nisu dovoljno korisni za te svrhe jer se podatci koji bi se mogli dobiti takvim eksperimentima mogu u različitim teorijama različito interpretirati. Stoga je važno da se budući rad o teoriji uma fokusira na uklanjanje dvosmislenosti u predviđanjima i interpretacijama svake od teorija.
... The cues of others' visual access can be more or less obvious, being either directly observable or subtle, but always require a certain degree of perspective-taking. Whether this decision requires the subject to represent, in some form, the mental awareness of others remains an open question (Heyes 2015(Heyes , 1998Penn and Povinelli 2007;Povinelli and Vonk 2004). Indeed, in most studies, subjects had to integrate observable features from others' current or past behaviours, and might have based their decisions solely on their own (egocentric) rather than the other's (altercentric) perspective. ...
... Great apes seem to understand that their own perspective can differ from reality (Karg et al. 2014;Krachun et al. 2009), but in contrast to anecdotal evidence in favour of chimpanzees' ability to use deception to create a false belief in others, experiments have found that chimpanzees' deceptive skills have limited flexibility. Perhaps, they deceive and hide, because they have learned rules about the relation of others' line of sight and their behaviour in the past, rather than understanding the other's false belief (Heyes 1998). Indeed, until a few years ago, chimpanzees had always failed in tasks that explicitly tested false belief understanding and, in contrast to 6-year-old children, also failed to discriminate their own true perspective with the mistaken perspective of a competitor (Karg et al. 2016). ...
... We, therefore, suggest that the evidence currently favours the hypothesis that (pet) dogs know a lot about seeing and hearing (of humans). Whether this knowledge or inference involves elements of mind-reading remains an open question, however (Buckner 2014;Call and Tomasello 2008;Heyes 1998;Lurz 2011;Penn and Povinelli 2007). ...
An important question in the study of canine cognition is how dogs understand humans, given that they show impressive abilities for interacting and communicating with us. In this review, we describe and discuss studies that have investigated dogs’ perspective-taking abilities. There is solid evidence that dogs are not only sensitive to the gaze of others, but also their attention. We specifically address the question whether dogs have the ability to take the perspective of others and thus come to understand what others can or cannot perceive. From the latter, they may then infer what others know and use this representation to anticipate what others do next. Still, dogs might simply rely on directly observable cues and on what they themselves can perceive when they assess what others can perceive. And instead of making inferences from representations of others' mental states, they may have just learned that certain behaviours of ours lead to certain outcomes. However, recent research seems to challenge this low-level explanation. Dogs have solved several perspective-taking tasks instantly and reliably across a large number of variations, including geometrical gaze-following, stealing in the dark, concealing information from others, and Guesser/Knower differentiation. In the latter studies, dogs' choices between two human informants were strongly influenced by cues related to the humans’ visual access to the food, even when the two informants behaved identically. And finally, we review a recent study that found dogs reacting differently to misleading suggestions of human informants that have either a true or false belief about the location of food. We discuss this surprising result in terms of the comprehension of reality-incongruent mental states, which is considered as a hallmark of Theory of Mind acquisition in human development. Especially on the basis of the latter findings, we conclude that pet dogs might be sensitive to what others see, know, intend, and believe. Therefore, this ability seems to have evolved not just in the corvid and primate lineages, but also in dogs.
... This finding, however, was hotly debated, and in 1993, Celia Heyes offered convincing alternative explanations for the theory of mind abilities previously reported in nonhuman animals (Heyes, 1993). Although there was anecdotal evidence that wild nonhuman primates engaged in behaviors, such as deception, that could be supported by mentalizing capacities, there came to be wide consensus by the 1990s that theory of mind was unique to humans (Anderson et al., 1996;Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990;de Waal, 1982;Heyes, 1998;Kummer et al., 1996;Leavens, 1998;Povinelli et al., 1990Povinelli et al., , 1991Povinelli et al., , 1994Povinelli & Eddy, 1996;Tomasello & Call, 1997;Whiten & Byrne, 1997). ...
... The strongest test of mind-reading, called the goggles test, was proposed by Heyes (2015Heyes ( , 1998 who was inspired by Novey (1979), and it has since been promoted by a number of scholars (e.g., Penn & Povinelli, 2007;Whiten, 2013). Heyes (1998) noted that an unusually powerful way to exclude behavior-reading explanations would be to engineer a scenario in which behavioral cues are kept constant, and subjects are likely able to solve the task only if they can project onto an agent a novel mental state that they themselves have only just experienced (Heyes, 1998). ...
... The strongest test of mind-reading, called the goggles test, was proposed by Heyes (2015Heyes ( , 1998 who was inspired by Novey (1979), and it has since been promoted by a number of scholars (e.g., Penn & Povinelli, 2007;Whiten, 2013). Heyes (1998) noted that an unusually powerful way to exclude behavior-reading explanations would be to engineer a scenario in which behavioral cues are kept constant, and subjects are likely able to solve the task only if they can project onto an agent a novel mental state that they themselves have only just experienced (Heyes, 1998). The paradigmatic example involves two sets of identical goggles. ...
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.
... Por otra parte, y en apoyo estos, Call y Tomasello (2008) argumentan que, de ser utilizados patrones rigurosos sobre una serie de reglas del comportamiento sin acciones mentalistas para resolver los problemas como propone Heyes, implicaría ver afectadas las posibilidades de una Teoría de la mente en los primeros estadios ontogénicos del Homo sapiens. Frente a esto, como contra argumento indirecto, Heyes (1998) plantea que no existe una correspondencia entre el desarrollo psicológico durante la ontogenia de otros primates y los primeros años de vida de nuestra especie y obedece más a un antropomorfismo, ante lo cual se le podría plantear que su postura da pie a negar procesos filogenéticos y recaer en un antropocentrismo, olvidando que "el Homo sapiens es una especie animal típica respecto a la calidad y la magnitud de la diversidad genética que afecta a su comportamiento" (Wilson, 1982, p. 243) y que comparte una historia evolutiva con otros primates. ...
... Ahora bien, se debe tener especial cuidado con algunas proposiciones, porque si bien Premack y Woodruff (1978) sostienen que el que un individuo atribuya estados de conocimiento o ignorancia a otros es porque él debe saber sobre el aprendizaje o la maduración, no necesariamente toda acción, como respuesta ante otros, involucra acciones mentalistas; incluso, Heyes (1998) comenta que es necesario tener en cuenta otros procesos psicológicos que pueden brindar luces para entender ciertas acciones sin que estos exijan una ToM, gracias a que los individuos obligatoriamente no se preguntan el porqué de los comportamientos de los conespecíficos o si otros animales hacen lo mismo. Tal es el caso del aprendizaje social que puede explicar algunas de las conductas, como lo hace la hipótesis alterna de que los chimpancés aprenden ciertas reglas de comportamiento y así entienden el accionar de otros sin que entre en juego la percepción que tenga el otro (Call y Tomasello, 2008). ...
... Tampoco los niños pequeños son conscientes de que atribuyen estados mentales, y quizá lo hagan. (Rivière y Núñez, 2011, p. 24) Este acontecimiento se ve directamente ligado a varios estudios que, según Heyes (1998), apuntan a la idea de que los hechos pueden leerse tanto como actos intencionados o como comportamientos circunstanciales, como lo es el caso de una hembra de babuino que engañó a un macho a través del acicalamiento, luego de que este cazara un antílope, para robar la presa cuando estuviese distraído, lo que podría leerse o como un acto premeditado a partir del engaño por la hembra o como un suceso fortuito. Dicha situación solo lleva a preguntarse ¿hasta qué punto se podrán obtener certezas sobre la intencionalidad de los individuos y una Teoría de la mente en ellos y qué relación tiene con la empatía? ...
RESUMEN: el presente trabajo analiza la influencia de la noción de empatía en los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje en contextos educativos a partir de algunos aspectos de la antropología evolutiva en términos de comprender el significado de la variación biológica, nutricional y comportamental entre estudiantes y docentes del grado undécimo de la Institución Educativa Enrique Vélez Escobar de Itagüí. Los aspectos adaptativos en el presente estudio se relacionan con: la nutrición como indicador de ventajas en la supervivencia, los comportamientos asociados al autocuidado o cuidado de otros y la comunicación eficiente entre los seres humanos. Se obtuvo una muestra no probabilística de 32 estudiantes entre los 15 y 20 años y 7 docentes entre los 32 y 60 años, a quienes se caracterizó a través de un formulario Google. Se analizó el estado nutricional de los estudiantes según talla para la edad e Índice de Masa Corporal (IMC), el cual se complementó con un patrón alimentario. Para medir la empatía, estudiantes y docentes aplicaron el Test de Empatía Cognitiva y Afectiva (TECA), pero únicamente los docentes a la prueba Reading the Mind in the Eyes; para el desempeño académico se estudiaron las calificaciones de los estudiantes en 8 asignaturas del primer período académico de 2021, y se entrevistaron 4 estudiantes y 3 docentes. Los datos fueron analizados mediante los softwares WHO Anthro versión 3.1.0 y el sistema de análisis estadístico SPSS, los cuales arrojaron estadísticos descriptivos y analíticos a través de la prueba χ² de Pearson, análisis bivariado con coeficiente de correlación Pearson y Análisis de Componentes Principales (ACP). Se encontró que estudiantes con mayor edad eran mejores en Alegría Empática, pero el resto de las variables no se asociaron; no obstante, como tendencia sin significación estadística, las mujeres fueron más empáticas, un mejor estado nutricional pudo influir en mejores desempeños de la empatía, y esta estuvo más cerca de influir en Inglés y Física. Finalmente, estudiantes y docentes concluyeron que la empatía interviene en los procesos educativos, en tanto al trabajo en equipo y a las actividades docente. Así, en esta investigación, la empatía puede relacionarse con comportamientos prosociales asociados a ventajas en el aprendizaje, donde las ventajas adaptativas se mostraron muy asociadas a la edad, y podrían encontrarse en una relación, aunque débil, con el estado nutricional de los jóvenes y con la mejor comunicación con otros (aprendizaje de idiomas).
ABSTRACT: this paper analyzes the influence of empathy on teaching and learning process in educative contexts understanding some issues of evolutive anthropology like biologic, nutritional and behavior variation among students and teachers from Institución Educativa Enrique Vélez of Itagüí, Colombia. The evolutive aspects in this research are related with: the nutrition like survivel advantage indicator, the behaviors related to self-care or caring for others and the efficient communication among human beings. First, it obtained a non-probabilistic sample of 32 students between 15 and 20 years old and 7 teachers between 32 and 60 years old, who were characterized through a Google form. Later, the nutritional state of student was analyzed from size for age and Body Mass Index (BMI), which was supplemented with eating pattern study. Students and teachers applied a Test de Empatía Cognitiva y Afectiva (TECA) but only teachers did the Reading de Mind in the Eyes Test. Finally, the academic average was measured from notes in 8 subjects of first academic period, and 4 students and 3 professors were interviewed. The information was analyzed with WHO Anthro 3.1.0 software and statistical system analysis SPSS, it got analytic and descriptive analysis with Pearson's chi-squared test, bivariate Pearson's analysis coefficient and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The results found the elder students was better in empathic joy, while the other variables didn’t show correlations; even so, women seemed to be more empathetic than men, and probably a better nutritional state —maybe for balanced diet—influenced the empathy, and the empathy was closer of subjects like English and Physis. Thereby, in this research, empathy can be related with prosocial behaviors related with advantages in learning, where the adaptive advantages showed to be very correlated with age, where it could find a relation, but weak, with nutritional state of teens and with the better communication between groups (like learning languages).
... That is, the agent's gaze might simply act as a directional cue that increases participant's visual attention to the agent's visual field. To avoid gaze effects, it was suggested that the agent wear a blindfold that was either transparent or opaque, which participants experienced themselves prior to the experiment [e.g., [17][18][19]. This blindfold manipulation is considered a critical test for true perspective taking because participants see exactly the same scene, and only their knowledge of the transparency of the blindfold determines what the agent can or cannot see. ...
... Similarly, the agent's presence or absence during the location change in a false belief task could have had an impact on the saliency of the event and, thus, affected participants' memory of it, leading to the response time differences in previous studies [2,3]. The blindfold manipulation excludes these explanations because all variables (e.g., visual input, attention orientation etc.) can be kept exactly the same, independently of the belief manipulation [e.g., [17][18][19]. ...
Understanding what other people think is crucial to our everyday interactions. We seem to be affected by the perspective of others even in situations where it is irrelevant to us. This intrusion from others’ perspectives has been referred to as altercentric bias and has been suggested to reflect implicit belief processing. There is an ongoing debate about how robust such altercentric effects are and whether they indeed reflect true mentalizing or result from simpler, domain-general processes. As a critical test for true mentalizing, the blindfold manipulation has been proposed. That is, participants are familiarized with a blindfold that is either transparent or opaque. When they then observe a person wearing this blindfold, they can only infer what this person can or cannot see based on their knowledge of the blindfold’s transparency. Here, we used this blindfold manipulation to test whether participants’ reaction times in detecting an object depended on the agent’s belief about the object’s location, itself manipulated with a blindfold. As a second task, we asked participants to detect where the agent was going to look for the object. Across two experiments with a large participant pool (N = 234) and different settings (online/lab), we found evidence against altercentric biases in participants’ response times in detecting the object. We did, however, replicate a well-documented reality congruency effect. When asked to detect the agent’s action, in turn, participants were biased by their own knowledge of where the object should be, in line with egocentric biases previously found in false belief reasoning. These findings suggests that altercentric biases do not reflect belief processing but lower-level processes, or alternatively, that implicit belief processing does not occur when the belief needs to be inferred from one’s own experience.
... We can imagine that there may be higher order attributes of agency which mirror the recursive theory of mind. Additional attributes may parallel high order intentionality and reasoning, as in research in animal ethology, machine theory of mind, and cultural intelligence [49][50][51][52]. This line of thinking is discussed further in Sect. ...
... Recursive theory of mind might imply higher levels of agency, as presented in Sect. 4, and parallel higher order intentionality [49][50][51][52]. Future work may explore this other-modelling and how it can be leveraged to build shared knowledge. ...
In this work, we present a perspective on the role machine intelligence can play in supporting human abilities. In particular, we consider research in rehabilitation technologies such as prosthetic devices, as this domain requires tight coupling between human and machine. Taking an agent-based view of such devices, we propose that human–machine collaborations have a capacity to perform tasks which is a result of the combined agency of the human and the machine. We introduce communicative capital as a resource developed by a human and a machine working together in ongoing interactions. Development of this resource enables the partnership to eventually perform tasks at a capacity greater than either individual could achieve alone. We then examine the benefits and challenges of increasing the agency of prostheses by surveying literature which demonstrates that building communicative resources enables more complex, task-directed interactions. The viewpoint developed in this article extends current thinking on how best to support the functional use of increasingly complex prostheses, and establishes insight toward creating more fruitful interactions between humans and supportive, assistive, and augmentative technologies.
... scientists also have an important role to play, as our understanding of social behaviors will benefit from phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic approaches ( Heyes, 1998 ;Skinner, 1966 ). ...
... In support, recent behavioral studies suggest that social abilities of non-human primates (NHPs) are more sophisticated than previously thought and may represent primitive forms of human social abilities ( Bourgeois-Gironde et al., 2021 ;de Waal and Preston, 2017 ;Silk and House, 2016 ;Suchak et al., 2016 ). Indeed, precursors of ToM are found in NHPs (e.g., understanding other's goals and intentions and anticipating others' falsebelief) ( Call and Tomasello, 2008 ;Hayashi et al., 2020 ;Heyes, 1998 ;Krupenye et al., 2016 ;Marticorena et al., 2011 ;Povinelli and Preuss, 1995 ;Premack and Woodruff, 1978 ) . While the ability of ToM has been associated with emergence of metacognition and language in humans ( Tomasello, 2003 ), reproductive social behaviors may largely be driven by primitive brain structures (e.g., the diencephalon, paleocortex, endocrine systems) in all mammals ( Chen and Hong, 2018 ). ...
Social interaction is thought to provide a selection pressure for human intelligence, yet little is known about its neurobiological basis and evolution throughout the primate lineage. Recent advances in neuroimaging have enabled whole brain investigation of brain structure, function, and connectivity in humans and non-human primates (NHPs), leading to a nascent field of comparative connectomics. However, linking social behavior to brain organization across the primates remains challenging. Here, we review the current understanding of the macroscale neural mechanisms of social behaviors from the viewpoint of system neuroscience. We first demonstrate an association between the number of cortical neurons and the size of social groups across primates, suggesting a link between neural information-processing capacity and social capabilities. Moreover, by capitalizing on recent advances in species-harmonized functional MRI, we demonstrate that portions of the mirror neuron system and default-mode networks, which are thought to be important for representation of the other's actions and sense of self, respectively, exhibit similarities in functional organization in macaque monkeys and humans, suggesting possible homologies. With respect to these two networks, we describe recent developments in the neurobiology of social perception, joint attention, personality and social complexity. Together, the Human Connectome Project (HCP)-style comparative neuroimaging, hyperscanning, behavioral, and other multi-modal investigations are expected to yield important insights into the evolutionary foundations of human social behavior.
... Другими словами, в качестве альтернативы универсалистскому подходу, доминирующему, с точки зрения авторов, в современной психологии, они предлагают совершать когнитивные операции высокого уровня вплоть до наличия "theory of mind" (напр. : Byrne 1995;Heyes 1998) или зачатков абстрактного мышления (напр.: Зорина, Полетаева 2003; Зорина, Смирнова 2006). Более внимательный анализ показывает, однако, что основная проблема в данном случае состоит в некритичном использовании категорий, описывающих процесс мышления, при котором оказываются смешанными "философский" и "психологический" взгляды на мышление (критику подобных работ см. ...
Статья посвящена проблеме культурно-исторической типологии в когнитивном аспекте. В ней предложена модель культурно-исторической эволюции, опирающаяся на выделение четырех базовых когнитивных уровней: уровень А характерен для высших приматов, уровень В формируется в первобытной культуре и является характеристикой традициональных культур, уровень С возникает в ранних теоретических культурах, таких как культура Древней Греции. Переход на уровень D обусловлен возникновением мировых религий и, позднее, социально-экономическими процессами, происходящими в Новое время. Отдельные когнитивные операции на уровне D можно выявить в текстах христианских и мусульманских философов периода Средневековья, при этом заметное расширение спектра и области применения таких операций характеризует культуры Нового времени и особенно значимо для современных индустриальных культур.
... The ability to seemingly read minds is early-developing, crosscultural, and continues to develop in its complexity throughout the early childhood years (Masangkay et al., 1974;Flavell et al., 1981;Kiley Hamlin et al., 2013;Tomasello, 2018). Basic aspects of Theory of Mind are likely shared with non-human primates (Hare et al., 2001;Kaminski et al., 2008;Call and Tomasello, 2011;Krupenye et al., 2016), with ongoing arguments about the degree to which even higher-order Theory of Mind may be present in non-human primates (Kano et al., 2019;Royka and Santos, 2022;Heyes, 1998). ...
The question of whether large language models (LLMs) possess Theory of Mind (ToM) -- often defined as the ability to reason about others' mental states -- has sparked significant scientific and public interest. However, the evidence as to whether LLMs possess ToM is mixed, and the recent growth in evaluations has not resulted in a convergence. Here, we take inspiration from cognitive science to re-evaluate the state of ToM evaluation in LLMs. We argue that a major reason for the disagreement on whether LLMs have ToM is a lack of clarity on whether models should be expected to match human behaviors, or the computations underlying those behaviors. We also highlight ways in which current evaluations may be deviating from "pure" measurements of ToM abilities, which also contributes to the confusion. We conclude by discussing several directions for future research, including the relationship between ToM and pragmatic communication, which could advance our understanding of artificial systems as well as human cognition.
... Although there is scant evidence of anti-realist historicism, associationists are part of a long tradition in which parsimony has been prized (Thorndike, 1898); a tradition that may incline them to overlook the need for experiments to distinguish simple and complex processes. Mentalists, on the other hand, are influenced by research on "theory of mind" which, since its inception (Premack & Woodruff, 1978), has tended to assume that, if social behaviour is not due to a very simple kind of associative learning, it must be due to reasoning about mental states (Heyes, 1998). With a blindspot around the possibility of domain-general reasoning about observable features of other agents, this tendency may obscure the need for experiments to find out whether complex processes are or are not socially-specific. ...
After more than a century in which social learning was blackboxed by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and economists, there is now a thriving industry in cognitive neuroscience producing computational models of learning from and about other agents. This is a hugely positive development. The tools of computational cognitive neuroscience are rigorous and precise. They have the potential to prise open the black box. However, we argue that, from the perspective of a scientific realist, these tools are not yet being applied in an optimal way. To fulfil their potential, the shiny new methods of cognitive neuroscience need to be better coordinated with old-fashioned, contrastive experimental designs. Inferences from model complexity to cognitive complexity, of the kind made by those who favour lean interpretations of behaviour (‘associationists’), require social learning to be tested in challenging task environments. Inferences from cognitive complexity to social specificity, made by those who favour rich interpretations (‘mentalists’), call for non-social control experiments. A parsimonious model that fits current data is a good start, but carefully designed experiments are needed to distinguish models that tell us how social learning could be done from those that tell us how it is really done.
... Uno de los problemas de la propuesta del Canon, en opinión de Heyes (1998), está en que no hay una razón suficiente para suponer que el uso de la teoría de la mente o de procesos mentales en animales, requiere menos inteligencia por parte de estos. Ni la inteligencia ni la simplicidad pueden medirse de una forma razonable. ...
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.
... Although there is scant evidence of anti-realist historicism, associationists are part of a long tradition in which parsimony has been prized (Thorndike 1898); a tradition that may incline them to overlook the need for experiments to distinguish simple and complex processes. Mentalists, on the other hand, are influenced by research on "theory of mind" which, since its inception (Premack & Woodruff 1978), has tended to assume that, if social behaviour is not due to a very simple kind of associative learning, it must be due to reasoning about mental states (Heyes 1998). With a blindspot around the possibility of domain-general reasoning about observable features of other agents, this tendency may obscure the need for experiments to find out whether complex processes are or are not socially-specific. ...
After more than a century in which social learning was blackboxed by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and economists, there is now a thriving industry in cognitive neuroscience producing computational models of learning from and about other agents. This is a hugely positive development. The tools of computational cognitive neuroscience are rigorous and precise. They have the potential to prise open the black box. However, we argue that, from the perspective of a scientific realist, these tools are not yet being applied in an optimal way. To fulfil their potential, the shiny new methods of cognitive neuroscience need to be better coordinated with old-fashioned, contrastive experimental designs. Inferences from model complexity to cognitive complexity, of the kind made by those who favour lean interpretations of behaviour (‘associationists’), require social learning to be tested in challenging task environments. Inferences from cognitive complexity to social specificity, made by those who favour rich interpretations (‘mentalists’), call for non-social control experiments. A parsimonious model that fits current data is a good start, but carefully designed experiments are needed to distinguish models that tell us how social learning could be done from those that tell us how it is really done.
... While taken together this evidence suggests that dogs have some understanding of another individual's visual perspective, there is as of yet no evidence that dogs mentally adopt another individual's point of view (de ned by Flavell et al. 1981 as 'Level 2 perspective taking'), which would be evidence for a true 'ToM'. One paradigm that was proposed to explore this is the so-called 'goggles-paradigm' which was rst proposed by Cecilia Heyes (1998). In the proposed paradigm an individual gets the opportunity to gain experience with two pair of goggles, which look identical from the outside apart from a different coloured frame, but one is opaque while the other is transparent. ...
Dogs have strong bonds with humans but the extent to which they can take our perspective into account is still in question. This study adapts the goggles experiment methodology to investigate if domestic dogs engage in level 2 perspective taking. The dogs not only have to understand when the human individual’s line of sight is blocked (level 1 perspective taking), but have to infer the other individual’s visual experience based on their own previous experience. A competitive context of food stealing is used.
Dogs (N = 24) first gained experience with two compartments, learning that food was accessible from one end while the other end had either a transparent or opaque lid. When stealing the food, dogs were visible to the human only through the transparent lid. In the test, dogs experienced two conditions: where both compartments were baited and a human either remained in the room (social condition) or left the room (non-social condition). Three factors were observed: (i) whether the dog took the food, (ii) the compartment the dog stole from, and (iii) latency to steal. The findings revealed that dogs didn't exhibit a preference for stealing from the concealed side, demonstrating that dogs don't consider the human's perspective when selecting which food to steal. However, in the social condition more dogs refrained from stealing, demonstrating sensitivity to the scenario’s competitive nature. It’s possible that the setting was overall too challenging and future research should look for alternative procedures to address the question of dogs’ understanding of a human’s perspective.
... It has been argued (but see, e.g., Bugnyar, 2017) that humans' ToM skills, and how humans use them to guide their social behavior and build their expectations, are exceptional in the animal kingdom (Dunbar, 1998;Frith & Frith, 2005). Therefore, ToM has been a target of extensive research in other social animals, such as nonhuman primates (Heyes, 1998;Horschler et al., 2020;Kano et al., 2020;Krupenye et al., 2016;Lewis & Krupenye, 2022;Premack & Woodruff, 1978), dogs (Catala et al., 2017;Hare & Tomasello, 2005;Kaminski et al., 2009;Lonardo et al., 2021;Maginnity & Grace, 2014), and dolphins (Tschudin 2006, for a critical discussion, see Hill et al., 2018). ...
Finding ways to investigate false belief understanding nonverbally is not just important for preverbal children but also is the only way to assess theory of mind (ToM)-like abilities in nonhuman animals. In this preregistered study, we adapted the design from a previous study on pet dogs to investigate false belief understanding in children and to compare it with belief understanding of those previously tested dogs. A total of 32 preschool children (aged 5–6 years) saw the displacement of a reward and obtained nonverbal cueing of the empty container from an adult communicator holding either a true or false belief. In the false belief condition, when the communicator did not know the location of the reward, children picked the baited container, but not the cued container, more often than the empty one. In the true belief condition, when the communicator witnessed the displacement yet still cued the wrong container, children performed randomly. The children’s behavior pattern was at odds with that of the dogs tested in a previous study, which picked the cued container more often when the human communicator held a false belief. In addition to species comparisons, because our task does not require verbal responses or relational sentence understanding, it can also be used in preverbal children. The children in our study behaved in line with the existing ToM literature, whereas most (but not all) dogs from the previously collected sample, although sensitive to differences between the belief conditions, deviated from the children. This difference suggests that using closely matched paradigms and experimental procedures can reveal decisive differences in belief processing between species. It also demonstrates the need for a more comprehensive exploration and direct comparison of the various aspects of false belief processing and ToM in different species to understand the evolution of social cognition.
... However, a deeper understanding of the mind of a chimpanzee can provide insight into how intelligent they are-specifically, how the theory of mind portrays their comprehension of empathy, social dynamics, and more. Researcher at University College London's Department of Psychology Cecilia Heyes describes theory of mind in animals as playing a, "...role in generating behavior and infers the presence of mental states in others by observing their appearance and behavior under various circumstances," (Heyes, 1998). As the closest relatives to people, chimpanzees exhibit a high level of intelligence, and understanding of beliefs and intention, suggesting that they possess a theory of mind. ...
... Studies of monkeys, apes, and humans suggest that only humans, and possibly some apes, have theory of mind abilities, while monkeys do not (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990;Heyes 1998). It is therefore reasonable to assume that new brain regions or systems have evolved, which underpin these abilities. ...
It has been nearly 10 years since the material for the original edition of this book was prepared. During that time, there has been dramatic growth in the fields of theory of mind, autism, and cognitive neuroscience. This new edition includes a whole section on the cognitive neuroscience of "mind-reading", bringing together varied research methods such as functional neuro-imaging, single cell recording, and neuropsychology. In addition, there is expanded coverage of primate studies and the evolution of a theory of mind, and new information relating theory of mind in clinical populations other than autism, such as schizophrenia. The original section on normal development has been updated, as has the debate over the relationship between theory of mind deficits and autism. Understanding other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience remains the key sourcebook for this important area, which attracts researchers and clinicians in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and primatology . The new material in this edition will ensure that it is essential reading for these groups. From reviews of the first edition: [This book] will be of absorbing interest to all those involved in the fields of autism and child development. It also contains thought-provoking ideas of relevance to psychology and psychiatry in general. L. Wing, National Autistic Society This book would be of great interest to researchers of child development but also to many clinicians and teachers working with individuals with autism. British Journal of Psychiatry.
... 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). ...
... Another important feature of social dynamics is the ability to infer mental states in others and oneself, as described in Premack & Woodruff's (1978) 'Theory of Mind' (ToM), although this theory has been discussed amply, in particular its inflexible interpretation when applied to animal behaviour (Heyes, 1998). Some authors consider that two other cognitive capabilities -the 'Mirror Self-Recognition' (MSR) and Self-Awareness, or SA (Gallup Jr., 1982Keenan et al., 2003;Gallup Jr. & Anderson, 2020) -are inextricably related to ToM. ...
Self-recognition is the ability of an animal to identify itself when observing its reflected image. Although many species have been tested, self-recognition has only been confirmed conclusively in a few taxa. We presented five Rosy-faced lovebirds, Agapornis roseicollis, with their own image using a mirror and applied the mark test, attaching a black sticker to each bird’s throat. We evaluated the potential tactile effect of the mark by attaching a transparent sticker to the bird’s throat. The results were analysed using Generalised Linear Mixed Models, which showed that four of five birds touched the black mark more than the transparent mark. There was no evidence that the birds could see the mark without the assistance of the mirror. The results of the study provide encouraging evidence that Agapornis roseicollis is able to recognise itself in a mirror and is the first parrot species to pass the mark test.
... Research programs executed by Savage-Rumbaugh et al. (1978), Povinelli et al. (1994Povinelli et al. ( ,1996Povinelli et al. ( , 2000, Tomasello (1996), Theal et al. (1999, Call & Tomasello (1999) and Heyes (1998) At this point some caution is in order. What does the last sentence actually mean? ...
The topic of the research executed certainly since the early nineties has always circled around the particularity of being human. If Darwin was right in stating that the human was a species amongst other species, in other words that a human too was an animal in principle not different from other animals in particular those closely related, in what then lay the difference and further how could that being different have been becoming into being?
I have been fortunate in that I could study a broad spectrum of subjects in the humanities going from psychology, sociology, politics, ethics, economics, history, ethology etc and finally philosophy. It allowed to profit from diversity of insights and within disciplines such as psychology and philosophy different paradigms. In the long run different insights took form and found publication in The Forgotten Transition (2018).
Cutting corners, this allowed formulating three core hypotheses. The first discusses the transition from a world experienced as a stream of events into a presentation of a set of manipulable units. The seconds focuses on mediated manipulation as the difference making the difference setting the human apart and the third on the ability to bring forth narratives.
The present ON-Series offers a further set of explanations ordered into twelve themes. The first volume discusses the object, aboutness, meaning, storytelling, uniqueness and the infinite possibilities of man. The second part is on the human condition, the psyche, reflexion, alienation, reality and consciousness. Most of the themes consist of several contributions. All can be read separately.
... If 70% of the tested primates indeed succeed, this is often interpreted as consistent with both accounts (as- 30 suming this effect is significantly above chance). Therefore, a task like this one would fail at differentiating between accounts, and this is usually the state of comparative research on Theory of Mind-for every study, there exists a mentalistic and a non-mentalistic account that both qualitatively explain the data (19)(20)(21)(22). 35 This analysis, however, makes two implicit assumptions. ...
Can non-human primates (NHPs) represent other minds? Answering this question has been historically difficult because primates can fail experimental tasks due to a lack of motivation, or succeed through simpler mechanisms. Here we introduce a computational approach for comparative cognition that enables us to quantitatively test the explanatory power of competing accounts. We formalized a collection of theories of NHP social cognition with varying representational complexity and compared them against data from classical NHP studies, focusing on the ability to determine what others know based on what they see. Our results uncovered that, while the most human-like models of NHP social cognition make perfect qualitative predictions, they predict effect sizes that are too strong to be plausible. Instead, theories of intermediate representational complexity best explained the data. At the same time, we show that it is possible for human-like models to capture non-human primate behavior (NHP), as long as we assume that NHPs rely on these representations only about one third of the time. These results show that, in visual perspective taking tasks, NHPs likely draw upon simpler social representations than humans, either in terms of representational complexity, or in terms of use.
... Imitation plays an important role in language acquisition, especially in infancy. In comparison studies, it is observed that monkeys perform lower than expected in imitation skills (Custance 1995, Heyes 1998, while it is possible to observe that solely vocal imitation is excellent in some animals from which our common ancestor, such as the parrot, diverged many years ago. This topic is elaborated on in the Hand Gestures versus Vocalization section. ...
One can understand the importance of language with its relation to mental activities such as memory and thinking. Language, a crucial human ability, has long attracted the attention of various theorists and philosophers. Language, by its nature, interacts with many biological, cultural and psychological factors. This article has drawn a general framework by bringing together the views from disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, anthropology, biology and neuroscience. On the one hand, while the theoretical opinions about language are included, on the other hand, language is discussed in the context of the changes we went through by separating from our common ancestor in the evolution process. When dealing with language, it is possible to talk about our differences from animals, the interaction of language with our cognitive processes and its organization in the brain. The views put forward by philosophers such as Plato and Descartes about the relationship between language and cognitions have expanded by Chomsky, Pinker, Dunbar and others on the evolution of language. In this article, evolutionary psychology, which strives to understand language and its relationship with cognitions, is emphasized by combining the data of modern evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. Language is acquired quickly and without the intense need for learning experiences, thanks to innate schemas, suggests that evolution formed these schemas. According to another view, the influence of the environment and culture gains importance instead of innatism. In addition, different opinions on the evolution of language are briefly discussed. Discussion topics include triggers of language development in evolution. These are related to biological and cultural influences, influences of vocalization and hand gestures on language. When thinking about language and its evolution, it is inevitable to observe and examine cognitive processes and thought. Multidisciplinary studies can also provide important information about the evolution of language while trying to understand the complex relationship between language and cognition.
... The rule, for example, may be 'agents search for things where they last saw them. ' Heyes (1998) proposed an experimental design to distinguish reading an agent's mind from other forms of anticipating an agent's behaviour. In the goggles test, goggles are employed to ensure that study participants are not understanding others' belief states based on observable behavioural cues but are rather projecting their own mental states onto them. ...
There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these false-belief data to bear on Asay’s form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures.
... To continue assessing the role of mentalizing on con ict resolution, future studies should establish scenario in which individuals can outcompete others decisions based on the knowledge that third parties have about them. For example, combining game theory models such as the UG with paradigms suitable for testing theory of mind abilities such as the "goggles experiment" 39,40 . Importantly, and in contrast with our current task, we suggest that those decisions might be based on social features of the individuals rather than on the outcomes of their decisions. ...
Partner choice promotes competition among individuals to be selected as a cooperative partner, a phenomenon referred to as competitive altruism. Our study explores chimpanzees' competitive altruism in a triadic Ultimatum Game where two proposers can send offers to a responder who can only accept one offer. Chimpanzees engaged in competitive altruism by sending higher offers on final vs initial trials in the triadic condition and not in a dyadic control condition. Chimpanzees also increased their offers after being rejected in the triadic condition. Finally, and most notably, second proposers strategically tried to outcompete first proposers by offering more before the responder could choose which offer to accept. Our results suggest chimpanzees consider how third-party interactions affect them and apply strategies to maximize their chances of being selected as cooperative partners.
... En ese sentido, se afirma que chimpancés, bonobos y gorilas tienen niveles de teoría de la menjte muy semejantes a los de los humanos. Claro que la capacidad de entender la intención del otro es una característica más sofisticada y rara, y que ni siquiera es encontrada en todos los humanos, según los que, por ejemplo, afirman que el autismo es un estado de ausencia de la teoría de la mente (Gomez, 1994;Heyes, 1998;Scasselati, 2001). 38 El filósofo de la mente, Daniel Dannet sugirió en 1978 que la teoría de la mente fuera la capacidad de identificar falsas creencias, o sea, de identificar que, en una misma realidad, individuso distintos pueden tener ideas distintas, y creer en ideas aún cuando incluso sean falsas (Goldman, 2012). ...
Desarrollamos el modelo teórico M8 - Modelo de ocho dispositivosadaptativos del cerebro social ? donde incluímos el módulo de puniciónentre los siete que ya estaban previstos en modelos anteriores de cogniciónsocial (Kanazawa, 2004 ). Definimos que el Big five ? 5 grandes rasgos de personalidad , que resultan de la acción estratégica de los módulos . Para testear la existencia del módulo cognitivo de punición, estudiamos elinterés popular por la pena de muerte y la punición en el mundo, conénfasis en los Estados Unidos (2004-2013). Buscamos correlaciones entrecuatro fuentes: 1) datos del Gallup institute ; 2) dados del trabajo de PeterJason Rentfrow (2010); 3) datos del The Democracy Ranking of the Quality of Democracy sobre la calidad de la democracia en los países del mundo y4) datos de Big Data creados a partir de la herramienta Google Trends .Trazamos 4 hipótesis para realizar el estudio: 1) la influencia del M8 (ymás precisamente del módulo de punición), el interés por la punición y la pena de muerte es universal y no varía mucho en su distribución, incluso enescenarios estruturales distintos; 2) existe una fuerte correlación entre altosniveles de extroversión e interés por la pena de muerte en los EstadosUnidos; 3) hay una sólida relación entre interés por la pena de muerte einterés en campañas electorales en los Estados Unidos; 4) existe unatendencia para que niveles similares en cuanto al interés por la pena demuerte aparezca en grupos con preferencias distintas (política y religión),en tanto haya semejanza en cuanto a la distribución de los rasgos de la personalidad (con variaciones en los mismos rasgos). Nuestros resultadosapuntan que la primera y la segunda hipótesis son partidarias tanto en países de alto como de bajo s core democrático, hay incidencia de interés por la punición y la pena de muerte; en los Estados Unidos hay una fuertísima correlación entre interés por la pena de muerte y la extroversión( r = 0,472; p = 0,001). La tercera hipótesis tiene también alta adhesión,existe una correlación altísima entre interés electoral e interés por la penade muerte ( r = 0,336; p < 0,001). Además de eso, encontramos un patrón deestacionalidad de interés consistente, inédito en la literatura. La cuartahipótesis muestra relativa adhesión, puesto que escenarios donde haydistribución de personalidad semejante (con variaciones en los mismosrasgos), los individuos tienden a mostrar niveles de interés semejante por la pena de muerte. La corroboración de las hipótesis 1, 2 y 3 dan base para laexistencia de un módulo punitivo propio del modelo M8 de cognición social.
... Explorations of whether nonhuman species possess the ability to reason about unobservable mental states has gathered momentum in recent years. Several research laboratories have explored other species' abilities to understand false belief, attention, the perceptual sources of knowledge, the communicative intention underlying the gestural acts of pointing and looking, visual perspective-taking, and even the distinction between accidental and intentional actions (for reviews, Call & Tomasello, in press;Hare, 2001;Heyes, 1998;Povinelli & Giambrone, 2000;Suddendorf & Whiten, 2001). To date, however, the results of these investigations have not definitively established whether the ability to reason about mental states is present in species other than our own. ...
... This form of social cognition, a substantive research theme in child development research, has been theorized to be a uniquely human quality that is linked to the development of cognitive abilities, social skills, and sophisticated communicative capacities (e.g., Astington, 1993;Perner, 1991;Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Comparative researchers have addressed exhibitory aspects of theory of mind, that is whether other species attribute intentions, beliefs, and desires to others, with cleverly designed laboratory and field experiments (e.g., Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990;Gallup, 1982;Heyes, 1998;Povinelli & Giambrone, 2001;Premack & Woodruff, 1978;Whiten & Byrne, 1988). Comparative psychologists have been more conservative in their interpretations of data compared to developmental psychologists. ...
... Ever since Premack & Woodruff (1978) asked if chimpanzees could have a theory of mind, investigators working with great apes have been hard-pressed to devise experimental methods adequate to meet a behaviorist challenge (Heyes, 1993(Heyes, , 1998. Meanwhile, the literature examining children's theory of mind is dominated by studies documenting children's verbal accounts of their observations, expectations, intentions, and perspectives. ...
It is well known that children's activities are full of pretending and imagination, but it is less appreciated that animals can also show similar activities. Originally published in 2002, this book focuses on comparing and contrasting children's and animals' pretenses and imaginative activities. In the text, overviews of research present conflicting interpretations of children's understanding of the psychology of pretense, and describe sociocultural factors which influence children's pretenses. Studies of nonhuman primates provide examples of their pretenses and other simulative activities, explore their representational and imaginative capacities and compare their skills with children. Although the psychological requirements for pretending are controversial, evidence presented in this volume suggests that great apes and even monkeys may share capacities for imagination with children, and that children's early pretenses may be less psychological than they appear.
... Research programs executed by , Povinelli et al. (1994Povinelli et al. ( ,1996Povinelli et al. ( , 2000, Tomasello (1996), Theal et al. (1999), Call & Tomasello (1999) and Heyes (1998) succeeds to solve a problem requiring eight procedural steps to be performed in a particular order. ...
From an early age on I have been interested in the humanities, in particular the different schools of psychology, sociology, history and politics. Later in life I started with the study in philosophy and ethics. An interest in technique resulted in a multi disciplinary point of view whereby the operationalism inspired by the said technique played an important role. Kant’s approach of investigating conditions of possibility combined with looking for answers on the level of operations became expressed in a doctoral research investigating the cognitive dimension of consciousness. In a later project on the alleged impact of the workings of mirror neurons, the importance of embodiment and action became a central theme. Profiting from data and insights gathered in the research programs mentioned, the attention became by accident attracted on cognitive archaeology. The underlying idea is that the characteristics from unearthed artefacts could tell something about the cognitive mind setting of the early humans. Following closely the publications on research on the cognitive abilities of great apes on the one hand and familiar with similar research on humans on the other, comparison provided the stepping stone into this project which so far has been going on for almost two decades now. It allowed suggesting hypotheses on the specificities of human knowledge in particular, the human condition in general.
A methodological point of view needs to be mentioned. Having studied philosophy and by this familiar with the history of Western thought, it became clear that many concepts taken for granted are actually particular history based interpretations. A deconstruction is imminent in order to expose the underlying operations, motor as well as cognitive in nature.
The publications on offer such as this volume are collections of essays on cognition and the human condition. The consequence is that the different chapters can be chosen at will.
... When behaviorists go beyond the evidence to say not only that interior experiences and exterior behavior have environmental correlates, but also that such experiences and behaviors are really nothing but the result of reinforcement Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture contingencies, conditioning, or contextual influences, then difficulties arise and we end up with an animal psychology without an animal psyche (Allen-Hermanson 2008;Carruthers 1989Carruthers , 2004Carruthers , 2008Carruthers , 2018C. Fisher 2005;Heyes 1998;Williams 2018). ...
This is the first part of a two-part article that presents the theoretical and empirical case for nonhuman animal (hereafter, ‘animal’) spirituality. Part 1 discusses the relevance of evolutionary theory and species differences for understanding animals’ capacity to have spiritual experience, conceptual issues related to defining animal spirituality, and methodological considerations pertaining to the use of analogical reasoning and animal-centered anthropomorphism as heuristic strategies in the study of animal spirituality. Behavioral and ethological evidence bearing on the existence of awareness, perceptual experience, self-awareness, and meaning-making in the absence of human language in animals is presented. Part 2 examines evidence for six biopsychosocial capabilities in animals that are proposed building blocks of human spirituality—cognition, imagination, emotion, moral sense, personality, and value-life. Part 2 concludes with a discussion of the implications of animal spirituality for society’s treatment of animals, humanizing an inhumane human biocultural world, and advancing understanding of human spirituality.
... 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;. This alternative hypothesis has been called 'behaviour-reading'. ...
... Several studies have used 'perspective-taking' paradigms to investigate whether nonhuman primates 52,53 or young children 54 understand the relationship between seeing and knowing. Heyes 55 claimed that in many such studies, preference for a knowledgeable informant could be explained by formation of an associative rule across trials, and proposed a novel methodology. Heyes's proposal involved giving an individual first-hand experience of a novel barrier that granted or denied perceptual access, before testing them to see whether they project similar mental states onto others who face the same barrier. ...
To differentiate the use of simple associations from use of explicitly reasoned selective social learning, we can look for age-related changes in children's behaviour that might signify a switch from one social learning strategy to the other. We presented 4-to 8-year-old children visiting a zoo in Scotland (N = 109) with a task in which the perceptual access of two informants was determined by the differing opacity of two screens of similar visual appearance during a hiding event. Initially success could be achieved by forming an association or inferring a rule based on salient visual (but causally irrelevant) cues. However, following a switch in the scenario, success required explicit reasoning about informants' potential to provide valuable information based on their perceptual access. Following the switch, older children were more likely to select a knowledgeable informant. This suggests that some younger children who succeeded in the pre-switch trials had inferred rules or formed associations based on superficial, yet salient, visual cues, whereas older children made the link between perceptual access and the potential to inform. This late development and apparent cognitive challenge are consistent with proposals that such capacities are linked to the distinctiveness of human cumulative culture.
... Yet, mapping these skills along phylogenetic trees and their relation to social or ecological conditions (e.g., [11,12] modifications of their mechanistic building blocks. Earlier views of cognitive evolution were based on some postulated, loosely defined genetic adaptations, such as language instinct [13,14], mind reading abilities [15], or mirror neurons [16,17], but those are increasingly replaced by approaches relying on explicit associative learning principles that can gradually form complex representations of statistically learned information [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. In line with these recent views, in order to understand the critical steps in cognitive evolution, one should identify specific modifications that can elaborate simple learning processes and make them better in some way, so that they can improve decision-making and eventually enhance fitness. ...
What makes cognition “advanced” is an open and not precisely defined question. One perspective involves increasing the complexity of associative learning, from conditioning to learning sequences of events (“chaining”) to representing various cue combinations as “chunks.” Here we develop a weighted graph model to study the mechanism enabling chunking ability and the conditions for its evolution and success, based on the ecology of the cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus. In some environments, cleaners must learn to serve visitor clients before resident clients, because a visitor leaves if not attended while a resident waits for service. This challenge has been captured in various versions of the ephemeral reward task, which has been proven difficult for a range of cognitively capable species. We show that chaining is the minimal requirement for solving this task in its common simplified laboratory format that involves repeated simultaneous exposure to an ephemeral and permanent food source. Adding ephemeral–ephemeral and permanent–permanent combinations, as cleaners face in the wild, requires individuals to have chunking abilities to solve the task. Importantly, chunking parameters need to be calibrated to ecological conditions in order to produce adaptive decisions. Thus, it is the fine-tuning of this ability, which may be the major target of selection during the evolution of advanced associative learning.
... Theory of mind has been extensively researched by the psychology community over the last few decades (Baron-Cohen, 1997;Flavell, 2004). Generally, false belief tasks are used to test the ToM capabilities of children and animals (Premack and Woodruff, 1978;Wimmer and Perner, 1983;Leslie and Frith, 1988;Heyes, 1998;Wellman, 2014). In developmental psychology, the famous Sally-Anne test (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) is widely adopted to assess a child's ability to attribute false beliefs to others. 1 Our code and dataset can be found at: Textual Time Travel. ...
... Another set of experiments used the so-called "goggles" experiment (Heyes, 1998) in which animals are to be trained with goggles with one rim color corresponding to transparent goggles and another rim color to opaque goggles. The aim is to find out whether, based on its own experience, an animal might attribute mental states to others that appear to have the same visual experience. ...
In this article we review publications relevant to addressing widely reported claims in both the academic and popular press that chimpanzees working memory (WM) is comparable to, if not exceeding, that of humans. WM is a complex multidimensional construct with strong parallels in humans to prefrontal cortex and cognitive development. These parallels occur in chimpanzees, but to a lesser degree. We review empirical evidence and conclude that the size of WM in chimpanzees is 2 ± 1 versus Miller’s famous 7 ± 2 in humans. Comparable differences occur in experiments on chimpanzees relating to strategic and attentional WM subsystems. Regardless of the domain, chimpanzee WM performance is comparable to that of humans around the age of 4 or 5. Next, we review evidence showing parallels among the evolution of WM capacity in hominins ancestral to Homo sapiens, the phylogenetic evolution of hominins leading to Homo sapiens, and evolution in the complexity of stone tool technology over this time period.
... Research programs executed by , Povinelli et al. (1994Povinelli et al. ( ,1996Povinelli et al. ( , 2000, Tomasello (1996), Theal et al. (1999), Call & Tomasello (1999) and Heyes (1998) to name some all reach similar conclusions. Chimpanzees and other non human primates do not understand the psychic condition of others. ...
Cognitive possibilities are often seen as sprouting from abilities. Furthermore behaviour is getting understood as being rendered by events in a past long gone, but fired up by veiled stimuli in the present.
In this contribution the focus will be directed on what is happening in the present moment of time and location, the only instance an organism exists in. From out this focus the question arises into the operations supporting if not bringing forth the cognitive possibilities mentioned. What operations are needed to realize thinking about tomorrow or recalling an event from the past? This already shows the action theoretical approach.
Three cognitive skills will be discussed: displacement in space and time or self initiated imagination, being able to gauge the mind of another person and being able not only to reflect but in particular to realize a condition of reflexion. The availability of an object pattern within the framework of mediated manipulation will provide the stepping stone to the mentioned skills.
This contribution comes in three parts. Explaining the aim provides the stepping stone. Elements making up the background making further explanation understandable will be offered under “Perspectives”. Further the operations supporting if not allowing self initiated imagination, theory of mind and the ability to reflect on oneself will be discussed. A critical note on the concept of the feature of “an open end or an apparent endless creativity” will round up.
Although dogs exhibit remarkable capabilities for interacting with humans, the underlying cognitive mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. Here, we investigated canine perspective taking by challenging dogs to decide whether and where to steal food in the absence of a human who had prohibited them from doing so. The dogs could only infer the experimenter’s presence through a sound (carrot chopping) they had perceived during a prior exploration phase, in which they also had the opportunity to observe from which locations in the room the human was visible. In the test, the majority of dogs preferred to steal from a plate that was not visible from the location where the human had chopped carrots before when they heard a playback of the chopping sound but not when they heard a control sound (street noise). These findings provide evidence that dogs anticipate the behavior of humans without relying on observable visual cues.
The objective of the present work is to analyse and discuss the
underpinnings of a naturalistic-evolutionary approach to consciousness
with special attention to the demarcation of a concept
of consciousness that applies to the evolutionary perspective.
The thesis aims at unravelling characteristics of the operationalised concept of
consciousness with special emphasis on 1) controversies characteristic
of consciousness and 2) implications on an evolutionary concept
of consciousness.
Forty years ago, Gallup proposed that theory of mind presupposes self‐awareness. Following Humphrey, his hypothesis was that individuals can infer the mental states of others thanks to the ability to monitor their own mental states in similar circumstances. Since then, advances in several disciplines, such as comparative and developmental psychology, have provided empirical evidence to test Gallup's hypothesis. Herein, we review and discuss this evidence.
This volume provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date compendium of theory and research in the field of human intelligence. Each of the 42 chapters is written by world-renowned experts in their respective fields, and collectively, they cover the full range of topics of contemporary interest in the study of intelligence. The handbook is divided into nine parts: Part I covers intelligence and its measurement; Part II deals with the development of intelligence; Part III discusses intelligence and group differences; Part IV concerns the biology of intelligence; Part V is about intelligence and information processing; Part VI discusses different kinds of intelligence; Part VII covers intelligence and society; Part VIII concerns intelligence in relation to allied constructs; and Part IX is the concluding chapter, which reflects on where the field is currently and where it still needs to go.
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.
Opinion piece: ape gestures are made intentionally, inviting parallels with human language; but how similar are their gestures to words? Here we ask this in three ways, considering: flexibility and ambiguity, first- and second-order intentionality, and usage in interactive exchanges. Many gestures are used to achieve several, often very distinct, goals. Such apparent ambiguity in meaning is potentially disruptive for communication, but—as with human language—situational and interpersonal context may largely resolve the intended meaning. Our evidence for first-order intentional use of gesture is abundant, but how might we establish a case for the second-order intentional use critical to language? Finally, words are rarely used in tidy signal–response sequences but are exchanged in back-and-forth interaction. Do gestures share this property? In this paper, we examine these questions and set out ways in which they can be resolved, incorporating data from wild chimpanzees.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cognition, communication and social bonds in primates’.
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.
This paper reexamines the case for mentality — the thesis that knowledge is a mental state in its own right, and not only derivatively, simply by virtue of being composed out of mental states or by virtue of being a property of mental states — and explores a novel argument for it. I argue that a certain property singled out by psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science as distinctive of skillful behavior (agentive control) is best understood in terms of knowledge. While psychological theories of agentive control that appeal to monitoring mechanisms, such as attention, have been proposed, these theories cannot account for the full scope of controlled action. By contrast, I argue that an epistemic theory of agentive control that invokes knowledge is extensionally adequate. It is when it comes to understanding the hallmarks of skillful performance that the theoretical benefits of thinking of knowledge as mental can be fully appreciated.
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