Apes can guess what others are thinking - just like humans, study finds
Apes can guess what others are thinking - just like humans, study finds
Research indicates apes are able to predict one another’s beliefs and suggests that other primates have complex inner lives
Hannah Devlin
@hannahdev
Thursday 6 October 2016 14.00 EDT
Apes have a human-like ability to guess what others are thinking, even in cases when someone holds a mistaken belief, according to research that supports the view that other primates can empathise and have complex inner lives.
The findings, in chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans, are the first to clearly demonstrate that apes can predict another’s beliefs – even when they know that presumption is false.
“This cognitive ability is at the heart of so many human social skills,” said Christopher Krupenye of Duke University. “I think our findings start to suggest that maybe apes have a deeper understanding of each other than we previously thought.”
In a fresh take on a classic psychology experiment, the apes were able to correctly anticipate that someone would look for a hidden item in a specific location, even if the apes knew that the item was no longer there.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/06/apes-can-guess-what-others-are-thinking-just-like-humans
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Apes share cognitive ability of humans' to recognise perspective of others
Updated about 9 hours ago
Scientists using homemade videos featuring a person in a King Kong costume have documented a remarkable cognitive skill shared by chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans: the human-like ability to recognise when someone else's beliefs are wrong.
The research demonstrated that these great apes — humankind's closest-living evolutionary cousins — possess a capability thought until now to have been the exclusive domain of people, the scientists said.
As individual apes were shown videos featuring a human actor and a costumed ape-like King Kong character, researchers tracked their eye movements.
In the video, the ape watches King Kong hide an object in one of two boxes.
When the person leaves, King Kong moves the object to a new location.
When the person returns to find the object, the apes looked intently at the original spot in anticipation of the person searching there.
Even though the apes knew the object had been moved, they understood that the human thought it was still there, said study co-leader Fumihiro Kano, a comparative psychologist Kyoto University in Japan.
More:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-07/apes-can-recognise-when-somone-elses-beilefs-are-wrong/7912064
