The World's Smartest Chimp Has Died.
'Her life helped us answer the question: What do animals think about?
Do other animals think, and what do they think about? Sarah, a chimpanzee who died last week in her late 50s, offers some important clues.
Sarah, who could have been deemed the world’s smartest chimp, was brought to the United States from Africa as an infant to work with David and Ann Premack in a series of experiments designed to find out what chimpanzees might think. In order to determine what, if anything, might be on Sarah’s mind, she was one of the first chimpanzees to be taught a human language. The Premacks taught her to use plastic magnetic tokens that varied in size and color to represent words. She formed sentences by placing the tokens in a vertical line. Ann Premack noted that her earliest words named “various interesting fruits,” so that Sarah “could both solve her problem and eat it.”
Food plays an important role in chimpanzee life, and in Sarah’s case, food often took on meaning beyond sustenance. She clearly had favorite foods, like chocolate, and much of the time would only correctly answer the questions she was asked if chocolate was forthcoming. She often would create sentences of the form “Mary give Sarah apple” but when Mary would change the order to read “Sarah give Mary apple” Sarah would not be happy and knock the sentence off the board.
The Premacks noted that one of the difficulties in teaching language to a caged subject is finding things to talk about. There is only so long even food-motivated chimpanzees will be willing to talk about bananas. Finding new sources of interest was important and for Sarah it was clear that asking her about her favorite people and promising her M & Ms provided strong motivation.
Sarah’s favoritism toward certain people came in handy in her groundbreaking participation in tests that lead to a subfield of inquiry known in psychology and philosophy as “theory of mind.” Sarah helped David Premack and co-author Guy Woodruff answer the title question of their 1978 paper “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” in the affirmative.
To have a theory of mind is to be able to attribute purpose, intention, beliefs, desires, and other attitudes to both oneself and another person or animal. In order to test whether Sarah could understand that people had thoughts that differed from her thoughts, she was presented with short video tapes where a human actor in a cage was trying to perform a task, like trying to get some bananas that were inaccessible. After watching the video Sarah was shown two pictures, one that would allow the actor to reach his goal (a box) the other not (a key). She successfully solved the problems for the actor.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/opinion/chimpanzee-sarah.html?
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Oh, not that smirking chimp 
I made the same mistake as you did at first. 
