Apes can understand how others see the world
The ability to understand how others see the world, may not be unique to humans as previously thought, but exist in apes too, an international team of researchers, including the University of St Andrews, has discovered.
Being able to put themselves in another’s situation, was thought to be a trait specific to human beings, however a new study – published in Science – shows chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans can also think this way.
The ability to attribute goals, desires and beliefs to others (so-called Theory of Mind) plays a crucial role in understanding other people and accurately predicting their behaviour.
In the last few decades dozens of studies have shown that apes are sensitive to what others can and cannot see, and can interpret the behaviour of others, in terms of the goals that they pursue, not necessarily the outcomes that they achieve.
However, repeated attempts to provide evidence that they were also capable of predicting what others would do when they held a false belief had failed.
The latest study adapted an anticipatory looking task (originally developed for human infants) that only required subjects to watch videos while sipping juice. The researchers then measured apes’ gaze movements using an infrared eye-tracker installed below the screen showing the movies.
Apes watched two short videos depicting a person watching another person, dressed in a King Kong suit, hiding in one of two haystacks. In the first scenario the agent witnessed the King Kong character hiding inside the first haystack; in the second, the agent witnessed the King Kong character hiding in the first and then the second haystack.
https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2016/title,798068,en.php