Chimpanzees gesture to humans in mirrors: using reflection to dissociate seeing from line of gaze

Lurz, Robert W.; Krachun, Carla; Mahovetz, Lindsay M.; Wilson, McLennon; Hopkins, William D.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.11.014

Cited by 26 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Particularly, in the case of this study, rather than attributing their own inner experience to the actor, it is possible that apes learned about the psychological affordances of the barriers and used this information to determine whether the actor had an unobstructed line of sight (but see ref. 44 for recent evidence against this possibility in a different research paradigm). Moreover, to determine whether apes represent agents' beliefs or belief-like states, it will be necessary to investigate their ability to anticipate an agent's action based on false beliefs about object identity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test

Kano

Krupenye

Tomonaga

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

167

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Human social life depends on theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. A signature of theory of mind, false belief understanding, requires representing others’ views of the world, even when they conflict with one’s own. After decades of research, it remains controversial whether any nonhuman species possess a theory of mind. One challenge to positive evidence of animal theory of mind, the behavior-rule account, holds that animals solve such tasks by responding to others’ behavioral cues rather than their mental states. We distinguish these hypotheses by implementing a version of the “goggles” test, which asks whether, in the absence of any additional behavioral cues, animals can use their own self-experience of a novel barrier being translucent or opaque to determine whether another agent can see through the same barrier. We incorporated this paradigm into an established anticipatory-looking false-belief test for great apes. In a between-subjects design, apes experienced a novel barrier as either translucent or opaque, although both looked identical from afar. While being eye tracked, all apes then watched a video in which an actor saw an object hidden under 1 of 2 identical boxes. The actor then scuttled behind the novel barrier, at which point the object was relocated and then removed. Only apes who experienced the barrier as opaque visually anticipated that the actor would mistakenly search for the object in its previous location. Great apes, therefore, appeared to attribute differential visual access based specifically on their own past perceptual experience to anticipate an agent’s actions in a false-belief test.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test

Kano

Krupenye

Tomonaga

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

167

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Previous work, for example, showed that chimpanzees gesture more when a human with food has a “‘direct line of gaze” to them (i.e., when he is facing them) than when he does not (Gómez, ; Hostetter et al, ; Kaminski et al, ; Leavens et al, ; Liebal et al, ; Povinelli & Eddy, ; Povinelli et al, ; Tomasello et al, ). To dissociate “line of gaze” from seeing, Lurz et al () adjusted the task so that in some conditions the experimenter faced away from the subject (i.e., there was no “line of gaze”) but could still see her through a mirror. As predicted by the mentalistic hypothesis, they found that chimpanzees gestured more in all conditions in which the experimenter could actually see them than in those conditions in which she could not, independent of whether the experimenter actually had a “line of gaze” to the subjects.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of mind in animals: Current and future directions

Krupenye

Call

2019

WIRES Cognitive Science

115

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Theory of mind (ToM; a.k.a., mind-reading, mentalizing, mental-state attribution, and perspective-taking) is the ability to ascribe mental states, such as desires and beliefs, to others, and it is central to the unique forms of communication, cooperation, and culture that define our species. As a result, for 40 years, researchers have endeavored to determine whether ToM is itself unique to humans. Investigations in other species (e.g., apes, monkeys, corvids) are essential to understand the mechanistic underpinnings and evolutionary origins of this capacity across taxa, including humans. We review the literature on ToM in nonhuman animals, suggesting that some species share foundational social cognitive mechanisms with humans. We focus principally on innovations of the last decade and pressing directions for future work. Underexplored types of social cognition have been targeted, including ascription of mental states, such as desires and beliefs, that require simultaneously representing one's own and another's conflicting motives or views of the world.Ongoing efforts probe the motivational facets of ToM, how flexibly animals can recruit social cognitive skills across cooperative and competitive settings, and appropriate motivational contexts for comparative inquiry. Finally, novel methodological and empirical approaches have brought new species (e.g., lemurs, dogs) into the lab, implemented critical controls to elucidate underlying mechanisms, and contributed powerful new techniques (e.g., looking-time, eye-tracking) that open the door to unexplored approaches for studying animal minds. These innovations in cognition, motivation, and method promise fruitful progress in the years to come, in understanding the nature and origin of ToM in humans and other species. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Psychology > Comparative Psychology Neuroscience > Cognition K E Y W O R D S animal cognition, comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, mental state attribution, perspective taking, social cognition, theory of mind

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“…In each of these studies regardless of whether the dependent measure was looking behavior (Drayton & Santos, 2018;Marticorena et al, 2011;Martin & Santos, 2014) or object-choice/reaching behavior (Hare et al, 2001;Kaminski et al, 2008) , when an object was spatially manipulated while an agent could not see it, primates seemed to no longer have any expectations about the agent's knowledge. While it is challenging to entirely rule out low-level explanations for this pattern based on behavior-reading (Lurz, Kanet, & Krachun, 2014;Povinelli & Vonk, 2003), our perspective is that primates do form inferences about the mental states of agents in these studies, as supported by recent experimental work on chimpanzees' understanding of what others can see in the absence of a direct line of gaze (Lurz, Krachun, Mahovetz, Wilson, & Hopkins, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Do non-human primates really represent others’ ignorance? A test of the awareness relations hypothesis

2019

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Non-human primates can often predict how another agent will behave based on that agent's knowledge about the world. But how do non-human primates represent others' knowledge states? Researchers have recently proposed that non-human primates form "awareness relations" to attribute objectively true information to other minds, as opposed to human-like representations that track others' ignorance or false belief states. We present the first explicit test of the awareness relations hypothesis by examining when rhesus macaques' understanding of other agents' knowledge falters. In Experiment 1, monkeys watched an agent observe a piece of fruit (the target object) being hidden in one of two boxes. While the agent's view was occluded, either the fruit moved out of its box and directly back into it, or the box containing the fruit opened and immediately closed. We found that monkeys looked significantly longer when the agent reached incorrectly rather than correctly after the box's movement, but not after the fruit's movement. This result suggests that monkeys did not expect the agent to know the fruit's location when it briefly and arbitrarily moved while the agent could not see it, but did expect the agent to know the fruit's location when only the box moved while the agent could not see it. In Experiment 2, we replicated and extended both findings with a larger sample, a different target object, and opposite directions of motion in the test trials. These findings suggest that monkeys reason about others' knowledge of objects by forming awareness relations which are disrupted by arbitrary spatial manipulation of the target object while an agent has no perceptual access to it.

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Chimpanzees gesture to humans in mirrors: using reflection to dissociate seeing from line of gaze

Cited by 26 publications

References 57 publications

Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test

Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test

Theory of mind in animals: Current and future directions

Do non-human primates really represent others’ ignorance? A test of the awareness relations hypothesis

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