Seeing through &lt;seeing through&gt;: An Analysis of Kano et al. (2019)

Henley, Ty; Povinelli, Daniel J.

doi:10.26451/abc.07.04.11.2020

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Excitingly, in this study, apes responded differentially to the exact same video stimulus depending on whether they had previously experienced the barrier in real life as opaque or see-through. Some researchers have argued that the goggles task can be solved non-mentalisticly if subjects integrate the information they learn about the occlusive properties of the experimental substrate (i.e., that it does or does not obstruct line-of-gaze) with existing behavior rules (rather than by projecting their experience of seeing or not seeing onto the agent) (Henley & Povinelli, 2020;Lurz, 2009;Perner, 2012); others have challenged this deflationary account (e.g., Heyes, 2015). In either case, the goggles task remains the strongest identified nonverbal test of mindreading currently on the market, and it is one that at least great apes have passed.…”

Section: Section 4: Interpreting the Evidence: Do Primates Have A Theory Of Mind?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind in Nonhuman Primates

Lewis¹,

Krupenye²

2021

Preprint

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Social life demands complex strategies for coordinating and competing with others. In humans, these strategies are supported by rich cognitive mechanisms, such as theory of mind. Theory of mind (i.e., mental state attribution, mentalizing, or mindreading) is the ability to track the unobservable mental states, like desires and beliefs, that guide others’ actions. Deeply social animals, like most nonhuman primates, would surely benefit from the adept capacity to interpret and predict others’ behavior that theory of mind affords. Yet, after forty years of investigation, the extent to which nonhuman primates represent the minds of others remains a topic of contentious debate. In the present chapter, we review evidence consistent with the possibility that monkeys and apes are capable of inferring others’ goals, perceptions, and beliefs. We then evaluate the quality of that evidence and point to the most prominent alternative explanations to be addressed by future research. Finally, we take a more broadly phylogenetic perspective, to identify evolutionary modifications to social cognition that have emerged throughout primate evolutionary history and to consider the selective pressures that may have driven those modifications. Taken together, this approach sheds light on the complex mechanisms that define the social minds of humans and other primates.

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Section: Section 4: Interpreting the Evidence: Do Primates Have A Theory Of Mind?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind in Nonhuman Primates

Lewis¹,

Krupenye²

2021

Preprint

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“…However, as mentioned before, the majority of the tasks employed to test ToM non-verbally fail to address this important distinction between mind and behaviour reading (for a more detailed description of the issue, see e.g. [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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite some objections [10], experience-projection tests remain the best experimental tool currently available for distinguishing behaviour reading from mind reading [3,18,19]. Indeed, during the experience phase, at the very least, subjects have to learn about a psychological affordance: the barriers are opaque or transparent (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others’ visual access

Lonardo,

Putnik,

Szewczak

et al. 2024

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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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.

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