WIKIMEDIA, ZYANCEThe theory of mind, which describes the capacity to infer another’s thoughts, may have just gotten a little broader. Although such an ability is commonly thought to apply only to humans, researchers have now shown that some of our great ape cousins—chimps, bonobos, and orangutans—may be similarly skilled. The international team of scientists showed dozens of nonhuman primates a video and tracked their eyes as the animals anticipated the actions of people in the scene. The animals appeared to react according to beliefs, even false ones, they perceived as being held by the actors. The results were published yesterday (October 6) in Science.
“People have thought for a while that false-belief understanding is unique to humans,” study coauthor Christopher Krupenye at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Scientific American, “and so this suggests that apes do have at least a basic, implicit understanding of false belief, which has been seen as a signature of theory of mind.”
Krupenye and colleagues showed 40 great apes a video depicting interactions between a human and a person dressed in a gorilla costume. For example, in one scene shown to the primates, the costumed person appears to attack the human and then takes refuge in one of two haystacks in the foreground as its victim watches. Then the human departs and the costumed “ape” leaves the haystack. ...
