ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent's action in a false-belief test.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- EVApeCognition: An 18-Year Dataset of Great Ape Cognition.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Is dogs' tendency to follow human misleading communicative cues influenced by humans' auditory perspective?Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Reply to Royka and Santos: Representing ignorance, and the evolution of theory of mind.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Postnatal dependency as the foundation of social learning in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- A Global Survey on the Perception of Conservationists Regarding Animal Consciousness.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- A commitment account of norm externalisation.Biology & philosophy · 2025Article
- Evaluating large language models in theory of mind tasks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Review
- Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others' visual access.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Investigating belief understanding in children in a nonverbal ambiguous displacement and communication setting.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2024Article
- Gaze tracking of large-billed crows (Corvus macrorhynchos) in a motion capture system.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Bonobos and chimpanzees remember familiar conspecifics for decades.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- SMART-BARN: Scalable multimodal arena for real-time tracking behavior of animals in large numbers.Science advances · 2023Article
- Specialized Networks for Social Cognition in the Primate Brain.Annual review of neuroscience · 2023Review
- Communication for collaborative computation: two major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Animal linguistics: a primer.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Social cognition and metacognition in great apes: a theory.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Canine perspective-taking.Animal cognition · 2023Review
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.