![]() ![]() Then the researcher left for awhile before returning with a stick to look for King Kong, who had left the scene while the researcher was away. ![]() In one scenario the King Kong figure pretended to attack a researcher, then hid in one of two hay bales, moving to the other bale while the researcher watched. “This is just their version of the Jersey Shore that we made so they would be really engaged and curious about what was going to happen.” Like humans, great apes are “pretty obsessed with social information-when there's a conflict within their group everybody stops and pays attention,” Krupenye says. To capture the apes’ attention, the researchers made each experimental scenario into a high stakes television drama starring a mysterious apelike character (a researcher in a gorilla suit), whom they dubbed King Kong. An infrared camera below the monitor recorded where on the screen the animals were looking as they watched the scenes unfold. This is why Kano and study co-leader Christopher Krupenye of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology adapted a simpler false-belief test designed for human infants that utilizes an eye-tracking method called anticipatory looking, or gazing at where you expect a person to look for an object.ĭuring the study, bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans were “invited” one at a time to sit in a room and drink juice while watching a sequence of scenarios on a video monitor. Traditional false-belief tests for apes have involved complicated tasks such as moving around cups to reveal hidden food. ![]() Fumihiro Kano of Kyoto University’s Kumamoto Sanctuary and a co-leader of the study calls this ability a “litmus test” for theory of mind. There is evidence that apes can understand other’s mental states when they match up with reality, but apes have consistently failed tests of false belief-the idea that someone else may act according to a belief that is untrue. Theory of mind is central to our social functioning as humans, but scientists have long wondered whether it is, in fact, a uniquely human trait. The findings suggest the apes were able to intuit what the human was thinking. In the study, published Thursday in Science, a team of scientists recorded the eye movements of three great ape species while the animals watched videos of a man searching for a hidden object that had been moved without his knowledge, and found that they looked more frequently at the location where the man expected the object to be (a belief the apes knew was false), even though the object was no longer there. A chimpanzee, a scientist with a stick and a researcher in a King Kong suit may sound like the setup for a bad joke, but it is in fact the basis of a recent study that provides the first evidence that great apes-that is, bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans-possess an understanding of false belief, a hallmark of “theory of mind.” This ability to understand that others have mental states and perspectives different than our own has long been considered unique to humans. ![]()
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