Nature & Environment

Are apes able to tell what you are thinking ?

By T.K. Randall
October 7, 2016

Image: Common Chimpanzee at the Leipzig Zoo
Credit: Thomas Lersch / CC BY-SA 3.0 (adapted) 'Theory of mind' is a term used to describe our ability to discern someone's intentions based on their actions, a skill that we regularly use in everyday life to anticipate what other people are going to do.

The idea that this ability is possessed by other animals as well however has long remained a matter of debate, but now according to a new study published in the journal Science, there is good evidence to suggest that primates in particular are quite capable of doing the very same thing.

"Decades of research with our closest relatives - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans - have revealed that great apes do possess many aspects of theory of mind," said study author Christopher Krupenye of the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

"For one, they can identify the goals and intentions behind others' actions. They're also able to recognize which features of the environment others can see or know about."The new research involved showing a group of primate test subjects a set of movie clips in which humans and apes (played by actors wearing a suit) played a game involving objects being hidden.

Sometimes an "ape" would hide an object while the human watched and then hide it again somewhere else when that person wasn't looking.

By analyzing the eye movements of the monkeys watching the film, the researchers were able to determine that the animals were expecting the human in the film to search for the object in the last place in which they had seen it being hidden, as oppose to where the "ape" had actually hidden it.

"They can anticipate that an individual will search for an object where they last saw it, even though the apes know that it's no longer there," said Krupenye.

"That is a really important human skill that has never been shown before in apes."

Source: Washington Post

Tags: Apes, Brain