Primates rely on visual attention to gather knowledge about their environment. The ability to recognize such knowledge-acquisition activity in another may demonstrate one aspect of Theory of Mind. Using a series of experiments in which chimpanzees were presented with a choice between an experimenter whose visual attention was available and another whose vision was occluded, we asked whether chimpanzees understood the relationship between visual attention and knowledge states. The animals showed sophisticated understanding of attention from the first presentation of each task. Under more complex experimental conditions, the subjects had more difficulty with species-typical processing of attentional cues and those likely to be learned during human contact. We discuss the results with respect to the comparative impact of enculturation on chimpanzees.

Development of reasoning is often depicted as involving increasing use of relational similarities and decreasing use of perceptual similarities ('the perceptual-to-relational shift'). We argue that this shift is a special case of a broader developmental trend: increasing sensitivity to the predictive accuracy of different similarity types. To test this hypothesis, we asked participants (3-, 4-, 5-year-olds and adults) to generalize novel information on two types of problems--offspring problems, where relational matches yield accurate generalizations, and prey problems, where perceptual matches yield accurate generalizations. On offspring problems, we replicated prior findings of increasing relational matches with age. However, we observed decreasing relational matches on prey problems. Provided feedback on their responses, 3-year-olds showed the same trend. Findings suggest that the relational shift commonly observed in categorization and analogical reasoning may reflect a general increase in children's sensitivity to cue validity rather than an overall preference to generalize over perceptual similarity.

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