Chimpanzees are more skilful in competitive than in cooperative cognitive tasks

Hare, Brian; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2003.11.011

Cited by 346 publications

(208 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…This is consistent with the Wnding that human adults do better in certain logical tasks if the task is posed in a deceptive context (Cosmides 1989). Furthermore, mind-reading skills have been recently found in chimpanzees when tested in competitive situations (Hare and Tomasello 2004).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

et al. 2008

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Although pointing is not part of great apes' natural gestural repertoire, they can learn to point to food, in order to request it. To assess the Xexibility with which they can use this gesture, one can vary the potential referent of the point. In two previous studies, three orangutans (two of them human-reared) have shown the ability to point to the location of a tool which a human experimenter needed in order to give them food. Here, we tested six orangutans and Wve bonobos using a set-up in which our subjects had to guide a human experimenter to the hiding place of a fork which was needed in order to retrieve a piece of food for the subject out of a vertical tube. We further examined the potential role of a competitive/deceptive context by varying the identity of the person responsible for hiding the tool. In addition, we implemented three diVerent control conditions in which an object was hidden but it was not necessary to indicate its location to get the food. We found that the majority of subjects spontaneously guided the experimenter to the hiding place of the fork by pointing to it when it was necessary and they did so signiWcantly less in control conditions. We did not Wnd an eVect of the person hiding the fork. Our results show that mother-reared orangutans and bonobos are able to point to inform a human about the location of an object that the human needs to procure food for the subject and that they can take into account whether it is relevant or not to do so.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

et al. 2008

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“…Finally, one of the classic supposed differences between humans and other apes was our possession of a Btheory of mind^-a capacity to represent the beliefs and desires of other individuals (Povinelli & Eddy, 1996;Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Such a capacity, at a basic level, is now well-documented in chimpanzees and ravens (Bugnyar, Reber, & Buckner, 2016;Hare & Tomasello, 2004). Thus, despite an undoubted increase in intelligence during human evolution, the specific, empirically demonstrated cognitive differences that underlie this quantitative difference have grown increasingly scarce and seem to focus on syntax and semantics/pragmatics, discussed below (cf.…”

Section: The Shared Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

2017

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The study of language evolution, and human cognitive evolution more generally, has often been ridiculed as unscientific, but in fact it differs little from many other disciplines that investigate past events, such as geology or cosmology. Well-crafted models of language evolution make numerous testable hypotheses, and if the principles of strong inference (simultaneous testing of multiple plausible hypotheses) are adopted, there is an increasing amount of relevant data allowing empirical evaluation of such models. The articles in this special issue provide a concise overview of current models of language evolution, emphasizing the testable predictions that they make, along with overviews of the many sources of data available to test them (emphasizing comparative, neural, and genetic data). The key challenge facing the study of language evolution is not a lack of data, but rather a weak commitment to hypothesistesting approaches and strong inference, exacerbated by the broad and highly interdisciplinary nature of the relevant data. This introduction offers an overview of the field, and a summary of what needed to evolve to provide our species with language-ready brains. It then briefly discusses different contemporary models of language evolution, followed by an overview of different sources of data to test these models. I conclude with my own multistage model of how different components of language could have evolved.

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“…Monkeys' attention also follows the gaze of others (4), and the similar magnitude and time course of gaze following by rhesus macaques and humans (5) implicates shared neural mechanisms. The ability to follow gaze is believed to be an important foundation for theory of mind (6,7); thus, the neural processes governing gaze following are relevant both to the evolution of social cognition (8)(9)(10) and to clinical disorders, such as autism, associated with social attention deficits (11)(12)(13)(14). Although gaze following involves automatic ''mirroring'' of other's mental states, to our knowledge, mirror neurons (15,16) for visual orienting have not previously been identified.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mirroring of attention by neurons in macaque parietal cortex

Shepherd

Klein²,

Deaner³

et al. 2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Macaques, like humans, rapidly orient their attention in the direction other individuals are looking. Both cortical and subcortical pathways have been proposed as neural mediators of social gaze following, but neither pathway has been characterized electrophysiologically in behaving animals. To address this gap, we recorded the activity of single neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of rhesus macaques to determine whether and how this area might contribute to gaze following. A subset of LIP neurons mirrored observed attention by firing both when the subject looked in the preferred direction of the neuron, and when observed monkeys looked in the preferred direction of the neuron, despite the irrelevance of the monkey images to the task. Importantly, the timing of these modulations matched the time course of gaze-following behavior. A second population of neurons was suppressed by social gaze cues, possibly subserving task demands by maintaining fixation on the observed face. These observations suggest that LIP contributes to sharing of observed attention and link mirror representations in parietal cortex to a well studied imitative behavior.gaze following ͉ imitation ͉ joint attention ͉ mirror neurons ͉ shared attention P eople naturally and intuitively share attention with each other. In a laboratory setting, people respond more quickly to targets that are the object of another's attention, even when this social cuing is brief or consistently misleading (1-3). Monkeys' attention also follows the gaze of others (4), and the similar magnitude and time course of gaze following by rhesus macaques and humans (5) implicates shared neural mechanisms. The ability to follow gaze is believed to be an important foundation for theory of mind (6, 7); thus, the neural processes governing gaze following are relevant both to the evolution of social cognition (8-10) and to clinical disorders, such as autism, associated with social attention deficits (11)(12)(13)(14). Although gaze following involves automatic ''mirroring'' of other's mental states, to our knowledge, mirror neurons (15, 16) for visual orienting have not previously been identified.Current evidence suggests that identification of where other individuals are looking is accomplished by neurons along the superior temporal sulcus (STS) (17)(18)(19)(20) (22), as well as the parietal cortex (28). These observations invite the simple hypothesis that gazefollowing behavior is mediated by a relatively straightforward system, beginning with the STS and proceeding directly to the attention-and gaze-control networks. Although intuitively appealing, this model raises several important questions.First, gaze-following behavior fits poorly into existing models of attention (1, 2), which dichotomize the underlying mechanism as either reflexively driven by exogenous stimuli or endogenously guided by internal goals (29, 30). Although there is some evidence that specific neural circuits mediate these processes (31-33), the precise contributions of neurons within different b...

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Chimpanzees are more skilful in competitive than in cooperative cognitive tasks

Cited by 346 publications

References 28 publications

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

Mirroring of attention by neurons in macaque parietal cortex

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