Visual attention and its relation to knowledge states in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes

Abstract

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.

New perspectives in gaze sensitivity research

“…In contrast, free-ranging rhesus macaques did attend to gaze cues when stealing from humans as they preferred to take food located in front of experimenters who could not see them (gaze averted away, or eyes covered), than those that could (Flombaum & Santos, 2005). The authors presented their results as evidence for macaques attributing mental states to the human experimenters (see also Bulloch, Boysen, & Furlong 2008, for similar interpretations on visual attention in chimpanzees); however, macaques may have based their choice on the presence or absence of salient visual cues (i.e., two eyes) (Emery & Clayton, 2008). These opposing interpretations highlight the hazards of applying gaze sensitivity paradigms as a means for testing attention attribution or perspective taking.…”

Apes Communicate about Absent and Displaced Objects: Methodology Matters

“…This highlights the difficulty in elucidating cognitive mechanisms, particularly when experiments use flawed sampling procedures or have little control over subject variables, (e.g. Bulloch et al 2008;Hostetter et al 2007;Leavens et al 2008;Thomas et al 2008). There is little question that future cross-species studies are of tremendous importance in further delineating the evolution of human cognition.…”

‘Theory of mind’ in animals: ways to make progress

“…When the same subjects were retested a few years later, the results were similar (Reaux et al 1999). In contrast, a different set of subjects immediately performed above chance on the first trial of all these conditions (Bulloch et al 2008), ranging from 71 % correct when the choice was 'eyes open' versus 'eyes closed' to 100 % correct when the choice was 'facing forwards' versus 'facing backwards'. Other studies have also produced conflicting results (Hofstetter et al 2007;Tempelmann et al 2011;Kaminski et al 2004), so that it remains unclear what affects the performance of chimpanzees in this setup.…”

“…The 'opaque visor paradigm', for instance, asks subjects to choose between two exper-imenters wearing buckets with visors, of which one allows seeing and the other does not. However, chimpanzees in the earlier 'begging paradigm' do not even consistently prefer experimenters with buckets over their heads to experimenters without buckets over their heads (Povinelli and Eddy 1996;Reaux et al 1999;Bulloch et al 2008). This makes it improbable that they will choose correctly when faced with experimenters wearing buckets equipped with visors, and in fact, preliminary evidence suggests that they do not (Vonk and Povinelli 2011).…”