A test of the submentalizing hypothesis : apes' performance in a false belief task inanimate control
Abstract
Much debate concerns whether any nonhuman animals share with humans the ability to infer others' mental states, such as desires and beliefs. In a recent eye-tracking false-belief task, we showed that great apes correctly anticipated that a human actor would search for a goal object where he had last seen it, even though the apes themselves knew that it was no longer there. In response, Heyes proposed that apes' looking behavior was guided not by social cognitive mechanisms but rather domain-general cueing effects, and suggested the use of inanimate controls to test this alternative submentalizing hypothesis. In the present study, we implemented the suggested inanimate control of our previous false-belief task. Apes attended well to key events but showed markedly fewer anticipatory looks and no significant tendency to look to the correct location. We thus found no evidence that submentalizing was responsible for apes' anticipatory looks in our false-belief task.
Citation
Krupenye , C , Kano , F , Hirata , S , Call , J & Tomasello , M 2017 , ' A test of the submentalizing hypothesis : apes' performance in a false belief task inanimate control ' , Communicative and Integrative Biology , vol. 10 , no. 4 , e1343771 . https://doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2017.1343771 , https://doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2017.1343771
Publication
Communicative and Integrative Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1942-0889Type
Journal article
Description
Financial support came from Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (K-CONNEX to FK), Japan Society for Promotion of Science (KAKENHI 26885040, 16K21108 to FK), JSPS (KAKENHI 26245069, 24000001 to SH), and European Research Council (Synergy grant 609819 SOMICS to JC).Collections
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