title: Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs.
abstract: Humans operate with a "theory of mind" with which they are able to understand that others' actions are driven not by reality but by beliefs about reality, even when those beliefs are false. Although great apes share with humans many social-cognitive skills, they have repeatedly failed experimental tests of such false-belief understanding. We use an anticipatory looking test (originally developed for human infants) to show that three species of great apes reliably look in anticipation of an agent acting on a location where he falsely believes an object to be, even though the apes themselves know that the object is no longer there. Our results suggest that great apes also operate, at least on an implicit level, with an understanding of false beliefs.
authors.affiliation: Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA. ckrupenye@gmail.com fkanou@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Krupenye
authors.affiliation: Kumamoto Sanctuary, Wildlife Research Center, Kyoto University, Kumamoto, Japan. ckrupenye@gmail.com fkanou@gmail.com.|Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Japan.
authors.forename: Fumihiro
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kano
authors.affiliation: Kumamoto Sanctuary, Wildlife Research Center, Kyoto University, Kumamoto, Japan.
authors.forename: Satoshi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hirata
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK.|Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Josep
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Call
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.|Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D032882:Comprehension; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019974:Pan paniscus / Q000523:psychology*; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000523:psychology*; D057080:Pongo abelii / Q000523:psychology*; D056345:Theory of Mind