All great mind reading begins with chocolate. That’s the basis for a classic experiment that tests whether children have something called the theory of mind—the ability to attribute desires, intentions, and knowledge to others. When they see someone hide a chocolate bar in a box, then leave the room while a second person sneaks in and hides it elsewhere, they have to guess where the first person will look for the bar. If they guess “in the original box,” they pass the test, and show they understand what’s going on in the first person’s mind—even when it doesn’t match reality.
“Testing the idea that nonhuman [animals] can have minds has been the Rubicon that skeptics have again and again said no nonhuman has ever, or will ever, cross,” says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. “Well, back to the drawing board!”
“It’s a very surprising and novel finding,” says Victoria Southgate, a developmental psychologist at the University of London, who helped create the eye-tracking technique to test 2-year-old infants and was not involved in this research. “It’s an almost exact replication of the study we did, and the apes appear to pass. It suggests that the capacity to track others’ perspectives and beliefs is not unique to humans.”
Hare is looking forward to where the new study leads. “Now the fun begins!” Hare says he expects that movies and eye-tracking will soon be expanded to test other species. Krupenye agrees. “The eye-tracking program and mechanism would just have to be shaped for faces of birds, cats, dogs, or other species” to work. Of course, that means that other scientists will also have to come up with some funky, species-specific soap operas to test them on.
Source: science mag
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