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Disposition to recognize goals in infant chimpanzees

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Abstract

Do nonhuman primates attribute goals to others? Traditional studies with chimpanzees provide equivocal evidence for “mind reading” in nonhuman primates. Here we adopt looking time, a methodology commonly used with human infants to test infant chimpanzees. In this experiment, four infant chimpanzees saw computer-generated stimuli that mimicked a goal-directed behavior. The baby chimps performed as well as human infants, namely, they were sensitive to the trajectories of the objects, thus suggesting that chimpanzees may be endowed with a disposition to understand goal-directed behaviors. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Parametric statistical analyses (ANOVAs and t-tests) were used with these data because there was no reason to believe the assumptions underlying such analyses were violated. Nonparametric analyses also require the homogeneity of variance assumption. Most of the hypotheses tested here were within-subjects hypothesis tests with only one degree of freedom in the numerator. These tests do not require the homogeneity of variance assumption.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Jeff Rowell and Babette Fontenot for the opportunity to run this experiment in the nursery at New Iberia Research Center (NIRC), the staff at NIRC and at the Cognitive Development Laboratory for technical and experimental support. I thank Robert McFatter for assistance with the statistical treatment of the data, and Akos Feher for stimuli development. I also thank four anonymous reviewers, and the Editor of Animal Cognition, for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Finally, I express my deepest gratitude to all those who supported this replication. The experiment described here complies with the current laws for animal care and use of the United States and was approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (IACUC no. 2001–8717–034).

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, C04 3SQ, UK

    Claudia Uller

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  1. Claudia Uller
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Correspondence to Claudia Uller.

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Uller, C. Disposition to recognize goals in infant chimpanzees. Anim Cogn 7, 154–161 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0204-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0204-9

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