Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?

Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later

Introduction

In 1978 Premack and Woodruff asked, ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’ In this brief review we attempt to answer this question based on much research that has been conducted in the 30 years since that time, particularly in the last decade or so (see Tomasello and Call [1] for the state of the art as of the mid-1990s). The answer will not be a simple yes or no, however, because part of the progress that has been made in recent years is a recognition that there are many different ways in which organisms might understand the psychological functioning of others.

A brief history

Premack and Woodruff’s [2] original study was actually about chimpanzees’ understanding of human goals. But soon there was new research suggesting that perhaps these results were experimental artifacts [3,4] and other research on social learning that suggested chimpanzees did not have an understanding of human goals [5]. Negative evidence also accrued during the 1990s about chimpanzees’ understanding of visual perception, especially from the well-known studies of Povinelli and Eddy [6] in which chimpanzees begged indiscriminately from humans facing them and others with buckets over their heads (see also Ref. [7]). There was also one negative study on chimpanzees’ understanding of false beliefs [8].

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