Evolutionary foundations of knowledge and belief attribution in nonhuman primates

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fumihiro Kano ◽  
Josep Call
Keyword(s):  
Nonhuman Primates ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Belief Attributions ◽  
Anticipatory Looking

Abstract Recent findings from anticipatory-looking false-belief tests have shown that nonhuman great apes and macaques anticipate that an agent will go to the location where the agent falsely believed an object to be. Phillips et al.'s claim that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief should thus be reconsidered. We propose that both knowledge and belief attributions are evolutionary old.

scholarly journals Adrenarche in nonhuman primates: the evidence for it and the need to redefine it

2012 ◽  
Vol 214 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
A J Conley ◽  
R M Bernstein ◽  
A D Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Nonhuman Primates ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Suitable Model ◽  
Adrenal Androgen ◽  
Adrenal Androgens ◽  
Old World ◽  
Developmental Event ◽  
Androgen Secretion ◽  
Definition Of

Adrenarche is most commonly defined as a prepubertal increase in circulating adrenal androgens, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and its sulfo-conjugate (DHEAS). This event is thought to have evolved in humans and some great apes but not in Old World monkeys, perhaps to promote brain development. Whether adrenarche represents a shared, derived developmental event in humans and our closest relatives, adrenal androgen secretion (and its regulation) is of considerable clinical interest. Specifically, adrenal androgens play a significant role in the pathophysiology of polycystic ovarian disease and breast and prostate cancers. Understanding the development of androgen secretion by the human adrenal cortex and identifying a suitable model for its study are therefore of central importance for clinical and evolutionary concerns. This review will examine the evidence for adrenarche in nonhuman primates (NHP) and suggest that a broader definition of this developmental event is needed, including morphological, biochemical, and endocrine criteria. Using such a definition, evidence from recent studies suggests that adrenarche evolved in Old World primates but spans a relatively brief period early in development compared with humans and some great apes. This emphasizes the need for frequent longitudinal sampling in evaluating developmental changes in adrenal androgen secretion as well as the tenuous nature of existing evidence of adrenarche in some species among the great apes. Central to an understanding of the regulation of adrenal androgen production in humans is the recognition of the complex nature of adrenarche and the need for more carefully conducted comparative studies and a broader definition in order to promote investigation among NHP in particular.

False belief attribution in children with Williams syndrome: the answer is in the emotion

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (11) ◽  
pp. 1003-1010 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Campos ◽  
P. Martínez-Castilla ◽  
M. Sotillo
Keyword(s):  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Belief Attribution

Applying the implicit-explicit distinction to development in children

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 783-783
Author(s):  
Ted Ruffman
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Implicit Knowledge ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Belief Task ◽  
The World ◽  
Anticipatory Looking

This commentary focuses on how Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) claims relate to aspects of development. First, I discuss recent research that supports D&P's claim that anticipatory looking in a false belief task is guided by implicit knowledge. Second, I argue that implicit knowledge may be based on exposure to regularities in the world as D&P argue, but equally, it may sometimes be based on theories that conflict with real world regularities. Third, I discuss Munakata et al.'s notion of graded representations as an alternative to the implicit-explicit distinction in explaining dissociations in infancy.

scholarly journals Beyond learning fixed rules and social cues: abstraction in the social arena

2003 ◽  
Vol 358 (1435) ◽  
pp. 1189-1196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Call
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Comparative Cognition ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Numerical Competence ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Stimulus Response ◽  
The Social ◽  
High Level

Abstraction is a central idea in many areas of physical comparative cognition such as categorization, numerical competence or problem solving. This idea, however, has rarely been applied to comparative social cognition. In this paper, I propose that the notion of abstraction can be applied to the social arena and become an important tool to investigate the social cognition and behaviour processes in animals. To make this point, I present recent evidence showing that chimpanzees know about what others can see and about what others intend. These data do not fit either low-level mechanisms based on stimulus-response associations or high-level explanations based on metarepresentational mechanisms such as false belief attribution. Instead, I argue that social abstraction, in particular the development of concepts such as seeing in others, is key to explaining the behaviour of our closest relative in a variety of situations.

Assertion and false-belief attribution

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jary
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Michael Dummett ◽  
Robert Brandom ◽  
Linguistic Ability ◽  
Representational Format ◽  
Representational Theory Of Mind

The ability to attribute false-beliefs to others — the hallmark of a representational theory of mind — has been shown to be reliant on linguistic ability, specifically on competence in sentential complementation after verbs of communication and cognition such as ‘say that’ and ‘think that’. The reason commonly put forward for this is that these structures provide a representational format which enables the child to think about another’s thoughts. The paper offers an alternative explanation. Drawing on the work of the philosophers Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom, it argues that the available data better fits an account that grounds the notion of representation in the commitments undertaken by asserters. The competence in sentential complementation that precedes false-belief attribution is viewed as a result of the child developing a meta-awareness of the syntactic forms employed in assertion. This meta-awareness gives the child access to discourse about the commitments undertaken by speakers and the consequences of these for their behaviour. This understanding constitutes the child’s grasp of the representational nature of discourse and thought. The paper thus offers an illocutionary account of theory-of-mind development.

scholarly journals The cognitive bases of human tool use

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krist Vaesen
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Nonhuman Primates ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Great Ape ◽  
Hand Eye Coordination ◽  
The Face

AbstractThis article has two goals. The first is to assess, in the face of accruing reports on the ingenuity of great ape tool use, whether and in what sense human tool use still evidences unique, higher cognitive ability. To that effect, I offer a systematic comparison between humans and nonhuman primates with respect to nine cognitive capacities deemed crucial to tool use: enhanced hand-eye coordination, body schema plasticity, causal reasoning, function representation, executive control, social learning, teaching, social intelligence, and language. Since striking differences between humans and great apes stand firm in eight out of nine of these domains, I conclude that human tool use still marks a major cognitive discontinuity between us and our closest relatives. As a second goal of the paper, I address the evolution of human technologies. In particular, I show how the cognitive traits reviewed help to explain why technological accumulation evolved so markedly in humans, and so modestly in apes.

scholarly journals A two-lab direct replication attempt of Southgate, Senju, & Csibra (2007)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Kampis ◽  
Petra Karman ◽  
Gergely Csibra ◽  
Victoria Southgate ◽  
Mikołaj Hernik
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Collaborative Study ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Action Prediction ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
False Belief Understanding

The study by Southgate, V., Senju, A., and Csibra, G. (Southgate et al., 2007) has been widely cited as evidence for false-belief attribution in young children. Recent replication attempts of this paradigm have yielded mixed results: several studies were unable to replicate the original finding, raising doubts about the suitability of the paradigm to assess non-verbal action prediction and Theory of Mind. In a preregistered collaborative study including two of the original authors, we tested 160 24- to 26-month-olds across two locations using the original stimuli, procedure, and analyses as closely as possible. We found no evidence for action anticipation: only roughly half of the infants looked in anticipation to the location of an agent’s impending action when action prediction did not require taking into account the agent’s beliefs and a similar number when the agent held a false-belief. These results and other non-replications suggest that the paradigm does not reliably elicit action prediction and thus cannot assess false belief understanding in 2- year-old children. While the results of the current study do not support any claim regarding the presence or absence of Theory of Mind in infants, we conclude that an important piece of evidence that has to date supported arguments for the existence of this competence, can no longer serve that function.

scholarly journals Are we less social in noisy environments? No effect of noise on implicit Theory of Mind performance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Kulke ◽  
hannes rakoczy
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Environmental Noise ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Implicit Theory ◽  
Noisy Environments ◽  
Testing Environment ◽  
Gaze Patterns ◽  
Replication Research ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Anticipatory Looking

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others, has been a recent focus of replication research. While some researchers found an implicit form of ToM, which could be measured with different tasks, including anticipatory looking measures, other researchers could not replicate these finding. The testing conditions may play a role for the success of replications. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate the effect of a noisy testing environment on results in an anticipatory looking false belief task. The original findings could only be partially replicated, leaving room for alternative explanations. Environmental noise did not significantly affect gaze patterns. Therefore, previous failed replications are unlikely to be related to different levels in environmental noise.

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