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
psychology
Description
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].
