TY - JOUR
T1 - Do non-human primates really represent others’ ignorance? A test of the awareness relations hypothesis
AU - Horschler, Daniel J.
AU - Santos, Laurie R.
AU - MacLean, Evan L.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Alyssa Arre, Astrid Hengartner, Thomas Kile, Kacie Saxer-Taulbee, and Hope Woods for their help in data collection and coding. The authors are also grateful to Angelina Ruiz Lambides and Nahiri Rivera Barreto for their help in securing the Cayo Santiago field station. This work was approved by the Cayo Santiago IACUC committee and conforms to guidelines for the use of animals in research. This research was supported in part by grants from the NIMH (R01MH096875) and the NCRR (CM-5-P40RR003640-13) to the Caribbean Primate Research Center. DJH was supported by an Emil W. Haury Fellowship from the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, and a Graduate Access Fellowship from the Graduate College at the University of Arizona. LRS was supported by Yale University. The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by grants from the NIMH ( R01MH096875 ) and the NCRR ( CM-5-P40RR003640-13 ) to the Caribbean Primate Research Center. DJH was supported by an Emil W. Haury Fellowship from the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona , and a Graduate Access Fellowship from the Graduate College at the University of Arizona . LRS was supported by Yale University .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2019/9
Y1 - 2019/9
N2 - Non-human primates can often predict how another agent will behave based on that agent's knowledge about the world. But how do non-human primates represent others’ knowledge states? Researchers have recently proposed that non-human primates form “awareness relations” to attribute objectively true information to other minds, as opposed to human-like representations that track others’ ignorance or false belief states. We present the first explicit test of the awareness relations hypothesis by examining when rhesus macaques’ understanding of other agents’ knowledge falters. In Experiment 1, monkeys watched an agent observe a piece of fruit (the target object) being hidden in one of two boxes. While the agent's view was occluded, either the fruit moved out of its box and directly back into it, or the box containing the fruit opened and immediately closed. We found that monkeys looked significantly longer when the agent reached incorrectly rather than correctly after the box's movement, but not after the fruit's movement. This result suggests that monkeys did not expect the agent to know the fruit's location when it briefly and arbitrarily moved while the agent could not see it, but did expect the agent to know the fruit's location when only the box moved while the agent could not see it. In Experiment 2, we replicated and extended both findings with a larger sample, a different target object, and opposite directions of motion in the test trials. These findings suggest that monkeys reason about others’ knowledge of objects by forming awareness relations which are disrupted by arbitrary spatial manipulation of the target object while an agent has no perceptual access to it.
AB - Non-human primates can often predict how another agent will behave based on that agent's knowledge about the world. But how do non-human primates represent others’ knowledge states? Researchers have recently proposed that non-human primates form “awareness relations” to attribute objectively true information to other minds, as opposed to human-like representations that track others’ ignorance or false belief states. We present the first explicit test of the awareness relations hypothesis by examining when rhesus macaques’ understanding of other agents’ knowledge falters. In Experiment 1, monkeys watched an agent observe a piece of fruit (the target object) being hidden in one of two boxes. While the agent's view was occluded, either the fruit moved out of its box and directly back into it, or the box containing the fruit opened and immediately closed. We found that monkeys looked significantly longer when the agent reached incorrectly rather than correctly after the box's movement, but not after the fruit's movement. This result suggests that monkeys did not expect the agent to know the fruit's location when it briefly and arbitrarily moved while the agent could not see it, but did expect the agent to know the fruit's location when only the box moved while the agent could not see it. In Experiment 2, we replicated and extended both findings with a larger sample, a different target object, and opposite directions of motion in the test trials. These findings suggest that monkeys reason about others’ knowledge of objects by forming awareness relations which are disrupted by arbitrary spatial manipulation of the target object while an agent has no perceptual access to it.
KW - Comparative cognition
KW - Knowledge representation
KW - Social cognition
KW - Theory of mind
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85064576144&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85064576144&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.04.012
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.04.012
M3 - Article
C2 - 31026672
AN - SCOPUS:85064576144
VL - 190
SP - 72
EP - 80
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
ER -