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Full-Text Articles in Organisms
Visual Attention And Its Relation To Knowledge States In Chimpanzees, Pan Troglodytes, Megan J. Bulloch, Sarah T. Boysen, Ellen E. Furlong
Visual Attention And Its Relation To Knowledge States In Chimpanzees, Pan Troglodytes, Megan J. Bulloch, Sarah T. Boysen, Ellen E. Furlong
Sarah Boysen, PhD
Primates rely on visual attention to gather knowledge about their environment. The ability to recognize such knowledge-acquisition activity in another may demonstrate one aspect of Theory of Mind. Using a series of experiments in which chimpanzees were presented with a choice between an experimenter whose visual attention was available and another whose vision was occluded, we asked whether chimpanzees understood the relationship between visual attention and knowledge states. The animals showed sophisticated understanding of attention from the first presentation of each task. Under more complex experimental conditions, the subjects had more difficulty with species-typical processing of attentional cues and those …
Comprehension Of Functional Support By Enculturated Chimpanzees Pan Troglodytes, Anna M. Yocom, Sarah T. Boysen
Comprehension Of Functional Support By Enculturated Chimpanzees Pan Troglodytes, Anna M. Yocom, Sarah T. Boysen
Sarah Boysen, PhD
Studies of causal understanding of tool relationships in captive chimpanzees have yielded disparate findings, particularly those reported by Povinelli & colleagues (2000) for tool tasks by laboratory chimpanzees. The present set of experiments tested nine enculturated chimpanzees on three versions of a support task, as described by Povinelli (2000), during which food rewards were presented in different experimental configurations. In Experiment 1, stimulus pairs included a choice between a cloth with a reward on the upper right corner or with a second reward off the cloth, adjacent to a corner, with the second pair comprised of a cloth with food …