But will they know the steps?

Chimpanzees know what others know, but not what they believe.

There is currently much controversy about which, if any, mental states chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates understand. In the current two studies we tested both chimpanzees' and human children's understanding of both knowledge-ignorance and false belief - in the same experimental paradigm involving competition with a conspecific. We found that whereas 6-year-old children understood both of ...

Will they come and will they stay?

Apes have culture but may not know that they do

There is good evidence that some ape behaviors can be transmitted socially and that this can lead to group-specific traditions. However, many consider animal traditions, including those in great apes, to be fundamentally different from human cultures, largely because of lack of evidence for cumulative processes and normative conformity, but perhaps also because current research on ape culture i...

Infants ask for help when they know they don't know.

Uncertainty monitoring is a core property of metacognition, allowing individuals to adapt their decision-making strategies depending on the state of their knowledge. Although it has been argued that other animals share these metacognitive abilities, only humans seem to possess the ability to explicitly communicate their own uncertainty to others. It remains unknown whether this capacity is pres...

Using the words toddlers know now to predict the words they will learn next

We set forth to show that lexical connectivity plays a role in understanding early word learning. By considering words that are learned in temporal proximity to one another to be related, we are able to better predict the words next learned by toddlers. We build conditional probability models based on data from the growing vocabularies of 77 toddlers, followed longitudinally for a year. This ty...