Jonathan Mshvelidze
Jaida Dent
Jordy Garcia
Abbey Cherry
Angelina Lambros
Our project adapts a study conducted on chimpanzees, Crockford et al., to determine whether theory-of-mind behavior found in chimpanzees echoes in bonobos at the Ape Initiative Center in Des Moines, Iowa. Theory-of-mind refers to the ability to assign mental states to another individual; it‘s a cognitive skill that allows one to predict future behaviors others. By using an animated video made on PowerPoint featuring a snake and avatar bonobo, we test our hypothesis that bonobos show greater theory-of-mind behavior and will communicate with a group member unaware of danger and demonstrate their awareness of a threat; this predicts in our experiment that subjects will exhibit more alarm calls, scratching, and vigilant behaviors in an ignorant video than in an knowledgeable video. To analyze whether subjects displayed theory-of-mind behavior, we coded for alarm calls, scratching, and vigilance, such as looking behind. The frequency of these coded behaviors were the dependent measures we tested to prove our hypothesis.
An important takeaway from this project is that while subjects did not display alarm calls and vigilance indicative of communicative behavior, statistically significant differences in the average scratches across subjects may indicate that bonobos may at least implicitly have theory-of-mind. This may be due to bonobo evolution occurring south of the Congo River without competition, causing no need for communicative alerting behaviors.
yassira
December 10, 2023 — 1:20 pm
It is intriguing to observe/understand what TOM (theory of mind) behavior is and understand that chimpanzees can protect each other. The graph was a little hard to understand at first but after looking at the caption underneath it made much more sense. I hope this is not a good question, but do we share TOM as well? or is it called something else?