Apes Share Human Ability ot Imagine

So says the title of this news alert .  

Such research is of particular interest to me as I now revive a decade-old research project on play, which I had to put on the back shelf while working my book on aging (though it also is importantly linked to that theme as well).

Nature news has the scoop on this study as well.

And the paper in Science is here.  The abstract:

Secondary representations enable our minds to depart from the here-and-now and generate imaginary, hypothetical, or alternate possibilities that are decoupled from reality, supporting many of our richest cognitive capacities such as mental-state attribution, simulation of possible futures, and pretense. We present experimental evidence that a nonhuman primate can represent pretend objects. Kanzi, a lexigram-trained bonobo, correctly identified the location of pretend objects (e.g., “juice” poured between empty containers), in response to verbal prompts in scaffolded pretense interactions. Across three experiments, we conceptually replicated this finding and excluded key alternative explanations. Our findings suggest that the capacity to form secondary representations of pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.

Cheers, 

Colin