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Animal mindreading: what’s the problem?

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Abstract

Research on mindreading in animals has the potential to address fundamental questions about the nature and origins of the human capacity to ascribe mental states, but it is a research programme that seems to be in trouble. Between 1978 and 2000 several groups used a range of methods, some with considerable promise, to ask whether animals can understand a variety of mental states. Since that time, many enthusiasts have become sceptics, empirical methods have become more limited, and it is no longer clear what research on animal mindreading is trying to find. In this article I suggest that the problems are theoretical and methodological: there is difficulty in conceptualising alternatives to ‘full-blown’ mindreading, and reluctance to use the kinds of empirical methods necessary to distinguish mindreading from other psychological mechanisms. I also suggest ways of tackling the theoretical and methodological problems that draw on recent studies of mindreading in humans, and the resources of experimental psychology more generally. In combination with the use of inanimate control stimuli, species that are unlikely to be capable of mindreading, and the ‘goggles method’, these approaches could restore both vigour and rigour to research on animal mindreading.

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Notes

  1. Woodruff and Premack (1979) also tested for comprehension of deceptive communications.

  2. The first studies using the competitive feeding paradigm were published in the previous year (Hare et al. 2000). I have focussed on the article published in 2001 because it reported procedures that have been used in many subsequent experiments.

  3. The published report (Hare et al. 2001) does not indicate clearly which of the contrasts were statistically significant because the conditions were not labelled consistently in the methods and results sections of the report.

  4. A third experiment reported by Hare et al. (2001) is not discussed here because it had null results.

  5. The Leipzig group has recently used a more carefully controlled “back-and-forth” competitive feeding paradigm in an attempt to rebut this “evil eye” hypothesis (Schmelz et al. 2011, 2013). The methods and results have not been reported in sufficient detail to establish whether the back-and-forth procedure has been successful in this respect. Even if it has, the possibility remains that the choice behaviour of subject chimpanzees in these studies depends, not on the ascription of preferences to others, but on learning – during or before the experiment—that inhibition of a prepotent response is rewarded under delayed test conditions.

  6. The situation may be exacerbated by a socioeconomic problem: due to changes in the social structure of research on animal mindreading, the theoretical and methodological problems are less likely to be solved because fewer minds are working on them, and new ideas are less likely to be honed by disagreement.

  7. One could also ask what is meant by ‘understanding’, but this uncertainty is not specific to perception-goal psychology. It is now commonplace in research on animal and infant cognition to discuss what participants ‘understand’ without explaining what this term implies.

  8. Buckner (2013) argues persuasively that the core problem in contemporary research on animal mindreading is semantic; the field is concerned with ‘concepts’ and ‘representations’ of mental states, entities that are defined by their content, and yet researchers—both enthusiasts and skeptics—do not specify or defend their assumptions concerning how we should decide what a representation is about. On this view, both the intervening variable and minimal mindreading solutions are potential answers to the semantic problem.

  9. Buckner (2013) suggests that whether or not there is a distinctive logical problem at the heart of research on mindreading depends on one’s theory of representation, and that researchers seldom make explicit their theories of representation. If this is correct, it raises the possibility that researchers sometimes express contradictory views—that the problem is logical and that it can be solved by clever experiments – because they do not consistently apply a single, implicit theory of representation.

  10. Chimpanzees remain the modal subjects in research on animal mindreading (Whiten, 2013), but in the last 15 years it has become increasingly common to test birds of the corvid family.

  11. Experiment 1 in Bugnyar (2011) also included a condition where one of the competitors saw both caching events and the other saw neither caching event. This ‘stay treatment’ was not crucial to the interpretation of the results and therefore, for the sake of simplicity and brevity, I have not included it in this summary.

  12. Lurz (2009) suggests that his concept of ‘direct line of sight’ is equivalent to my concept of ‘eye-object line’ (Heyes 1998), but this is not correct. An agent has eye-object line when there is “an unobstructed, notional straight line between their eyes” and the object (Heyes 1998, p 113, emphasis added). That is, when there are no objects interposed between the agent’s eyes and a focal object. In contrast, on Lurz’s account, an agent can have direct line of sight when there is an object between the agent and the focal object, as long as the interposed object is transparent.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ian Apperly, Cameron Buckner, Thomas Bugnyar, Martin Eimer, Nick Shea and an anonymous referee for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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  1. All Souls College and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Cecilia Heyes

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Heyes, C. Animal mindreading: what’s the problem?. Psychon Bull Rev 22, 313–327 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0704-4

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